How Long Will Beltrán Wait for Cooperstown?
And why will he wait? Hint: Spy stuff.
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
Carlos Beltrán will be the general manager of Puerto Rico’s entry in the 2026 World Baseball Classic.
Beltrán’s first of two terms as an Astro took him and them to the 2004 National League Championship Series. Beltrán smashed four home runs en route a 1.521 series OPS—but the Astros lost to the Cardinals in seven close games.
Had Beltrán not been infamous for being frozen for series-ending strike three by Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright in the 2006 NLCS, he would have been remembered for hitting three homers and posting a 1.054 OPS in the seven-game set.
As a Cardinal, Beltran won the 2013 Roberto Clemente Award for sportsmanship and community involvement.
Leading Off
Why Beltrán Waits
Perhaps enough Hall voters can’t forgive him co-masterminding Astrogate.
By Jeff Kallman
We IBWAA writers get a shot at voting for the Hall of Fame, too, even if it’s only symbolic outside our walls. Many of us are also Baseball Writers Association of America members with Hall votes. Since many of those now reveal their Cooperstown votes, I have no compunction against revealing mine.
My yes votes went to Andruw Jones, Dustin Pedroia, CC Sabathia, Ichiro Suzuki, Chase Utley, and Billy Wagner. My reasons aren’t complicated:
Jones is the single most run-preventive center fielder who ever played major league baseball, including Hall of Famer Willie Mays. Before injuries pushed him into his too-well-remembered rapid decline Jones was also a Hall-level hitter.
Pedroia’s Hall case isn’t really clear, but he is likely to hang around the ballot, and I respected him for a very long time as an obvious Red Sox field leader who knew what he was doing at second base. While he was at it, he stood strong against his teammates’s electing the wrong way to retaliate against Manny Machado whom Pedroia himself didn’t blame for that collision. (Hint: You don’t wait two days and the near-end of a game to send the message if you think it needs to be sent. That’s weak.)
Sabathia’s probably the most traditionally-numbered candidate this time around. And if he doesn’t look too much different than the lesser-qualified Andy Pettitte, ponder this: Sabathia was seen as a staff ace far more often than Pettitte.
Ichiro . . . well, if you have to ask . . .
Utley was an underrated batsman, a top of the line baserunner, and a terrific and run-preventive second baseman who’d have won a satchelful of Gold Gloves in a more just universe. He was also too much on the quiet side compared to his more ebullient Phillies teammates. But if Cooperstown had a sign declaring that type off limits, you could win a couple of pennants and a World Series or two with a roster full of the Hall of Famers who’d be exiled. (They’d only begin with Steve Carlton and Charlie Gehringer.)
Wagner shouldn’t have had to wait until year final on the writers’ ballot to earn his Hall plaque. It wasn’t his idea to pitch under a thousand innings in a more than distinguished career. If you’re looking for a better way to gauge a closer than the save stat (one of the all-time stupid stats: real “save situations” show up in earlier innings as well as the ninth), ponder that nobody could hit Billy the Kid*—the lifetime batting average against him is .187. Compared to him, even The Mariano (BAA: .211) looked like you could take him downtown at will.
According to Ryan Thibodaux’s Baseball Hall of Fame Vote Tracker, at this writing, Ichiro’s liable to be a unanimous Hall of Famer; Sabathia will become a first-ballot Hall of Famer with shy of 90 percent of the vote; Wagner will make it in his final BBWAA ballot appearance (85.6 percent as I write), and, Carlos Beltrán will sneak in with 76 percent of the vote.
There’s something a little wrong with that fourth picture.
Right behind Beltrán is Andruw Jones at 73.1 percent, a hair and a half shy of the minimum required for election. Aside from believing Jones should have been elected already, I suspect Beltrán will continue to wait, even after the co-mastermind of 21st Century baseball’s absolute worst cheating scandal** was denied first-ballot enshrinement.
He wound his playing career down as a designated hitter/mentor for the 2017 Astros and—renowned as an astute catcher of pitch tipping and other opposition “tells” from which he might draw an advantage—teamed with then-bench coach Alex Cora to create the team’s off-field-based, illegal real-time camera, illegal sign-stealing operation.
When Beltrán returned from his 2020 suspension and personal exile to follow to join the Yankees’ YES Network as an analyst, he gave a 2022 spring training interview to the network and was asked why he didn’t stop the Astro cheating:
And my answer is, I didn’t stop it the way no one stopped it. This is working for us. Why you gonna stop something that’s working for you? So, if the organization would’ve said something to us, we would’ve stopped it for sure. I wish I would’ve asked more questions about what we were doing.
“Beltrán was as powerful a clubhouse presence as there was on the 2017 Astros,” Astrogate co-exposer Evan Drellich once wrote, “begging the question, what was stopping him from asking those questions?” That might be one of several questions on the minds of enough BBWAA voters to keep Beltrán out of the Hall of Fame another year. Or more.
* If you think Sabathia’s redemption story is something to behold, and it certainly is, ponder Wagner’s, too. He grew up in such poverty that peanut butter on a cracker was dinner often enough. His family changed homes almost as often most people change underwear. And, he drove himself to become a lefthanded pitcher thanks to a pair of bad right arm fractures.
** What would have been 20th Century baseball’s worst cheating scandal? Some think crowds of candidates abound. (Including three pennant winners: The 1940 Tigers. The 1948 Indians. The 1961 Reds.) Based on the record and the evidence, I’d have to say that plowing their second-half way from the dead to a pennant playoff with an elaborate enough, off-field-based, telescopic sign-stealing plot, the 1951 Giants win the Ignoble Prize.
Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who now edits the Wednesday and Thursday editions of HtP. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born. Bio for newsletter writer goes at the end with info about author, email, link to X/Twitter profile.
Extra Innings
Ryan Thibodeaux has maintained and operated Baseball Hall of Fame Tracker since 2014.
Thibodeaux grew up an Astros fan in Houston, then held season tickets to the Oakland Athletics before his children were born.
He has said he began the Tracker over his personal frustration over how long it was taking the Astros’ fabled Killer Bs (first baseman Jeff Bagwell, catcher-turned-second baseman Craig Biggio) to make it into the Hall of Fame.
His X (Twitter) handle was inspired by a Sidney Potier film, They Call Me Mr. Tibbs—he elected to use @NotMrTibbs.
