JAWS and the 2025 Hall of Fame Ballot: Félix Hernández

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Before he’d ever thrown a major league pitch, cracked a prospect list, or reached legal adult status, Félix Hernández had a nickname: King Felix. Dubbed as such by U.S.S. Mariner blogger Dave Cameron on July 17, 2003, when he was just a 17-year-old in the Low-A Northwest League, he was already overpowering much older hitters. Still a teen when he reached the majors, he quickly came to represent the hopes and dreams of a franchise that had fallen short of a World Series despite four playoffs appearances from 1995–2001; parted with superstars Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., and Alex Rodriguez along the way; and capped that run with a record-setting 116 wins but a premature exit in the ALCS.

Though slow to embrace the royal moniker, Hernández grew into it. His dazzling combination of an electrifying, darting sinker, a knee-buckling curve, and a signature hard changeup propelled him to a Cy Young Award, two ERA titles, six All-Star appearances, and a perfect game. From 2009–14, he was the best pitcher in the American League by ERA, FIP, strikeouts, and WAR, parlaying that into a contract commensurate that made him the game’s highest-paid pitcher. Unfortunately, a heavy workload — more innings than any pitcher 23 or younger since Dwight Gooden two decades earlier — sapped the sizzle from his fastball, with injuries and a cavalier approach to conditioning taking their toll as well. The Mariners struggled to surround him with a quality roster, and changed managers and pitching coaches every couple of years. The team didn’t reach the playoffs once during Hernández’s career, finishing above .500 just five times, with a pair of second-place showings in the AL West as good as it got.

The last leg of Hernández’s career was a slog. For as strong as he had been in his 20s, he was basically replacement level once he turned 30. Unable to adapt to his changing body and repertoire, he netted -0.2 WAR from 2016–19, and after his seven-year, $175-million contract expired, he never secured another major league job. His fadeout left him shy of the milestones that tend to catch Hall of Fame voters’ eyes, and for as much as we may wish otherwise, the advanced statistics don’t make a particularly strong case for him, either. While he may find enough support to linger on the ballot, he isn’t likely to reach 75% soon.

Félix Abraham Graham Hernández was born April 8, 1986 in Valencia, Venezuela, the country’s third-largest city. He grew up in a middle-class environment; his father Felix Sr., a former baseball prospect himself, worked as a truck driver while his mother Mirian was a homemaker. As a child, the younger Hernández played shortstop in Little League, but basketball was his first love. He would skip school to shoot hoops at the playground and dreamed of making the NBA.

Hernández’s strong arm garnered attention in baseball circles. At 12, he began pitching for traveling squads. At 14, he was throwing 90 mph and being scouted by major league teams. “When I was pitching in Little League, I would see all of these people in the stands,” Hernández told Bleacher Report’s Scott Miller in 2015. “And I was like, ‘Who are all of these people?’”

Mariners bird-dog scout Luis Fuenmayor was one. He phoned area scouts Pedro Avila and Emilio Carrasquel (a nephew of 1950s White Sox star shortstop Chico Carrasquel), who invited him to the team’s Venezuelan academy. Hernández was already inclined toward the Mariners because he idolized Caracas native Freddy Garcia, who had become a stalwart member of the team’s rotation in 1999, less than a year after he was acquired from the Astros in the Johnson trade, and who had earned All-Star honors for that 116-win 2001 squad.

Though the Braves offered more money and the Yankees, Astros, Dodgers, and Rockies pursued him as well, the Mariners — led by international scouting director Bob Engle — won the family over. Hernández ultimately signed with Seattle for a $710,000 bonus on July 4, 2002. Even just three years later, Braves director of player development Dayton Moore viewed him as The One Who Got Away, telling the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s John Paul Morosi, “That’s the toughest loss we’ve had. I knew he was special the moment I laid eyes on him.”

After pitching in the Venezuelan Summer League that year, Hernández began his stateside professional career in 2003, as a 17-year-old with Everett of the Low-A Northwest League, a circuit where the average player was four years older. He dominated hitters with a 94-95 mph fastball, a plus curve and a solid changeup, posting a 2.29 ERA with 78 strikeouts in 55 innings and earning a late-season promotion to A-level Wisconsin. Baseball America named him the Northwest League’s no. 1 prospect that fall, and placed him 30th on their Top 100 Prospects list the following spring.

