FT BREAKING NEWS: Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones elected to HOF

00:00:03
Speaker 1: FT breaking news. We have just learned that Carlos Peltron is a Hall of Famer. Scotty Brown, A. J. Perzinski, and Eric Kratz, let's talk about him. You guys both faced Carlos Beltron. So what was it like to face Carlos Beltron and how much does he deserve?

00:00:18
Speaker 2: This a lot.

00:00:19
Speaker 3: One of the greatest switch hitters I've ever seen played against Carlos since rookie ball all the way up right.

00:00:25
Speaker 2: So one of the greatest switch hitters I ever played against.

00:00:28
Speaker 3: Could hit, could hit for power, could steal bases, and was unbelievably clutch in big moments in the postseason. The run he had with the Houston Astros that year was one of the greatest runs, wasn't it.

00:00:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, the first go round with the Astros, the second and did everything.

00:00:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, the second goal second round is something completely different.

00:00:45
Speaker 1: It held him back for a little bit of time here, But that's what fans want to hear from us. We'll get to it.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: He deserves to go in.

00:00:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, Gokratz, no, his I.

00:00:54
Speaker 4: Mean, I just run now Again, I didn't play against him as long as AJ did, so AJ saw his peak, his prime. There's a few swings that I'm like, Okay, you know this guy's a switch hitter. Lance Berkman, you know he's a switch hitter, Chipper Jones. Switch hitter swings can be how they are, and those guys are the elite ones that I've ever seen. But to me, like, I just remember his left handed swing as a catcher sitting back there seeing the swing and you go, because you're always reading swings, and you go, man, it just always it just felt like his swing was in the zone the whole time, and you're like, this is the opportunity we're going to have to be able to get a ball in on him. Nope, And I mean he was still he was up there in age mid thirties, and it just it looks like a long swing. It's almost like Juan Soto swing in the sense that you're like, doesn't look like the fastest swing, but it's in this it's in the zone so long, and he hits the ball so flush and so square, and he gets to so many different pitches. It's just like he was one of those guys that really stood out to me for the years that I played against him.

00:02:01
Speaker 1: He had good runs with almost every team that he was part of Right. I mean, he did a lot of time with KC and then had some good moments with the Yankees.

00:02:10
Speaker 3: I just remember him Casey, they had him, Jermaine Died, Johnny Damon in the outfield.

00:02:14
Speaker 2: They were all young studs. They had Mike Sweeney, Joe Randa, the.

00:02:18
Speaker 3: Joker, they had, They had some good they had some good players, young players, and I was like, whoa, this is the big leagues.

00:02:26
Speaker 2: Huh.

00:02:26
Speaker 3: And then obviously Carlos moved on to multiple teams after that, but he did a nice job everywhere.

00:02:31
Speaker 2: People remember him in New York, both Mets and Yankees.

00:02:34
Speaker 1: He was.

00:02:35
Speaker 3: Listen, when you look at a Hall of Famer and you look at his numbers, say, this guy should be in the Hall of Fame. Okay, I mean he did everything. He performed in the postseason. He hit four hundred and thirty five home runs, almost had three thousand hits.

00:02:47
Speaker 2: I mean, this guy was he got on bass.

00:02:49
Speaker 3: I mean, now, Mets fans also remember when Adam Wayne Right do him a three two.

00:02:54
Speaker 2: Curve ball and struck him out there one pitch.

00:02:56
Speaker 3: I know, but this dude had unbelievable run and that was one of the best pitch of all time.

00:03:00
Speaker 2: So Carlos beltch Un deserves being This isn't even an argument.

00:03:04
Speaker 3: And if we want to go to the twenty seventeen oh for a sec I mean, people say, oh, this is that, But.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: There was a lot of other people doing things at the same time, right right. I played on teams where guys were doing all kind nothing like that. Crazy.

00:03:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, but there was always stuff going on.

00:03:19
Speaker 3: So you can't that that wasn't something you could hold against him because they were using the tools that they were allowed.

00:03:24
Speaker 1: Teams, and he was coming over from the Yankees, right, Yes, And I think there were some things going on there too. I'm not pointing out just the Yankees. It's the Red Sox. The Red Sox got caught with some stuff. There was a lot that was the sign stealing era, and the Astros took it too far and that changed a lot of things. But does that prevent a guy for his entire career from making it to the Hall of Fame, Because if we're going to start getting that specific on everything, it gets really challenged.

00:03:49
Speaker 2: Now.

00:03:50
Speaker 1: He was a ringleader. That was pretty much proven. He was a big part of it.

00:03:54
Speaker 2: He also lost his job as a manager because of it.

00:03:56
Speaker 1: He got punished.

00:03:57
Speaker 2: He's been punished.

