It’s Hall of Fame consideration season. For the rest of the calendar year, Connections will be looking at some of the names on the 2025 ballot.
By full decade, starting in 1900, here are the bWAR leaders among second basemen (min. 67% of game at second):
| Decade | Player | bWAR |
| 1900-1909 | Nap Lajoie | 69.0 |
| 1910-1919 | Eddie Collins | 73.5 |
| 1920-1929 | Rogers Hornsby | 93.8 |
| 1930-1939 | Charlie Gehringer | 64.2 |
| 1940-1949 | Joe Gordon | 43.9 |
| 1950-1959 | Nellie Fox | 41.1 |
| 1960-1969 | Bill Mazeroski | 27.6 |
| 1970-1979 | Joe Morgan | 67.1 |
| 1980-1989 | Lou Whitaker | 43.5 |
| 1990-1999 | Craig Biggio | 53.2 |
| 2000-2009 | Chase Utley | 42.2 |
| 2010-2019 | Robinson Canó | 53.1 |
Some pretty heady names appear on this list. The inner-circle, Mt. Rushmore second sackers from the pre-integration era each have a decade of standing above their peers. The greatest second baseman since Jackie Robinson donned a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in 1947 shows up. Two of the pre-eminent defensive stalwarts at the position surface. In all, nine of the 12 are in the Hall of Fame. Utley should be, too.
Utley’s place on this selective endpoint presentation is one way to help assess his candidacy, a quick and dirty tool to explore his connections to past greats, a simple lens to use as a conversation starter.
Although Utley didn’t play a full season until he was 26 years old, the six-time All-Star crammed a significant bundle of excellence into his window as a peak performer. Power, an uncanny ability to steal bases without being caught, a run of grading out (via defensive WAR) as one of the best glovemen in the league, Utley’s toolkit spoke of a guy able to do a lot of things exceptionally well. For a 10-year run from 2005-2014, he produced the second highest bWAR in the Majors, behind only Albert Pujols. Yes, doing a bit of everything and doing it remarkably well. Within this high point of performance, Utley added an historic display of pop in the 2009 World Series, tying the Fall Classic high mark with five home runs. That came a year after a 2008 campaign in which he produced a 9.0 bWAR (the highest for a second baseman since Biggio’s 9.4 in 1997 and a top-eight mark at the position in the Integration Era) and helped the Phillies land the franchise’s second ever World Series title. By the numbers, if not the acclaim (more on that later on), he was the best player on a club in perennial contention for the pennant.
And then, as it does, the eye-popping went away. The counting stats accrued more slowly, the rate stats declined, and Utley just sort of evaporated, annual postseason appearances for the Dodgers notwithstanding. He played his final game in 2018, allowing those of us who like to do such things the opportunity to place his cemented numbers alongside his positional peers. Among players since 1901 with at least 1,000 games at second:
~Utley ranked seventh in home runs, 10th in extra-base hits, 15th in RBI
~Utley possessed the best SB% (min. 150 SB)*
~Utley owned the 15th best bWAR
~Utley was tied for the 14th best OPS+
*since 1951, when full records are available
Also:
~Utley was one of six to have at least five seasons with a 7.0 or better WAR (min. 67% of games at second). Collins and Hornsby had eight, Lajoie owned seven, and Utley was tied with Gehringer and Morgan.
~Utley was tied for the eighth most seasons with a qualifying OPS+ of at least 125 (min. 67% of games at second)
Throughout his prime, Utley lived through the incongruity of being so good on the diamond and so dismissed when it came to acknowledgement of his standing – a mismatch seen across the National League and perhaps most pointedly, on his own team. From 2005-2009, he was either second or third in NL bWAR every year, yet his highest finish in MVP voting through this five-year stretch was a seventh place finish in 2006. That year, while he posted a team-leading 7.3, his teammate, Ryan Howard (he of the 58-homer, 149-RBI line and a 5.2 bWAR) claimed the award. The next year, Utley’s 7.8 was third among position players in the NL, yet only good enough for eighth in voting. The winner – Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins – posted a 6.1 along with one of the four seasons ever with at least 20 doubles, 20 triples, 20 homers and 20 steals. In both 2006 and 2007, his teammates posted flashier numbers and storylines, and Utley was lost in the shuffle.
This disparity is part of Utley’s ultimate story, one that feels even more telling and stark when presented in another way. Since 1931 (the year the current MVP system was put into place), there are a dozen Hall of Famers who played at least 1,000 games at second. Those 12 – along with Utley – are listed below, referencing both the number of times they finished in the top five in MVP voting and top five in their league in bWAR.
| Player | Top 5, MVP | Top 5, bWAR |
| Roberto Alomar | 2 | 2 |
| Craig Biggio | 2 | 2 |
| Rod Carew | 3 | 3 |
| Bobby Doerr | 1 | 1 |
| Nellie Foxx | 2 | 2 |
| Charlie Gehringer | 5 | 5 |
| Joe Gordon | 1 | 4 |
| Billy Herman | 3 | 3 |
| Bill Mazeroski | 0 | 0 |
| Joe Morgan | 4 | 5 |
| Ryne Sandberg | 3 | 4 |
| Red Schoendienst | 2 | 0 |
| Chase Utley | 0 | 5 |
For most of these immortals, the two top-five columns mesh: either the tallies are exactly the same or very similar to one another. It’s only Gordon and Utley who really possess the imbalance. And at least Gordon – a Veterans Committee Hall of Fame inductee in 2009 – captured the 1942 AL MVP (although that finish is suspect, to say the least). MVP voting has treated second basemen tough, showing four winners since Morgan had his back-to-back wins in 1975 and 1976: Sandberg in 1984, Jeff Kent in 2000, Dustin Pedroia in 2008 and Jose Altuve in 2017. That seems paltry for nearly a half-century of crowning the best. The MVP award is not the bWAR Award of course, but it feels wrong to have seen Utley be outside the top-five in one category for every year he placed in the top-five in the other.
The current Hall of Fame ballot carries Utley’s name for the second time, following a debut that brought him 28.8% of the vote. His year-to-year standing will be one of the more interesting plots over the next few years – will there be a steady rise to forecast eventual election? Will he fade from conversations as his peak years recede from memory? Will he, ultimately, like his fellow decade-bWAR leader Whitaker, remain on the outside? There are a lot of questions, to be sure. There are also a lot of answers, a case for Chase Utley that rests upon a stupendous peak, a placement among the very best ever to man the keystone and a variety of skills and manifestations of them that lifts him to one of the very best.
Thanks to Baseball Reference and its extraordinary research database, Stathead, for help in assembling this piece.
Roger Schlueter
As Sr. Editorial Director for Major League Baseball Productions from 2004-2015, Roger served as a hub for hundreds of hours of films, series, documentaries and features: as researcher, fact-checker, script doctor, and developer of ideas. The years at MLB Production gave him the ideal platform to pursue what galvanized him the most – the idea that so much of what takes place on the field during the MLB regular and postseason (and is forever beautifully condensed into a box score) has connections to what has come before. Unearthing and celebrating these webs allows baseball to thrive, for the present can come alive and also reignite the past.