Hernández put up stellar numbers in 2004 — 2.95 ERA, 10.4 K/9, and just eight homers allowed in 149 1/3 innings — while splitting his season between High-A Inland Empire and Double-A San Antonio. BA crowned him the top prospect of both the California and Texas Leagues, noting his improved fastball (now 96-97 mph), grading both that and his curve as 70s and his developing changeup as a 60, and adding that the Mariners were keeping a 88-90 mph slider that “puts his other pitches to shame” under wraps out of health concerns. By the spring of 2005, before he’d even celebrated his 19th birthday, he was the publication’s no. 2 prospect overall behind only Joe Mauer.

While Hernández spent the first four months of the 2005 season at Triple-A Tacoma, the Mariners were in rough shape. They had followed their 116-win season with a pair of 93-win campaigns (but no playoff berths) before plummeting to 63 wins in 2004. Though they showed signs of life in the first half of 2005, by the July 31 trade deadline they were 45-58. General manager Bill Bavasi made four trades that month and cleared a spot in the rotation by releasing the struggling Aaron Sele. Hernández had put up a 2.25 ERA in 88 innings at Tacoma, but he’d missed over three weeks due to a bout of bursitis and had worked out of the bullpen to rebuild his pitch count.

On August 3, Hernández got the call-up. He debuted the next afternoon, the first teenage pitcher to start a major league game since Todd Van Poppel did so with the Athletics in 1991. Though the first four batters he faced reached base — single, walk, walk, single — to bring home a run, Hernández limited the damage by getting Dmitri Young to ground into a double play, then struck out Ivan Rodriguez. He allowed just two baserunners and one run over the next four innings, but the Mariners didn’t score while he was in the game and lost 3-1. They would continue to provide meager run support, scoring three runs or fewer in 10 of his 12 starts, but he was every bit as good as advertised, posting a 2.67 ERA (158 ERA+) with 8.2 K/9 across 84 1/3 innings.

When Hernández showed up to spring training in 2006, he packed 246 pounds on his 6-foot-3 frame, 16 over his target weight. His extra heft led to a bout of shin splints and a disappointing first half; he didn’t lower his ERA below 5.00 for good until June 28 and finished at 4.52 (98 ERA+) in 191 innings. His WAR dropped from 2.8 the year before to 1.3. He’d learned a hard lesson. “After the season, I said, ‘That’s not me. I can’t do that anymore,’” he told the Seattle Times’ Larry Stone in 2011.

The next spring, Hernández checked in at a svelte 226 pounds. After striking out 12 while allowing three hits in eight scoreless innings on Opening Day against the A’s, he no-hit the Red Sox for seven innings on April 11 before yielding a single to J.D. Drew, and settled for a one-hit shutout. Despite ups and downs thereafter, his 3.92 ERA (112 ERA+) and 3.9 WAR represented steps forward, as did the Mariners’ 88-74 record after three straight sub-.500 seasons.

Though his 3.6 walks per nine marked a career high, and his 3.80 FIP was more or less in line with his marks in 2006 and ’07, Hernández grazed the AL leaderboard with a 3.45 ERA (123 ERA+) in ’08 while also topping the 200-inning mark for the first time (200 2/3). This wasn’t necessarily a good thing; his 666 1/3 innings through his age-22 season was more than 100 ahead of every other Wild Card-era pitcher except CC Sabathia (588). You’d have to go back to Gooden (924 1/3 from 1984–87) to find a more heavily used pitcher at such a young age. It’s not like Hernández was doing it with a championship on the line; the Mariners lost 101 games in 2008, their fourth losing season out of five.

On June 17, 2008, Hernández threw an immaculate inning — three strikeouts on a total of nine pitches — against the Marlins’ Jeremy Hermida, Jorge Cantu, and Mike Jacobs. To that point he was just the 13th AL pitcher to do so.