00:04:00
Speaker 4: It means a matter if you think he was doing it other times, Like if you think he shouldn't be in because twenty seventeen wasn't his only year doing some type of scheme, I would say, look like, let's pump the brakes on that. Something that I think and I know from talking to guys that he was probably one of the best is picking tips up from pitchers. Not illegal, not illegal at all, picking things up. So what does that mean? It means he was a supremely talented hitter, but it also means he was paying attention to the game. He was trying to find little things. You talk to Alex Corer, you watch Alex Corer now as a manager on the bench, you know you'll see him like you'll see him look over. You'd be like, oh, it's probably a curveball here. Like guys are picking things up from pitchers. Carlos Beltron was from what I heard, one of the best at doing that. So did he go too far with the trash can thing? Yes? Does it exclude him from the Hall of Fame all the numbers that aj just pointed out, No, it does not exclude him from the Hall of Fame.

00:05:07
Speaker 1: And there are some people that are like, well, he did a form of cheating and got caught. Steroid users did a form of cheating and got caught. I think we all agree at this point on this show that if you're caught after testing officially began and attempted to level the playing field, then that's a differentiator. There are some people that don't share that opinion, but I certainly do. I can see cases made before that, But once the testing and everything was put in place, and then you're still getting smacked with a ped band, the distrust does start to emerge. It's very greatly affecting one individual player, and for some people that's their line. I do think there's a line between a guy getting busted for royds and not knowing how long or what right, versus a guy being part of a big scandal and one of the ringleaders for one season and being punished for his entire career for that. Do you guys agree that it's two different categories in terms of how you judge a player. For the Hall of Fame, yeah.

00:06:11
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, and the trash can scandal thing for the astros, everybody needs to understand it wasn't happening on every pitch because there was teams who knew stuff was going on. The Astros were petitions were not petitions. Grievances were filed by other teams on the Astros during that season. Major League Baseball just turned the blind eye and was like, well, you guys are just mad because they're you know, they're doing things and you could be doing things too, Like this could have been taken care of during that season, and teams and players took care of it. That's why you'd see nine visits to the mound. You had to change your signs. You have to mix things up. If you mix things up and you switch it and it's hard to figure it out, kind of hard to tell somebody from a camera what's coming if or from a TV screen what's coming if you're constantly changing it up, and it's like, all right, it's fine. Steroids. Those dudes were using it every single pitch. There wasn't a pitch off that, there wasn't a game off that steroids weren't working.

00:07:17
Speaker 3: I don't know want this to turn into this argument, so I wonder, let's just gme back to Carlos congratulations, you deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. You're in the Hall of Fame. In that twenty seventeen year, he didn't even have a great year. So he won a World Series, but it was about the other years before.

00:07:33
Speaker 1: That, right in a great team year, but he didn't have a great individual year. That was the end of his career.

00:07:36
Speaker 2: Yes, it was last year.

00:07:38
Speaker 3: So listen, this is about Carlos belter On getting elected to the Hall of Fame. Congratulations, Carlos, you deserve it. Now I'm going to be fascinating to see what hot you choose.

00:07:46
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00:08:01
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00:08:46
Speaker 4: It's kind of that's That's what I'm kind of gonna get at. Like what team will he choose? Do you guys remember that he was a Giant? I had no I completely forgot he played for the San Francisco Giants, and I feel like I'm to have locked into baseball, like understand when like this was the Eras twenty eleven. He played for the Giants. So for people who don't know, you can look up Baseball Reference. He went his first six years with the Kansas City Royals, crushed it Double Central in that turf. Then he went to Houston had just a ridiculous season. Then he I mean a ridiculous half a season. Then he signed with the Mets. Then he went to San Francisco for a tick, and after Wayne Wright struck him out, he's like, well, I'll go play for him with the Cardinals. So it'll be interesting. Who do aj Who do you remember Carlos beltron As and who he should go in as?

00:09:39
Speaker 2: Oh? I mean to me, it's a Met, But I mean he was there the longest.

00:09:44
Speaker 3: I mean I remember him coming up with the Royals because again I played with, I played against him in the minor league, so I remember him more a royal guy.

00:09:49
Speaker 2: But I think that he's a Met. For me, he's a Met, He's a Met. That's a boy, He's a Royal just as long.

00:09:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just think. I just say there was more moments as a Met than as a Royal.

00:10:02
Speaker 1: It's close, though, No, in terms of his success with both teams, it's close. He had some really good seasons with KC. But I agree, I think he's going to choose New York. I was more in the middle of his career. That was the big contract I think he resonates more with New York. Although, hey, maybe he's pissed about what happened afterwards. Right he was going to be a manager. He was Maybe he says, I'm going with KC. And I don't think anyone would look at it and be like, well, you can't do that, you can't be a Royal. He might say, that's what launched my career, that's what was the foundation of me as a player. And if you look at my numbers, they were exceptional. With Kansas City in a similar amount of played appearances or a similar around of years at least that were locked.

