Jimmy Rollins talks Hall of Fame candidacy, 2023 Phillies

Jimmy Rollins is a former National League MVP, four-time Gold Glover, three-time All-Star, the Phillies’ all-time hits leader and a World Series champion.

His career is plenty decorated as is.

But the book might not be closed just yet. The 2023 Hall of Fame class will be unveiled on Jan. 24, and while Rollins is far from a shoe-in — or even likely — to earn a spot in Cooperstown, his 9% total in the 2022 balloting exceeded the 5% threshold to at least keep him in consideration another year.

That, alone, is worth something.

“It takes, for Year 2, a lot of the pressure off,” Rollins said on Tuesday’s edition of The Show with Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman. “I survived Year 1, I was at 9 percent. If I fall off — no one wants to, but hey, I made it to the second round. I made it to the semifinal. Everyone wants a championship, but I made it to the semifinals.”

If Rollins is to advance past the metaphorical semifinal, it won’t be because his statistical production jumps off the back of the baseball card. Rollins is below water in career OPS+ (95), as Sherman pointed out, and his career OBP (.324) and bWAR (47.6) don’t exactly scream Hall of Fame caliber. 

But Rollins isn’t hanging his candidacy on that — not last year, and not this year either. The intangibles serve him better. The two New York Post writers said they favor a player’s “impact” over his “stats” when filling out their ballots — “it’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Stats” was a phrase Heyman used — which is an approach that would help Rollins’ case. 

Naturally, Rollins agreed with that strategy, pointing to his now-famous “team to beat” comment before the 2007 season as an example of his winning mentality integral to the great Phillies teams of the late 2000s and early 2010s. He acknowledged he’s not exactly a top-tier candidate in terms of traditional stats, but argued his role as a centerpiece of those teams outweighs that deficiency.

“I don’t care what the numbers say,” Rollins said. “I understand them. But that doesn’t give a full picture of the impact that they had on their team, on their teammates, the organization.”

Whether impact or stats is the primary driver of Rollins’ Hall of Fame case, voting is notoriously a highly subjective crapshoot. But Rollins said that while all the variables and different ways of approaching Hall of Fame voting — how to deal with PED associations; the structure of the vote itself (like 10-year eligibility windows and 10-player ballot limits); even a given voter’s relationship with the player in question — present uncertainty, the sheer ground he still has to make up before the 75% induction threshold offers some peace of mind going into Year 2.

“There’s nothing I can do about my career. It’s all said and done,” Rollins said. “I know in order for me to get there, I have a long ways to go, so it’s not the pressure of being at 65% or so or your first year on [the ballot] … Until the number gets somewhere where I’m like ‘OK, this might be the year,’ it’s kind of an ease of mind for me.”

Rollins offers his assessment of the 2023 Phillies

If J-Roll earns a spot in the Hall of Fame one day, memories of the aforementioned “team to beat” proclamation will follow him all the way to Cooperstown. Perhaps they’ll even play a role in getting him there in the first place.

Appropriately, Sherman and Heyman didn’t let Rollins go without prompting him for a similar proclamation about this year’s Phillies:

Is the 2023 club, like the ‘07 one, the team to beat in the NL East?

“You know what? I am ready to say that,” Rollins answered. “And who’s to prove me wrong?

“If they believe like we believed — especially with the moves of bringing over Trea [Turner] and some of those arms that were big — they are just as good as anybody in that division.”

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