Because of his age, workload, and the previous year’s bout of bursitis, the Mariners had filed an objection to prevent Hernández from pitching for Venezuela in the inaugural World Baseball Classic in 2006, but they allowed him to pitch in ’09; he threw 8 2/3 scoreless innings in a pair of appearances, getting wins in both games and helping Venezuela reach the semifinals. With the Mariners giving him a longer leash during the regular season, and with an improved changeup — the fastest in baseball, with exceptional vertical movement — as well, he took his game to a new level. In 34 starts totaling 238 2/3 innings (the AL’s third-highest total), he struck out 217 hitters and placed second with a 2.49 ERA and fifth with 5.9 WAR. Even with modest run support on an 85-win team, he won a league-high 19 games and finished second to Zack Greinke in the AL Cy Young voting.

In January 2010, during the second of his three years of arbitration eligibility, the going-on-24-year-old Hernández signed a five-year, $78 million extension, one that included incentives, escalators, and limited no-trade protection. He delivered on the promise of that contract by improving in just about every measure from 2009, as he led the AL in ERA (2.27), innings (249 2/3), and WAR (7.2), and ranked second in strikeouts (232). Despite having traded for Cliff Lee to form one of game’s best one-two punches, the Mariners collapsed to 101 losses and scored the majors’ fewest runs by far (just 3.17 per game). Hernández received the lowest run support of any AL qualifying pitcher and finished with a 13-12 record, but he won the AL Cy Young over David Price (19-6, 2.72 ERA) and Sabathia (21-7, 3.18 ERA). The vote was viewed as a watershed moment in the history of the award, as Hernández’s win total stood as the lowest of any starter over a full season until Jacob deGrom won the NL Cy Young in 2018 while going 10-9 with a 1.70 ERA and 9.5 WAR.

“If you look at every conceivable measurement for all the candidates, Felix Hernandez — other than wins — pretty much dominated the field,” voter Erik Boland told the New York Times’ Tyler Kepner. “So based on that, and based on the award being for best pitcher, not most valuable pitcher — because if it was most valuable pitcher, it could have been Sabathia or Price — all the measurements, rather dramatically, point toward Felix.”

“I didn’t have the wins, but you look over all the numbers and you say, ‘Wow,’” Hernández told Kepner. “I’m so happy. My first reaction was crying.”

Though Hernández’s FIPs barely budged from 2010 (3.04) to ’11 (3.13), a 43-point spike in batting average on balls in play (from .265 to .308) shot his ERA from 2.27 to 3.47, with his WAR cut in half, to 3.6. Nonetheless, he made his second AL All-Star team, beginning a run of five straight selections. The 2011 season saw the Mariners get particularly creative while promoting their ace, first in a spring commercial starring his workhorse alter ego, Larry Bernandez:

On May 28, 2011, the Mariners opened a special section at Safeco Field, the King’s Court. For $30, a fan received a free yellow King Felix t-shirt and an oversized “K” card to go with a seat in Section 150, near the left field foul pole, where the King’s subjects could cheer themselves into a frenzy. Soon the court expanded into an adjacent section, though the Mariners could only sell so many tickets to a 95-loss team.

Thanks to improving peripherals in 2012 and ’13 — not to mention the use of a cutter to offset his declining fastball velocity — Hernández lowered his ERA to just above 3.00 while leading the AL in FIP in the former year (2.84) and trimming it even further in the latter (2.61, second in the AL). He also cracked the league’s top 10 in WAR, ranking sixth in 2012 (5.3) and seventh in ’13 (5.1). Meanwhile, he finished fourth in the Cy Young voting in the former season, eighth in the latter.

On August 15, 2012, during a sunny Wednesday afternoon in front of 21,889 fans at Seattle’s Safeco Field, everything came together for Hernández. He retired all 27 Rays he faced en route to the 23rd perfect game in major league history — but somehow the third of the season, after White Sox righty Philip Humber (also at Safeco) and Giants righty Matt Cain. Hernández struck out 12, including five of the final six hitters, and needed just 113 pitches to finish the job, the last of them a big curveball that froze Tampa Bay’s Sean Rodríguez.