00:10:48
Speaker 4: Hey, j did you feel like he was one of the more underrated players? Because I was coming up through the minor leagues, you were already in the big leagues. And when he was playing on the Royals, I just remember people year in a year out saying this, dude's really underrated. He didn't make his first All Star team tail he was twenty seven is last year with the Royals. Did you feel like he was underrated?

00:11:09
Speaker 2: No? I thought inside baseball we knew how good he was. I don't think I don't think that underrated was a thing. I mean, people knew that. People that knew knew there was no underrated.

00:11:18
Speaker 3: Trust me, when you went into Kansas City and you're like, oh, we got Carlos Beltring coming up, you better be careful here because he'll whack one out. He had like that flat swing and he just whack one out there and you're like, right or left hand, it didn't matter. So and he made he made the outfield look easy. He was a center fielder at the time he was.

00:11:34
Speaker 2: It was good. He was a really good player.

00:11:36
Speaker 1: The one thing I'll point out that made him underrated he was quiet. Quiet. But also if you're inside baseball and you're watching the games every day, you know about him. The game was different back then too. It wasn't as easy in the late nineties and early two thousands to say, catch a Royals game, right, especially how many times would they be put on national television? Not a ton. Okay, So if you're a fan of another team and you're not following the Royals very closely, and you just look at his counting stats, which were a much bigger deal back then, right, and you're like, okay, like got good homer totals, but they're not crazy. Well, now we factor Kansas City's Ballpark into things a lot more than we did back then. We factor in, or at least we try to factor in defense and base running and all of these things. With statistics. We didn't have that. So I think if you watch the game, you'd be like, oh, this guy's a stud, he's a superstar. But if you did it and you looked at his stats, right, so let's say his two thousand and one season with Kansas City, and you're like, okay, three oh six, twenty four, one oh one, it's really solid, but it's not. It's not forty something homers and you might not be watching his defense and have any grades for defense. But nowadays it's like six and a half win player. Defensive Metrics loved him. Ops plus was one twenty three that year, so stuff like that. But anyway, congratulations to Carlos Beltrod and you're a Hall of Famer. Andrew Jones owed it into the Hall of Fame. What took so long? The dude put together a superstar career. He was so good for a long period of time during the beginning of his career. Maybe he gets punished for the end of his career. But now they figured it out, So congratulations to Andrew. And you got to watch a little bit of Andrew Jones and see how freaking ridiculously good he was.

00:13:20
Speaker 3: I got to play with Andrew with the White Sox towards the end of his career, and he was a great dude.

00:13:25
Speaker 2: He was a great teammate. He was fun as hell to play with.

00:13:27
Speaker 3: And his numbers weren't as great as they were when I was a Braves fan coming up and getting to watch him when he was a nineteen year old in the World Series, hitting homers and making over the over the wall catches.

00:13:36
Speaker 2: But this is a well deserved honor.

00:13:38
Speaker 3: Ten Gold Gloves, five All Star Games, a home run Championship, never won that World Series. It's probably the one thing he looks back on him says Dang, I wish I would have got that World Series. But he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame with his numbers and with that ten year period where he was absolutely elite.

00:13:54
Speaker 4: So cool in an era when like Griffy was before him and he was cool and smooth. You're like, I'm growing up a right handed hitter. It's like, I'll never be that cool. And then Andrew Jones came up. Little did I know in ninety six when he came up, he was only three years older than me and I was still just in high school trying to make my varsity team. But you'd watch him and he played for the Braves. I love the Phillies as a kid, and I'm like, you know, why do I like this guy so much? Like everything he did was so smooth. His swing to be able to come up in the World Series at nineteen and do what he did put him on the map for me. And seeing him at the end of his career, the one thing that stayed the same, and it's something that is endearing to I think a lot of Braves fans is that that just same every day smile. It looked like he enjoyed the game, and oh yeah, he was the best center fielder to play during his era. Some believe possibly one of the top two or three to ever play the game. And these are the pitchers that pitched in front of him and have enjoyed their Hall of Fame careers because he would go and get it for him.

00:15:10
Speaker 1: That's right, Small, Clavin Maddox incredible pitchers, but certainly didn't hurt to have Andrew Jones out there in centerfield, and they speak about him to the highest level. Right, I mean, I spent a lot of.

00:15:23
Speaker 2: Time he played so shallow. He was so great at going back on balls.

00:15:25
Speaker 3: He played very shallow and took away a lot of those singles in front of him. It was one of the best diving catchers I've ever seen, where he could dive and make make LOOKIZI had a good arm. Could steal bases when he was younger too. People forget that he could steal bases when he was younger. So I mean this, I don't know why it took so long. He started out with like eight under eight percent, barely stayed on the ballot.

