By: Mike Carter
Chase Utley has become a lightning rod of sorts in his bid to make it to the baseball Hall of Fame.
This is Utley’s first year on the ballot, and how you look at his case may actually point to how future similar cases get resolved by the voters. Utley’s case in my mind is made by looking at his peak value, not the entire body of his work.
Quite simply, Utley’s career numbers, measuring by volume, do not get him into the Hall of Fame: Utley had 1885 hits, good for a .275 batting average, 269 HR, 1025 RBI, 1103 runs, 154 SB. Utley had an outstanding .358 career OBP, as well as an OPS+117. OPS+ takes a player’s on-base percentage and slugging and “normalizes” that number to compare hitters across major league baseball. An average OPS+ is 100, so Utley’s OPS+ of 117 means he was 17% better than league average over the course of his career.
I know many people have issues with using Wins Above Replacement as a comparison tool. I do not. Utley’s 64.5 WAR is 98th all time for position players in major league history. If we break down the career WAR for Utley, he averaged a WAR of 5.4 annually over a 162 game, full season spread. For example, a solid starter might have a WAR between two and three in a given season, meaning he was worth two or three more wins for his team that year than a replacement level player, who would likely normalize between zero and one WAR in a season.
Quite simply, a WAR of 5.4 shows us that on average, Utley was a superstar player. Utley was a six-time All Star and a four-time Silver Slugger. Utley’s WAR of 64.5 was 12th all-time for second baseman; of the 11 guys ahead of him, the only ones not in the Hall of Fame are Bobby Grich (71.1) and Robinson Cano (68.1).
I also like to look at Jay Jaffe’s work with JAWS. Jaffe is one of the foremost sabermetric gurus in baseball. JAWS is an acronym that stands for Jaffe WAR Score System. Jaffe was looking for a way to compare Hall of Fame cases when he developed the system. Putting it simply, JAWS is an average of a player’s career WAR averaged with their 7-year peak WAR. Jaffe then has an average Hall of Fame score for each position on the diamond. The average JAWS score for second basemen in the Hall of Fame was 57. Utley comes in at 56.9. He has the 12th all-time highest JAWS score for the position; the only two second baseman not in the Hall of Fame ahead of him are Grich and Cano, who is still playing in Baseball United in Dubai.
At Utley’s peak from 2005-2010, he was a five-time All Star who hit .298 with 162 home runs, 216 doubles, 572 RBI, 90 stolen bases, a .911 OPS and a 133 OPS+ while averaging 150 games played per season. At that peak, his WAR was 45.5; the next second baseman on the list over that time period was the outstanding Brian Roberts at 24.2. During this time, he helped guide the Philadelphia Phillies to the playoffs and helped them win the World Series in 2008.
We haven’t even talked about his defense, which was excellent. He was not a Gold Glove second baseman, but his 17.3 defensive WAR over his career places him in great company.
People often talk about intangibles, the things that you cannot measure with a statistic. In my opinion Utley was the best player on those great Phillies teams from 2006-2010, better than shortstop Jimmy Rollins or first baseman Ryan Howard. Both won MVPs during that time. But Utley was their leader, and he proved it on the biggest stage in baseball, with seven home run ins 15 World Series games played over that time.
Utley seems to get punished for playing until he was 39. Yet he was still a serviceable role player at the end of his career for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
As we start to have more players who had high peaks for several years before finishing their careers as role players, we will need to reconsider the Hall of Fame cases for players like Utley. Scott Rolen is a similar case to me. The days of the “compilers” may be over; we may not see a player get 3,000 hits again for a long time, and the days of 300 wins being a benchmark appear to be over with the increase in pitching specialization. We might not even see hitters get to 2,000 hits or pitchers get to 200 wins anymore. We need to change our lens to consider players that do not compile 20+ year of stats even with some lean years thrown in there. The game has changed and so must our way of looking at these cases. With my lens, I see Utley as a Hall of Fame player based on his peak value and being the best player on the best team in the National League for a five-year period.