Though the Mariners continued to muddle along below .500 — and had produced just two winning seasons during Hernández’s career to that point — their improvement from 61 wins in 2010 to 75 in ’12 under GM Jack Zduriencik (who had taken over in October 2008) was enough for Hernández and the team to restructure his contract. The result, announced in mid-February 2013, was a seven-year, $175 million pact, the largest for any pitcher to that point (some outlets reported it as a five-year, $135.5 million extension covering the 2015–19 seasons). The negotiations prevented Hernández from pitching in that year’s World Baseball Classic.

After backsliding to 71 wins in 2013, the Mariners improved to 87 in ’14, missing a Wild Card spot by just one game. That year, Hernández posted career bests with a 2.14 ERA, which led the AL, a 2.50 FIP, and 248 strikeouts; on a per-plate-appearance basis, he also put up his best strikeout and walk rates (27.2% and 5.0%, respectively). His 6.4 WAR ranked second only to Corey Kluber’s 8.1, and he finished a very close second behind the Cleveland ace in the AL Cy Young voting.

Even while posting a gaudy 18-9 record and making his fifth consecutive AL All-Star team, Hernández’s strikeout, walk and home run rates all moved in the wrong directions in 2015, and his ERA climbed to 3.53, his highest in eight years. Due to a few skipped turns for minor ailments, he threw only 201 2/3 innings, 34 1/3 fewer than in 2014. His performance still added up to 4.6 WAR, good for fourth in the league.

Alas, whether classified as a good or great season, it turned out to be the last of its kind on his résumé — not that anyone knew it at the time. Indeed, Hernández posted a brilliant 2.21 ERA through his first nine starts in 2016. However, his average four-seam velocity had suddenly dropped from 92.6 mph to 91.0, with his sinker’s velocity falling as well, but slightly less. He was getting fewer swinging strikes and fewer chases, so despite the low ERA, he had a 4.11 FIP to that point, driven by a high walk rate (3.9 per nine). After being tagged for six runs in six innings against the Twins, he landed on the disabled list with a right calf strain — his first such stint since 2008 — and was slow to recover, missing 53 days. Returning after the All-Star break, he was inconsistent, posting a 4.48 ERA and 4.98 FIP in the second half. Both marks rose above 5.00 over the final six weeks, as the Mariners’ playoff odds dwindled from 45% to zero. Not only were his 106 ERA+ and 1.3 WAR over 25 starts his worst marks since 2006, but also the 86-win Mariners missed a Wild Card berth by three games, extending their playoff drought to 15 years. The math was a gut-punch.

After the season, pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre Jr. (whose father had served as the team’s pitching coach in 2008), expressed some frustration when reviewing Hernández’s performance, noting some mechanical inconsistencies that compromised his command, as well as opponents getting wise to his unvaried approach. Via the Seattle Times’ Ryan Divish:

“It was just so glaring, and I did my best to get through to him, and I will continue into next year, is that everybody was looking at him up,” Stottlemyre said. “So if he was throwing his changeup below the zone and out of the zone where it wasn’t a strike out of the hand, clubs just spit on it. It was the same with his fastball. You look at the games that he struggled and clubs really made him work. The looked for him up in the zone and when stuff was down below, they just spit on it. They pigeon-holed him. ”

Manager Scott Servais issued a public challenge to Hernández, telling Divish, “He’s going to have to make a few adjustments in the offseason and come into spring training in a little better shape with a little more urgency because we certainly need him to be at the top of the rotation.”

Other pitchers have rebounded from mid-career slides toward mediocrity, but for Hernández, though he was just 30 years old, things went increasingly downhill, this despite a winter of hard work and a tune-up in the 2017 World Baseball Classic, during which he allowed two runs (one earned) in two appearances totaling 7 2/3 innings. Shoulder bursitis and biceps tendonitis sent him to the IL for lengthy stays in late April and early August, limiting him to 16 starts with a 4.36 ERA (96 ERA+) and 0.7 WAR. While he made 29 starts in 2018, lower back stiffness sidelined him in July, and his average four-seam velocity again dropped, this time from 90.9 mph to 89.6; batters slugged .603 against the pitch and hammered him for a 5.55 ERA in 155 2/3 innings. His -1.3 WAR tied for the AL’s second-lowest mark. While the Mariners won 89 games, their highest total during Hernández’s time in Seattle, they still missed the playoffs by eight games. Not even the King at his peak would have made up the difference.

