Warmup Tosses: The Lineup

Daisy-chaining through baseball history with the Hall of Fame ballot

Alright, so now that I’ve teased the new “season” of our daily baseball card get-together a couple of times, I thought I should give you a little more insight into what’s coming.

So here goes…

Beginning on Monday, December 23, we’ll fire up our hobby time machine each day, starting with one of this year’s Hall of Fame candidates and daisy-chaining to a somewhat similar player from the past.

How will we make that connection? Well, using Baseball Reference’s Similarity Scores, JAWS positional rankings, and the like. Basically, I’ll be looking for a player connected to the given candidate in each case, and one who strikes my fancy in some way.

Then I’ll write about him/them with the help of — you guessed it — old baseball cards. “Old” being open to interpretation, of course.

I plan to finish the series on or before January 21, when the Hall announces the results of this year’s election. I did’t backwards-plan to perfection, so we’re a bit short on days — that means we’ll have to hit a couple of Saturdays or Sundays along the way.

As for the pecking order, we’ll work in chronological order, starting with the player who finished up his career the longest ago and ending up with the 2019 retirees. Below is the schedule, starting with Day 1 (December 23) and including the date of each player’s last MLB appearance in parentheses.

Play ball!

---

• Day 1 - Billy Wagner (October 3, 2010)

• Day 2 - Manny Ramirez (April 6, 2011)

• Day 3 - Andruw Jones (October 3, 2012)

• Day 4 - Omar Vizquel (October 3, 2012)

• Day 5 - Andy Pettitte (September 28, 2013)

• Day 6 - Bobby Abreu (September 28, 2014)

• Day 7 - Torii Hunter (October 3, 2015)

• Day 8 - Mark Buehrle (October 4, 2015)

• Day 9 - Jimmy Rollins (June 8, 2016)

• Day 10 - Alex Rodriguez (August 12, 2016)

• Day 11 - Francisco Rodriguez (June 22, 2017)

• Day 12 - Carlos Beltran (October 1, 2017)

• Day 13 - David Wright (September 29, 2018)

• Day 14 - Chase Utley (September 30, 2018)

• Day 15 - Ichiro Suzuki (March 21, 2019)

• Day 16 - Troy Tulowitzki (April 3, 2019)

• Day 17 - Dustin Pedroia (April 17, 2019)

• Day 18 - Hanley Ramirez (April 17, 2019)

• Day 19 - Carlos Gonzalez (June 27, 2019)

• Day 20 - Ian Kinsler (August 12, 2019)

• Day 21 - CC Sabathia (September 24, 2019)

• Day 22 - Felix Hernandez (September 26, 2019)

• Day 23 - Adam Jones (September 28, 2019)

• Day 24 - Russell Martin (September 28, 2019)

• Day 25 - Fernando Rodney (September 28, 2019)

• Day 26 - Curtis Granderson (September 29, 2019)

• Day 27 - Brian McCann (September 29, 2019)

• Day 28 - Ben Zobrist (September 29, 2019)