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Random thought: Even if his career ended today, Joey Votto is a Hall of Famer.
Votto has 1,866 hits and 284 home runs, both numbers that would suggest that he wasn't Hall of Fame worthy. But among the 963 players with at least 5,000 plate appearances through age 35, his 151 wRC+ ranks 30th all-time. That is Mike Schmidt production.
Why does Votto only have 1,866 hits? It's possibly in part because of how often he walks. He has the 16th-highest BB% of those 963 players with the criteria above. His OBP is 18th-best, just two points below Mickey Mantle.
By the JAWS standard, Votto (54.4) is 4.9 points below the average for first basemen, but I'm not a *huge* fan of using average JAWS because of outliers like Lou Gehrig, whose 91.1 JAWS skews that to the right. He is right on the median line of 54.3.
And if you're using bWAR7 to just look at his peak performance, Votto ranks ninth there. The eight players above him are either Hall of Famers (7) or Albert Pujols (1).
Ultimately, if you give him until the end of his contract in 2023, he definitely brings the counting stats up to Hall of Fame level. I'm just saying he's probably already there right now.
