This post isn’t about who does or does not deserve to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s simply this: which Hall of Fame players had the most bad seasons, or the worst seasons in general. My thanks to Sports Reference’s Stathead for existing and making this easy to find. Let’s get started.
There are 14 seasons by future Hall of Fame batters with a bWAR at or below zero where the player was between 23 and 37 years old.1I picked those age cutoffs to eliminate the awkward rookie year or the inevitable aging decline at the end of one’s career. The worst of these seasons was a -2.6 WAR courtesy of Ted Simmons in 1984, the only season of his career he didn’t play catcher.2His time mainly at DH meant he gained no positional adjustment in the WAR calculation, exacerbating his lack of value. This caught my eye. The previous winter, the Brewers traded for longtime Texas Ranger and six-time Gold Glove recipient Jim Sundberg. Sundberg proved to have an adequate bat on top of his generational glove, so Simmons got a year off from catching duty. After that 1984 season, Sundberg was part of a four-team trade that included the Royals, Rangers, and Mets. Simmons didn’t see much time at catcher the rest of his career, but always had at least a few games.
If we remove the age restriction and look at the most sub-zero WAR seasons among Hall of Fame hitters, the results are as we expect: players in sharp decline who aren’t quite ready to retire. Ichiro’s final seasons stick in my memory because it was weird that he spent time in Miami, and it was sad to see him perform so poorly.
The analogous list of Hall of Fame pitchers is intriguing because the only two players with three seasons with sub-zero WAR are strongly associated with my Minnesota Twins: Bert Blyleven and Jim Kaat. Bert was considered a Hall of Fame edge case for over a decade for reasons I don’t fully understand. As advanced statistics came into the scene—and Bert leveraged his public persona in the Twins’ broadcast booth—he was finally elected to the Hall of Fame in 2011.
Jim Kaat is even more of an edge case in that it required a few trips through additional committees—specifically the Golden Days Era committee—to eventually be elected in 2022 despite a career that ended nearly 30 years earlier.
This digging revealed that bad seasons—that is, seasons where an average player in the league would have performed better than these illustrious stars—universally occur on either side of what are excellent careers, with the mild exception of injuries. I examined these sub-zero seasons among Hall of Famers and found very few that occurred at any point other than their very early 20s or very late 30s. Aha! I thought when I noticed one of Blyleven’s was in his age-31 season—got you! Except I didn’t filter based on time played—he only pitched 20 innings and missed the remainder of the season with an injury.
All this to confirm that Hall of Fame players rarely have truly abysmal seasons, except when they’re young and dumb—until the last thirty or so years, teams tended to toss rookies into the deep end—or the inevitability of their retirement sneaks up on them. In related news, water is wet, but I still found this fascinating.
- 1I picked those age cutoffs to eliminate the awkward rookie year or the inevitable aging decline at the end of one’s career.
- 2His time mainly at DH meant he gained no positional adjustment in the WAR calculation, exacerbating his lack of value.