Despite the Mariners’ solid showing, GM Jerry Dipoto dismantled the team, trading James Paxton to the Yankees, Robinson Canó and Edwin Díaz to the Mets, Jean Segura to the Phillies, and so on. As the team slipped to 68 wins in 2019, Hernández’s final guaranteed season under his big contract went no better than the previous one. On Opening Day against the Angels, he allowed three runs (one earned) in 5 1/3 innings, netting a win; nobody knew it at the time, but that turned out to be his final one. By mid-May, when he landed on the IL with a strained latissimus dorsi, his ERA had ballooned to 6.52. He missed over three months, returning in late August, and aside from a seven-inning, one-run start against the White Sox on September 14, the results were generally bad. On September 26 at Safeco Field, he made his final start for the Mariners, facing the A’s. I wrote about it for FanGraphs:

He tipped his cap to the King’s Court upon entering, fell behind early while struggling with his command and control, strutted a bit after a strikeout, exulted in Dylan Moore’s spectacular, run-saving catch to end the fifth inning, competed like hell with a tenacity that far outstripped his stuff, and then bowed to the frenzied crowd of 20,921 before exiting the field. Some 2,800 miles away in Brooklyn, watching the outing on my office TV as I pecked out an article full of objective measures regarding his place in history, I struggled to keep it together. I can only imagine how Mariners fans felt.

A free agent for the first time, Hernández signed a minor league deal with the Braves in January, one that would pay him a salary of just $1 million if he made the team. Through four Grapefruit League appearances, he appeared on track for a roster spot, but the COVID-19 pandemic shut the game down in mid-March. While he briefly returned to camp in July when the team began ramping up for the shortened season, a day after the Braves revealed that Freddie Freeman and three other Atlanta players had tested positive for the coronavirus, Hernández chose to opt out of playing. He signed a similar minor league deal with the Orioles in February 2021 but didn’t pitch as well before elbow discomfort sidelined him in mid-March. Shortly after he resumed throwing, he opted out of his deal in late March. He never found another landing spot. Weeks before his 35th birthday, he had thrown his last pitch in a major league uniform.

…

Even at first glance, it’s not hard to see that Hernández’s road to Cooperstown is a steep one, as neither his traditional nor his advanced stats scan as Hall-worthy. Pitcher wins are an imperfect measure of value, but for better or worse, voters have generally used them as a proxy for career length and achievement. Unfortunately, there aren’t many modern precedents for electing pitchers with fewer than 200 wins; only three enshrined AL/NL starters have gained entry via the writers’ ballot, namely Dizzy Dean (150, elected in 1953), Dazzy Vance (197, elected in ’55), and Sandy Koufax (166, elected in ’72). All three were better than Hernández at run prevention on a career level, and only Vance threw more innings. Of the six other enshrined starters with fewer than 200 wins, five hail from the 19th century or the Deadball Era, with Veterans Committee selection Lefty Gomez (189, elected 1972) the only exception.

Similarly, only 13 starters have been elected with fewer than 3,000 innings pitched, including five from the 19th century or Deadball Era. From among the other eight, four of them are the sub-200 win pitchers mentioned above, while two others were elected within the past 11 years. Here’s that group, plus Hernández:

Hernández has the lowest ERA+ of the bunch, and fewer innings than all but three of those pitchers; he’s got a higher WAR than that trio, which includes Koufax. That still leaves him with the fourth-lowest peak of the group, and an S-JAWS that’s on par with Koufax. The problem is he’s just not Koufax, nor does he have a Koufax-like case. While Hernández did win a Cy Young and two ERA titles, Koufax won three Cy Youngs (all before the award was split into two for separate leagues), five ERA titles, an MVP award, and three World Series (with two MVP awards). According to the Bill James Hall of Fame Monitor, which gives credit for awards, league leads, milestones, and postseason performance, Hernández’s meager score of 67 isn’t even close to “a good possibility.” Koufax scores 227, which is about 100 points beyond “a virtual cinch” and explains why he was a first-ballot Hall of Famer despite his short career.

