Leading up to the Baseball Hall of Fame class announcement on Jan. 21, we’ll be examining the cases of notable candidates every Thursday. A first-time nominee who spent his entire career with the Seattle Mariners leads us off.
Félix Hernández was four months removed from his 19th birthday when he took the mound in a Major League Baseball game for the first time. It was Aug. 4, 2005, and with his first pitch, he became MLB’s youngest starting pitcher since 1978. No younger starter has debuted since.
The game itself was forgettable—the Detroit Tigers beat the Seattle Mariners, 3–1, in a battle of two sub-.500 teams—as was Hernández’s stat line (two runs in five innings with four strikeouts). But he left an impression on all those who saw it, planting the seeds of a career that would see a baby-faced teenager transform into a King.
“Maybe in 10 years, 15 years, I’ll be sitting on my couch, watching TV, and I’ll be able to tell my kids I caught his first game,” Mariners catcher Wiki González said after the game. “The first game of a possible future Hall of Famer.”
The path to finding out whether González’s prediction comes to fruition begins this year, when Hernández joins the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot. This year’s class of first-year players is particularly impressive, with Hernández’s longtime Mariners teammate, Ichiro Suzuki, leading the way, along with fellow starting pitcher CC Sabathia. Add in returning players who are close to enshrinement (Billy Wagner, Andruw Jones and Carlos Beltrán), and the path to Cooperstown for Hernández appears to be a steep one.
Fitting for a player for whom life in the big leagues was always an uphill climb.
Over the course of his 15-year career, Hernández never appeared in a playoff game. The Mariners never won 90 games with him on their roster, and only five times finished above .500. This, despite the righthander being among the game’s most dominant forces for the first decade of his career.
From his debut in 2005 through his age-29 season in ‘15, no pitcher amassed a higher fWAR than Hernández’s 52.4. The Venezuela native logged the third-most starts (334) and innings (2,262 ⅓) during that span, made six All-Star Game appearances and had six top-10 American League Cy Young Award finishes. He won the award in ‘10 and was the runner-up in ‘09 and ‘14.
Amid this period when he was both consistently excellent and durable, he was also incredibly unlucky. He suffered double-digit losses five times, including his 2010 campaign in which he had a league-leading 2.27 ERA with six complete games yet went 13–12. In four of those dozen losses, he allowed two earned runs or fewer over at least seven innings. He lasted seven frames or more in 25 of 34 starts.
During this stretch, Hernández appeared to be on a surefire path to the Hall. He made 30-plus starts annually with an ERA+ (128) in line with the career marks of his contemporaries like Max Scherzer (133), Roy Halladay (131), Justin Verlander (129), Cole Hamels (123) and Zack Greinke (121).
But a Hall of Fame career is just as much built upon a gradual decline as it is a sensational peak, and that’s where we get to the biggest hole in Hernández’s case. Taking the ball every fifth day from a teenager to age 30 will wear down even the rubberiest of arms, and for King Félix, the fall arrived swiftly.
Hernández made 25 starts in 2016, ending a 10-year run of at least 30 starts. A 3.82 ERA was propped up by a shaky 4.63 FIP, and it never got any better than that. He managed only 16 starts in ‘17 and had a 5.55 ERA in ‘18. In three years, he went from 28-year-old Cy Young Award runner-up to replacement level pitcher. Two years later, his career was over.
His commitment to remaining on the Mariners throughout his prime and beyond, coupled with his mounting shoulder injuries, robbed the baseball world of getting a chance to see him pitch in the postseason, adding a tragic layer to an excellent career. A late-career comeback attempt with the Atlanta Braves and Baltimore Orioles fizzled out, sparing us from adding Hernández to the extensive list of players who played in ill-fitting hats as the dying embers of their careers burned out (who remembers Chicago White Sox outfielder Ken Griffey Jr. or Boston Red Sox pitcher John Smoltz?).
But for all that was lost given that he never pitched for a good team, the fact that Hernández stuck with one franchise, toiling away year after year as the Mariners failed to get over the hump, makes King Félix something of a folk hero. (It also made him the Mariners’ franchise WAR leader among pitchers, outranking Randy Johnson.) That injuries cut his baseball life short only adds to the mystique. And all of it is fodder for what was his finest hour on Aug. 15, 2012.
Does it matter that Safeco Field was half full to watch Hernández hurl the 23rd perfect game in MLB history? Does it matter that the Mariners were in last place on that day, and would remain there through the end of the season? Of course not. Hernández never got to pitch in the Fall Classic, but he deserved this moment, which is probably a better career highlight than any postseason game could have delivered. The image of fans sitting in the King’s Court section losing their collective minds as Hernández kicks his leg in the air to celebrate his career-defining accomplishment made all the team’s shortcomings throughout his career seem, at least for a moment, worth it.
After his debut nearly 20 years ago, a 19-year-old Hernández offered a content but muted assessment of his outing. “I know I pitched well, and I know I had a good game, but I can’t be too happy because the team lost,” he said.
It’s a sentiment he would, unfortunately, have to grow accustomed to. The losses and the injuries may have prevented Hernández from amassing the stats and October moments that define most Hall of Fame careers, but the résumé points he accumulated during his apex stand toe-to-toe with just about any pitcher enshrined in Cooperstown.
If longevity and stat compilers are what voters favor, then Hernández’s time on the ballot could be short. Few reached his heights, though, and for a player who didn't catch many breaks in his career, getting some more runtime for a proper Hall of Fame assessment would be a breath of fresh air.
The King’s reign must always come to an end. Long live the King.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Is King Félix’s Career-Long Seattle Reign Long Enough for the Hall of Fame?.
