How Did Joe Mauer’s Hall of Fame Case Become So Complicated?

This winter represents the first year that Joe Mauer is eligible for the Hall of Fame. The St. Paul native retired after the 2018 season and enjoyed a 15-year career with the Minnesota Twins, including six All-Star appearances, three Gold Glove Awards, five Silver Slugger awards, three batting titles, and the 2009 American League Most Valuable Player Award.

The Twins decided to retire Mauer’s No. 7 jersey the moment he decided to hang it up, and his resumé belongs on a plaque in Cooperstown. But even as national baseball writers submit their ballots, Mauer’s Hall of Fame case seems complicated to Twins fans and has created an internal debate that doesn’t make sense.

If you think Mauer doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame, reread the opening paragraph. It wasn’t that Mauer did all of those things during his major league career. He did it at catcher.

Catcher is the most physically demanding position in baseball. It’s a difficult position to occasionally play, and Mauer took that a step further by playing at catcher in 687 of his 801 total games (85.7 percent) from 2005 to 2010.

Only Jason Kendall (833) and A.J. Pierzynski (804) played more total games while playing 85 percent of the time at catcher from 2005 to 2010. But Mauer’s offensive production set him apart from this group.

Mauer’s .328 batting average was miles ahead of Brian McCann’s .289 average. His .409 on-base percentage dwarfed Jorge Posada’s .376 OBP of players who played 85 percent of their games at catcher from 2005 to 2010. Mix in a .478 slugging percentage that only ranked behind McCann (.489) and Posada (.484), and Mauer had a .886 OPS that led the group during this time frame.

But Mauer’s dominance also had historical significance. Had Mauer continued playing at catcher and produced at the same rate as he did from 2005 to 2010, his .328 average would have passed Mike Piazza’s .308 average for the highest all-time among players who played 85 percent of their games at catcher in the expansion era, which started in 1969.

Mauer also would have been first in on-base percentage, passing Dick Dietz’s .405 OBP from 1969-73. His slugging percentage would have ranked fourth behind Piazza (.545), Javy López (.491), and Will Smith (.483).

The fact that Mauer became the first catcher to win an American League batting title in 2006 is right next to “Where is Adam Thielen from?” on the Minnesota citizenship test. But it’s even more impressive when you consider he won two more batting titles in 2008 and 2009.

That stretch is the foundation of Mauer’s career, even though he hit .315/.399/.438 with a .836 OPS from 2010 to 2012. If Mauer hung it up after nine seasons, most Twins fans would have looked back at his career with fond memories. Instead, there is a layer of disappointment that many fans can’t shake.

Mauer came up in 2004 just as the Twins were coming out of their post-championship hangover from the 1990s. After Minnesota advanced to the American League Championship Series in 2002 and won the AL Central for the second straight year in 2003, Mauer represented the next wave of Twins to keep the run going.

The Twins won their third straight division title in 2004 and three more division championships in 2006, 2009, and 2010. But as many Twins fans know, they didn’t win a single playoff game during Mauer’s career.

Mauer’s numbers dipped to pedestrian levels during the postseason, hitting .275/.341/.300 with no home runs and one RBI in 10 career playoff games. When the Twins surged to a division title in 2006, Mauer was part of an entire offense that went cold. He went 2-for-11 with a walk in the Oakland Athletics’ three-game sweep.

Mauer went 5-for-12 with a double, two walks, and an RBI in the New York Yankees’ three-game sweep in the 2009 ALDS. But fans remember his Game 2 double that wasn’t after Phil Cuzzi botched a call down the left-field line. Then there was the 2010 ALDS, where Mauer recorded a hit in all three games. However, he failed to drive in a run as the Twins suffered another three-game sweep against the Yankees.

If Mauer’s Twins had made a run during any of those years, there would be fewer skeptical fans. Looking at other Twins players who have had their numbers retired, Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek won a pair of World Series titles. Bert Blyleven was a member of the 1987 World Series team. Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, and Jim Kaat were members of the 1965 AL Champion team.

For some fans, Mauer wasn’t the most popular player on his team. Some preferred Justin Morneau, Torii Hunter, and Johan Santana.

Mauer’s teams won more division titles than Rod Carew‘s Twins teams, but Carew wasn’t around with the advent of social media. Strangely enough, that medium exploded simultaneously during Mauer’s peak, which happened during the 2009 season.

After missing the first month due to a back injury, Mauer hit .365/.444/.587 with a career-high 28 home runs and 96 RBI. Despite an early exit from the playoffs, the 2009 season was supposed to be a springboard to Mauer’s career at age 26. The Twins signed him to an eight-year, $184 million extension, the largest contract in team history.

Mauer’s trajectory changed with the team’s move to Target Field, and expectations changed for him and the team. The Minnesota’s bilateral leg weakness diagnosis in 2011 confused fans, leading many to jump online to complain about their highly-paid superstar.

The second half of Mauer’s career wasn’t bad. He hit .290/.373/.405 with 62 home runs, 526 RBIs, and two All-Star appearances from 2011 to 2018. But it wasn’t what Twins fans expected after his breakout in 2009. The Twins started to fade with Mauer as the face of the team. The Yankees swept them again in 2010, and Minnesota averaged 95 losses from 2011 to 2014.

The Twins went 83-79 in 2015. But they had a total system failure a year later, losing 103 games in 2016 – the most since the team moved from Washington in 1961.

Mauer’s status also started to fade after a concussion he suffered toward the end of the 2013 season forced him to move to first base. While Mauer became an excellent defender at first base, fans wanted more power from the position. He averaged only eight homers a year in his final five seasons.

The Twins returned to the playoffs in 2017, only to fall to the Yankees in the Wild Card game. That was the twilight of Mauer’s career. By the time he hung it up, Mauer had been nine years removed from his 2009 season and was not the player he had been in his prime.

Many have held the end of Mauer’s career against him, but it doesn’t diminish the type of player that he was. He put up some of the best offensive seasons for a catcher in the history of the sport. He was also the face of the teams that produced the most prolonged success in Twins history.

In a national media landscape that focuses on big-market teams, Mauer was the rare player who grabbed their attention. He up massive numbers at a position that robs players of their abilities before reaching their potential.

Perhaps if the Twins had done what the Washington Nationals did by moving Bryce Harper from catcher to the outfield after selecting him with the No. 1 overall pick in 2010, Mauer would have reached the levels of success that many had hoped. But even if he didn’t, that hasn’t stopped national writers from unofficially voting Mauer into the Hall of Fame at an 83.4 percent clip, according to tracker Ryan Thibodaux.

Mauer is a legendary player who should get the call to Cooperstown in a few weeks.