Hernández compares somewhat more favorably to Dean, Gomez, and Lemon, but each had postseason heroics in at least one World Series, and even while pitching in a time before the Cy Young was awarded, all score in the 112–128 range on the Monitor — and that’s with Lemon missing time due to World War II, while Dean and Gomez (and Koufax, of course) having their careers cut short by arm injuries. Within those abbreviated contexts, these guys accomplished a lot.

WAR and JAWS aren’t terribly flattering to Hernández, either. He’s tied for 114th in the former; among those above him are a couple of contemporaries with even fewer innings, namely Johan Santana (51.7 in 2,025 2/3 innings) and Roy Oswalt (50.0 in 2,245 1/3 innings). Hernández is a more respectable 65th in adjusted peak WAR, ahead of 28 of the 66 enshrined non-Negro Leagues starters. Even so, he’s well below Santana (45.0) and Oswalt (40.2), not to mention the still-active Chris Sale (41.7 in 1,958 innings) and deGrom (39.8 in just 1,367 innings), Sabathia (39.3), and just about every good lost candidate I mentioned in my series on starting pitchers outside the Hall from 2022, such as Kevin Brown, David Cone, Orel Hershiser, Rick Reuschel, Bret Saberhagen, and Dave Stieb.

Hernández’s 44.1 S-JAWS ranks 97th, ahead of just 14 of the 66 enshrinees. Repeating a table from my Andy Pettitte/Mark Buehrle update:

Where Sabathia’s S-JAWS places him in the 39th percentile, Santana’s in the 30th, and Pettitte and Buehrle in the 27th and 28th, respectively, Hernández is down in the 22nd, stuck in the first quartile instead of the second. I voted for Pettitte for the first time last year on the basis of his S-JAWS quartile and volume of postseason accomplishments, and I’ll vote for Sabathia on this ballot. I’m not sure I can justify voting for Hernández on that basis. Examining his standing by age in key categories relative to Hall of Fame starters doesn’t offer any stronger justification, either.

Created ahead of Hernández’s final start in 2019, that graph is oriented to show him ranking in the top 10 or 20 in strikeouts and WAR relative both to all post-1901 starters and to the 58 enshrinees during his 20s, but plummeting once he hit 30. Even with Mike Mussina since elected, there’s no need to update the graph; you get the idea.

Earlier this year, when Kluber, a two-time Cy Young winner, retired, I examined the best runs of five, seven, and 10 consecutive seasons since 1978 based on WAR. Santana, Brown, Stieb, Kevin Appier, and Kluber are among the non-Hall of Famers who stand out on the five-year list. Hernández cracks the lower reaches of the seven-year list (37.8 WAR from 2009–15) and the 10-year one (47.2 WAR from 2006–15), but on both, several aforementioned non-Hall of Famers figure more prominently.

I went into this process hoping to find a solid, objective reason to vote for Hernández. It’s not that I was unaware of his rankings in WAR and S-JAWS, but I hoped that maybe if I tilted my head, covered one eye, and squinted, I’d see something I’d previously missed. I don’t think I have, at least not by the ways that I’ve evaluated pitchers in a Hall context for the past 20ish years. Hernández did have a great run; from 2007–15, his 45.9 WAR (including offense) is third behind only Clayton Kershaw (49.4, despite not debuting until May 25, 2008) and Greinke (47.0), two future Hall of Famers. He’s second to Kershaw if you limit the stretch to 2009–14, but the gap between the two is wider over a shorter period.

