Third basemen are Cooperstown’s rarest breed, and Rolen became just the 18th Hall of Famer to play the majority of his career there. He received 76.3% of the vote in his sixth year on the ballot to clear the 75% needed for induction by just five votes. He had been on 63.2 percent of ballots last year.
“There was never a time in my life when I thought I was going to be a Hall of Fame baseball player,” Rolen said Tuesday. “…I never thought I was going to be drafted. I never thought I was going to play in the major leagues. It was never going to be anything. And then certainly when I did the vote, it was a great honor at the time.
But Rolen went further than that Tuesday, being honored for a 17-year career that included a Rookie of the Year award in 1997 and a World Series title in 2006. Rolen began his career as a second came from Mike Schmidt with the Philadelphia Phillies and became the mainstay of a long-awaited St. Louis Cardinals championship team in his thirties. His eight Golden Gloves trail only Brooks Robinson (16), Schmidt (10) and current Cardinals third baseman Nolan Arenado (10) for the most at the position. Among third basemen of the past half-century, Rolen is seventh in Wins Above Replacement, according to FanGraphs. Of those who came before him, the only players not in the Hall of Fame are either not yet eligible or have had their careers tainted by performance-enhancing drugs.
“On behalf of the entire St. Louis Cardinals organization, I want to congratulate Scott Rolen on the well-deserved honor of being selected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame,” Cardinals President Bill DeWitt said. Jr., in a statement. “Scott was the cornerstone of our infield and roster during his six seasons in St. Louis, and helped create many fond memories on the great Cardinals teams of the mid-2000s.”
Rolen, who played for the Phillies, Cardinals, Toronto Blue Jays and Cincinnati Reds, finished his career with a .281 batting average, .855 on-base percentage, 316 home runs and 2,077 hits, figures significantly affected by injuries that limited him in his thirties.
“Philadelphia was privileged to have witnessed the start of its extraordinary baseball career,” Phillies owner John Middleton said in a statement. “Besides being one of the most impactful offensive and defensive players of his era, Scott played the game the right way. Whether it was taking extra base with a headfirst slide or diving for a ball in the hole, his uncompromising effort and selfless attitude resonated with our fans.
Thanks to his elite glove and steady bat, Rolen was an annual MVP contender when healthy. From 1997 to 2005, only three players have racked up more FanGraphs WAR: Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds and 2023 Hall of Fame returning member Andruw Jones. Jones, known as even more of a glove star than Rolen, was named on 58.1% of the ballots this year, the sixth for which he was eligible.
Rolen became just the second writer-voted player in the past three years. They elected former Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz last year. The year before, they had elected no one. The relative scarcity is evidence of the complicated era in which Rolen wrote his Hall of Fame resume, an era in which many of baseball’s brightest stars slipped into baseball’s purgatory due to ties to performance-enhancing drugs.
Alex Rodriguez, for example, won just 35.7% of the vote this time around, as a year of suspension for testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs continues to overshadow his legacy as the one of the most prolific hitters of his time. Rodriguez is fifth all-time in home runs and fourth all-time in RBI, numbers that would otherwise make him a first-round Hall of Famer. Accused steroid users Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, Hall of Fame stat locks, went 10 years each without reaching 75%; they fell on the ballot after last year’s vote.
Other convoluted nominations, like that of playoff ace Curt Schilling and first-time eligible outfielder Carlos Beltrán, have also tarnished some of the most impressive on-court resumes of decades past. This year, Beltrán became the first member of the 2017 Houston Astros to enter the Hall of Fame ballot, meaning his candidacy gave voters their first opportunity to address the legacy of those involved in the scandal. theft of Astros signs. He obtained 46.5% of the vote.
But neither Rolen nor the man who’s come closest to him in the Class of 2023, Todd Helton, was linked to off-court controversy. Helton, the biggest star in Colorado Rockies history, has always been somewhat discredited because he played half his career at Coors Field, an offensive friend, but his numbers – including batting average in career of .316 and an OPS of .953 – suggests that he was not a fluke. Helton got 72.2% of the vote in his fifth year on the ballot and will be back next year. Thus will approach Billy Wagner (68.1% in his eighth year) and the slugger Gary Sheffield (55% in his ninth).
These players should take heart in Rolen’s Hall of Fame story, which he says began in the parking lot outside his young son’s basketball practice as he waited to hear the results of his freshman year’s vote on the ballot in 2018. At the time, he told his son he didn’t think he would be admitted, that he just wanted the required 5% to remain on the ballot for one more year. When the numbers came out, he had received 10.2%.
“Did we win?” his son, Finn, asked him.
“I said, ‘Oh, yeah, we won,'” Rolen recalled telling her.
“[Getting in] is kinda silly,” he said. “That’s a bit of a stretch.”
