5 Red Sox who deserve more Hall of Fame consideration
Few Hall of Fame cycles has been more eagerly anticipated by Red Sox fans than this one. After 13 terrific years in Boston, legendary designated hitter David Ortiz is eligible for election, and he is projected to be right at the 75% vote mark needed for election.
Yet while Ortiz will eventually get the call to the Hall, there have been many players in the franchise’s long history whose case for Cooperstown has not been given the proper due.
For this list, I looked only at players who spent a significant portion of their careers with the Red Sox. So while David Cone, Bret Saberhagen, and Jack Clark all played with the Red Sox and had terrific careers, they did not have a long enough career with the team to be considered for this list.
As with my last Hall of Fame piece, a significant portion of how I determined if a player was Hall of Fame worthy or not was by looking at JAWS. Invented by Hall of Fame guru Jay Jaffe, JAWS averages a player’s cumulative WAR and the WAR from their seven-year peak, making it easier to compare players who were great for a short period to those who compiled stats over a long career.