Turning to Wins Above Average or fWAR instead of bWAR, or comparing birth or debut date ranges… I tried such approaches. So far, none convinces me enough to try to convince you, the reader, that when we look at Hernández’s career we’re seeing something besides the story of a pitcher worked very hard at a young age before running out of steam in his quest for Cooperstown. Hernández had some great seasons for a franchise that largely squandered them by not surrounding him with better players. He dealt with the inevitable injuries that come with high-volume pitching, and he couldn’t find a way to do what the great ones do: remake himself to combat the inevitability of Father Time. Instead, he threw his last competitive pitch at age 33, ending a three-year stretch in which he’d posted a 5.42 ERA and -1.4 WAR in 314 innings.

It doesn’t help that the Mariners had so much organizational turnover during his time. Even with only three GMs during Hernández’s run (Bavasi until June 2008, Zduriencik from October ’08 to August ’15, and Jerry Dipoto from September ’15 onward), they cycled through eight managers (two of them interim ones) and eight pitching coaches. That amounts to changing the voices in the pitcher’s ear about every two years, which can make it tough for a manager or coach to build up the trust necessary to have hard conversations with a superstar.

Perhaps if Hernández had come along a few years later, when the industry handled pitchers in their early 20s with greater care, he’d have stood a better chance at longevity, but he’s not blameless. We can play what-if all day, but he’s the one who owns his intermittent commitment to training and his inability to adapt — common themes when his name is discussed within the industry. A couple of damning pieces from September 2019 stick in memory. Divish revisited Servais’ 2016 challenge:

Said one Mariners player on the condition of anonymity: “We all knew he needed to change. But he didn’t get it.”

Hernández vowed it would be better, but it became apparent such promises weren’t kept.

… Hernández arrived in spring training [in 2019] looking no different from the end of last season. His first bullpen session was so bad a team executive wondered if he had touched a baseball the entire offseason.

Ouch. Via The Athletic’s Corey Brock, harkening back to Dipoto’s arrival in the spring of 2016:

“He came in and went through a routine that I came to find out was ‘Félix’s routine,’” Dipoto said. “He did not throw in the early bullpen sessions. He took the first week to 10 days to acclimate himself.”

The truth was that despite his promise to give better than his best, Hernández did very little throwing or training — if any — during the offseason. He would wait until pitchers and catchers reported to the team’s facility in Arizona each February to get his arm (and body) in shape for the upcoming season.

… “There was this belief that Félix was going to flip a switch and be ready to go,” Dipoto said. “But we never really saw that.”

Hernández sometimes bought into the team’s suggestions, hiring a trainer during the winter of 2016–17, following Stottlemyre’s advice to pitch to contact more in the spring of ’18, but “he would eventually go back to what he had always done — pumping fastballs — while never acknowledging that he was a lesser version of the player he had been,” wrote Brock. “Team sources said he was reticent to accept the club’s efforts to help from an analytic standpoint, eschewing scouting reports and biomechanical data used by other pitchers.”

“Hernández’s career arc is fascinating and tragic,” wrote Divish. “It’s Shakespearean in its triumph and turmoil. Meteoric rise followed by a steady fall with no vindication in the end.”

While I am not yet convinced Hernández is a Hall of Famer, I continue to be haunted by the fate of Santana. In a 12-season career, he led his league in ERA and WAR three times apiece and won two Cy Youngs, but an anterior capsule tear cut his time short. He went one-and-done on a very crowded 2018 ballot, receiving just 2.4%. He’s ineligible for a spot on at an Era Committee ballot until the 2029 Contemporary Baseball one (if the current format continues), and even then there’s no guarantee. Players who receive less than 5% from the writers rarely wind up on committee ballots, a reality that I have spent my career as an analyst and advocate battling with scant success. Ted Simmons is the only such player elected after falling off the writers’ ballot in his only try; Lou Whitaker has appeared on one committee ballot, Bobby Grich none.

As the electorate grapples with how to evaluate recent generations of starting pitchers, I think it’s preferable to keep as many current candidates on the ballot so voters can continue comparing them, supporting the best instead of measuring them against ineligible ones; the Santana mistake may not be undone for decades. Thus I lean toward casting a vote for Hernández to help ensure he gets to 5% and maintains eligibility, which would give voters — myself included — at least another year to let his candidacy marinate.

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