00:15:45
Speaker 1: This was his ninth year.

00:15:46
Speaker 2: Now, in his ninth year he got in. So congratulations, Andrew.

00:15:50
Speaker 1: You only got ten years on the ballot, right, He was not getting love early on. And then it's this slow, steady rise.

00:15:57
Speaker 2: No, it was like slow boomb and then a huge jump. Yeah.

00:16:00
Speaker 1: It's just crazy to look back and be like, if this is not a gold standard Hall of Fame center fielder, what are you looking for at that position? And it is an incredibly difficult position. It is a position that wears you down right centerfield versus left and right. M hm, that one's easy. We always see guys they can't. How many guys nowadays make it through their career just in centerfield right, they always drop off, and I think teams are actually dropping them off sooner than ever. Right, that's a young man's game out there, and it usually leads to more wear and tear and to injuries. So for Andrew, you saw that late in his career, and it's not like he was terrible, like he was still hitting.

00:16:40
Speaker 4: He was still hitting a lot of dinger. That's a lot of dingers to hit in one career. And I talked to somebody with a Braves organization that ended up shifting over to the Royals, but they were there during Andrew Jones time. And Andrew Jones played before shifts, and they said because of where he could play, it was like one of the original in the sense that they could push their opposite field outfielder to the line where those doubles that their Hall of Fame pitchers would give up because it was like, oh, this guy was able to like go out and touch a really good pitch. They didn't care if the ball got blasted to the gaps. Why Because Andrew Jones went and got it. And I truly believe somebody told me this that they think if they had the cameras and all the like biometric scanning things, that his range would have actually given him a higher war than it actually got because now you have, you know, you have the radius that you're able to play, and when you play shallow and you still cover so much ground, your points go way way up, And they think he would have actually had a higher war, higher outs above average or whatever the other metric is that they use for defense.

00:17:56
Speaker 1: There are some guys where now we're looking at like seven year peak, I mean hit it ten year run. So that's why I just had a hard time understanding where some voters were, and I never really got the answers I was looking for when I would debate Andrew, because I've been debating his case for a long time. At this point, I'm like, what am I missing? Right, the numbers are hitting the eye test that worked. The eye test worked back then. Right for defense, you were like, this is the best defensive center fielder. I know you've talked also about Tory Hunter, and maybe this helps open up the door for Tory hunter, which is important.

00:18:34
Speaker 3: It is important one player that gets in helps out other players, much like sal salaries. One player helps other players.

00:18:41
Speaker 1: I think the media does help here. Obviously I'm biased, but it does help to state cases for players. I think the media was starting to politely shame people into voting for Andrew Jones, like why right, state your case? Present it, let me see an article about it. And maybe that happens here with Tory, where you're like, why you state the case every year? And say Andrew got in. Tory's got a lot of comps. Let's try and get him into. The Hall's too small for certain positions for sure, right agree, I would say it's center field, third base, and catcher. Those are the three where you're like, you gotta give more love there, and.

00:19:15
Speaker 3: The catcher to me is the one. But that's a whole different argument because it's such a you don't get to play, you don't get the number stats because you don't get to play one hundred and fifty five games year. If you get one hundred and twenty five, you've had a lot, especially now they've cut it down to like one hundred is the max. So it's really hard and you're gonna have to take a look at some other guys in their numbers.

00:19:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why it's tough. Those are two premium positions. Defensively, then should be getting a lot more love. Shortstop gets the love the other two don't write. If you're looking at importance, it's catcher one, shortstop two, center field three.

00:19:48
Speaker 3: Everyone builds their team up the middle. They want to build the team up the middle. So congratulations Andrew. Actually, you know, I forget you. I'm not calling you Andrew congratulations fruitcake like you used to call everybody congratulations. Fruit He got into the Hall of Fame. Now when I see you, I'm gonna have to actually respect you. So congratulations Andrew.

00:20:09
Speaker 4: The whole, the whole like wearing wearing down, like centerfielder was wearing down. Like guys not guy. These guys are not all on the same level. They're all on their own individual level. You think about Andrew Jones wearing down, you think about like a Grady Sizemore was having an incredible year. He wore down Ken Griffey Jr. Was going to be the greatest player of all time. He was gonna break Hall of he was gonna break home run records for your careers, and he started to break down. Mike Trout, you've seen what's happened all Hall of Fame. I'm not saying great Sizemore is. I'm just saying that the position is not for dudes that get into their mid thirties and for it got you like you have to kind of look at it differently. This guy burst onto the scene and did not skip a beat. There is so many blue icons on the right side of his on the on the right side of his stat sheet, it is kind of hilarious.

00:21:05
Speaker 1: Wow, now he'll get even more love. We'll see in Cooper's town. Andrew, congratulations,