When you pitch nine innings -- and there's no tie -- you get a complete game. Yet when you check nine boxes on a Hall of Fame ballot, you feel like you haven't completed the job.
I know, I know: the Hall allows voters to select up to 10 candidates per ballot. Ten is a maximum, not a mandate. But when you go with nine, it's like turning down a beer at last call. You're already loaded, so why not one more?
There's comfort in voting for 10, as I did last year. You can always tell yourself, and others, that you would have voted for more if you'd had the chance. With nine, you reveal not just who you voted for, but who you think falls short.
Which brings me to Félix Hernández.
I could have easily given Hernández my last remaining spot. If you covered baseball in his era, as all of the voters did, how could you not love the guy? He reached the majors with the Seattle Mariners at 19 years old, in August 2005, dazzling hitters with a chilling vision of the future of his craft.
I'll never forget seeing veteran utility man Joe McEwing, then in his final year with Kansas City, just after Hernández had carved up the Royals for eight innings. What did McEwing see in the kid?
"Ninety-seven -- with sink!" he replied, shaking his head. Lots of pitchers throw sinkers at 97 mph today. Not two decades ago.
Hernández made at least 31 starts every season for a decade, from 2006 through 2015. His record was a hard-luck 139-97, but even so, only Justin Verlander and CC Sabathia had more wins in those seasons. Hernández had a 3.13 ERA, and nobody had more strikeouts than his 2,065.
But I also considered a personal rule: once I vote for someone, I will not drop him from my ballot. That's not fair to the candidate. If I decide to give him the highest honor in the sport one year, I can't take it away later. And with a 10-vote limit, things can get crowded in a hurry.
So I'm locked in with these holdovers: Andruw Jones, Andy Pettitte, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Billy Wagner and David Wright. I added Carlos Beltrán this year, so that's seven, and CC Sabathia and Ichiro Suzuki were easy choices from the new ballot.
This is Wagner's final year of consideration by the Baseball Writers' Association of America. Suzuki is a lock for election, and Sabathia is trending that way. So I expect to have six holdovers for the 2026 ballot, when Cole Hamels headlines the list of newcomers. Jon Lester arrives for the 2027 ballot, and David Price for 2028.
Many others will too, of course. But when it comes to Hernández, it makes sense to study contemporaries like Hamels, Lester and Price. We're about to get a whole lot of pitchers like them -- memorable aces from an era that limits their chances of compiling traditional counting stats.
Since the veterans' committee picked Addie Joss in 1978, every AL/NL starter elected to the Hall has amassed more than 200 career wins. Lester (200 wins), Hernández (169), Hamels (163) and Price (157) did not. Their career stat lines -- and those of today's generation -- challenge the definition of who belongs in Cooperstown.
Hernández and Price won Cy Young Awards. Hamels, Lester and Price sparkled in the World Series. Hamels, Hernández and Lester pitched no-hitters -- and Hernández's was perfect.
The question is where to place them all, historically. To do that, let's look at pitchers with 2,000 to 2,999 career innings who worked exclusively within the last 50 years. We'll set a maximum ERA of 3.90, matching the highest in Cooperstown (Jack Morris).
That gives us a list of 48 pitchers, with Roy Halladay and Pedro Martínez already in the Hall and two others -- Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer -- who will make it easily. The remaining 44 include Hernández, Hamels, Lester and Price.
It's safe to say that all four rank above quite a few on the list, like Rick Honeycutt, Bob Knepper, Scott Sanderson, Ed Whitson and so on. But there's a whole lot of greatness sprinkled throughout that group of 44.
Fifteen of them -- more than a third -- earned Cy Young Awards, including Bret Saberhagen and Johan Santana, who both won two. So did Corey Kluber and Tim Lincecum, who fell well short of 2,000 innings, and Jacob deGrom, who is 36 and still shy of 1,400.
Several pitchers shined in the postseason, a stage Hernández never reached while playing his entire career with the Mariners. Josh Beckett, Madison Bumgarner, Hamels, Saberhagen and Frank Viola won World Series MVP awards, and others were similarly dominant in late October, like Cliff Lee (2009), Chris Carpenter (2011), Lester (2013) and Price (2018).
If you're still looking for a pitcher to start a crucial game, the list has righties to spare in David Cone and Adam Wainwright. Lefties, too: Jimmy Key, Ron Guidry, Fernando Valenzuela. And let's not forget analytic darlings like Kevin Appier or Dave Stieb, who both had well over 50 wins above replacement.
That's 20 big names, plus Hernández, scattered among those last three paragraphs. None of them have a plaque at the Hall. The more I studied those names, the more I convinced myself that Hernández fits more snugly in that group than he does in the tier above.
It's easy to criticize the election process, and it's certainly imperfect. But for all the inherent flaws of a massive collaborative effort -- only Mariano Rivera has gotten 100 percent of the vote, for example -- there's also a benefit.
Candidates need just five percent of the vote to remain on the ballot. With enough support, they can stay in consideration for 10 years. Former Orioles and Yankees ace Mike Mussina debuted with just 20.3 percent of the vote in 2014. He was always a strong candidate -- he earned 270 victories while pitching exclusively in the rugged AL East -- but needed six tries to reach the required 75 percent.
In his induction speech, the always-astute Mussina offered "an enormous thank you to those who voted for me in my very first year and kept me on the ballot (and) to those who continued to re-evaluate my career." Eventually the voters got it right on Mussina, and that's all that matters.
Perhaps Hernández will follow a similar path. According to Ryan Thibodaux's Hall of Fame ballot tracker, he already has enough public votes to remain on the ballot.
To the Hernández voters, then, I offer an enormous thank you. I'm not there yet with him, not with so many others in his class still on the outside. But I'll continue to re-evaluate his outstanding career.