Joe Mauer’s first year on the National Baseball Hall of Fame ballot has been going well. It’s fair to say it’s been even better than some Twins fans expected to see before the official announcement.
Thanks to the long-running dedicated work of Ryan Thibodaux and his team of public BBWAA ballot trackers, the numbers are showing signs of optimism for Twins fans who want to see their hometown hero enshrined in Cooperstown as a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
Latest updates of the Ballot Tracker have tallied 37.8% of the estimated 384 votes for the Hall of Fame this year. Mauer has the second-most in this pool of known votes at 121, good enough for 83.4% of the public vote. He only sits behind former third baseman Adrian Beltre, who leads with 143 out of 145.
The Athletic’s Twins beat writer, Dan Hayes, has cast one of the 121 known votes for Mauer, with many more expected to come.
Hayes’ time on the Twins beat began just as Mauer’s career was ending in 2018. Before then, he often saw Mauer from the press box at Guaranteed Rate Field while covering the White Sox for NBC Sports Chicago from 2012 to 17.
“He reminded me of Tony Gwynn, where he controlled the at-bat and would set the at-bat up,” said Hayes. “It was going to go how he wanted in most cases. For that to happen from a catcher, that stood out.”
Mauer rarely swung at the first pitch. Out of his 7,960 career plate appearances, he only swung at the first pitch 9.5% of the time. Even then, he had a career batting average of .353 on first pitches in such a small sample size.
“I grew up watching this with Tony Gwynn and Will Clark,” said Hayes. “Here we were, later on, and Joe Mauer came along and was doing the same thing from a position, which was routinely filled with .200 to .220 hitters. We never expected offense from the catching position.”
Exceeding all other players at his position offensively while still being a top defender behind the plate are two of many reasons Hayes cast his vote for Mauer to get in.
“He was a good framer, he was a good pitch caller, his pitchers love throwing to him,” said Hayes. “It would have been amazing if the Twins ever possessed a pitching staff like they had last year [2023] at any time during his career. I think that we never got to see Joe Mauer command a dominant pitching staff; he had Johan [Santana], he had Liriano. He caught outstanding individual pitchers, but he never had a staff like that.”
Mauer rarely caught even league-average pitching rotations when he was catching. The best pitching rotation caught was in 2006, but even that rotation never fully came together collectively like they did last year. Or like the one the last catcher to be inducted to the Hall of Fame caught, Iván “Pudge” Rodríguez.
Rodríguez had a 21-year career, beginning at age 19 with the Texas Rangers. There, he caught the strikeout king Nolan Ryan and Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd. He ended his career at age 39 with the Washington Nationals, helping catapult Stephen Strasburg, Jordan Zimmerman, and other young arms into successful starters.
But for some voters, Rodríguez is a Hall of Famer, and Mauer isn’t because Mauer never won a playoff game, let alone the World Series.
To Hayes, the playoff argument isn’t valid when reflecting on the rosters Mauer and Pudge played on in the postseason.
“The deck was stacked against the Twins a lot,” said Hayes. “They never had a guy really come through and just shove for seven innings and then hand it off to a bullpen. I don’t think that a player, whether their team won or lost in the postseason, that can definitely enhance the resume but it doesn’t take away from the resume to me. Ernie Banks is in the Hall of Fame, he never won a playoff game.”
Not only did Banks never win one, he never played in the postseason. But like Banks, Mauer would join a list of contemporaries, including Richie Ashburn, Ralph Kiner, and Phil Niekro.
The other common argument against Mauer’s Hall of Fame case is often found in Minnesota, not outside the state. He developed lofty expectations at age 17 when he entered his senior year at Creatin-Durham Hall in St. Paul in 2000.
Mauer was the superstar three-sport athlete in high school and looked like he had unlimited potential. Mauer’s career leveled with reality after his MLB debut in 2004.
Hayes did not become fully familiar with Twins fans’ constant frustrations with Mauer until he joined the Twins beat in 2018. While it was odd and Mauer was entering his final year, it didn’t take away from the longstanding influence Mauer had created in the Twins clubhouse that some current players still feel.
“I’m not gonna say he’s a traditional leader,” said Hayes. “He’s not a rah, rah guy. But you could just see the way the other guys kind of watched him, and they were in awe of him. It was a bunch of young guys that were coming into their own between Sanó, Kepler, Buxton, Rosario, and Joe was their steadying force.”
Mauer was far from the prime hitter he once was in 2018, finishing his final season with a solid .282 batting average. The work effort behind the scenes that Mauer did in the clubhouse to play out the final 127 games of his career reminds Hayes of another clubhouse leader he’s covered.
“Hearing how much it’s the concussions strained his eyes even years after the 2013 and how he had to retrain his vision essentially,” Hayes continued. “The stuff that he did to play out through age 35 was incredible and showed passion. It’s the kind of stuff that leaders are made up of. Paul Konerko did the same thing for the White Sox.”
When it comes down to it, Mauer is an all-elite hitter at his position and played great defense, earning three Gold Gloves behind the plate, too. But within that elite offense remains a special kind of hitter, according to Hayes. One that groups him with current Hall of Famers Gwynn and Wade Boggs, and Ichiro Suzuki – an all-but-guaranteed member of the class of 2025.
“I think all four of them, if they had sacrificed contact and their styles, and sold out for a specific pitch, they had the eye and the ability and the approach to do that,” said Hayes. “If they wanted to be 30 home run guys, I think they could have bulked up more and done it. Instead, they chose to be more dangerous as far as working pitchers working for pitching plate appearances, working walks, running that on-base percentage of high, and just being able to put the ball in play everywhere.”
While Mauer still needs 75% of all BBWAA voters to get in this year, the hope for him to make it on the first ballot is there. Hayes saw only the tail end of Mauer’s career daily. But the impact of his peak years as an offensive first catcher place gained so much recognition from writers across the country, that the shortsightedness of some Minnesotans who have been all-too-familiar with Mauer isn’t as much an issue with them.
