From St. Paul to Cooperstown? Joe Mauer will soon know the answer
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Joe Mauer’s baseball career seems almost too spectacular to be true.
Born in St. Paul, he was the first pick of his hometown team, the Minnesota Twins. During his career, he played in six All-Star games, won three Gold Glove awards, and was named the American League’s most valuable player in 2009.
In his MVP year, Mauer batted .365 and slugged 28 home runs and 96 runs batted in.
On Tuesday, Mauer, now 40, will learn whether he’ll be inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame, the game’s highest honor.
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To win admission, players must receive 75 percent of the vote from members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWA).
"He has very few peers,” said La Velle E. Neal III, a sports columnist at the Star Tribune. “He could hit. He could get on base. He had a great throwing arm.”
As a reporter who covered the Twins during Mauer’s entire career, Neal saw Mauer play in hundreds of games. “He was the gold standard during his 10 years behind the plate.”
Jayson Stark, a writer for the Athletic, said he voted for Mauer.
In a story published Thursday, Stark noted people sometimes focus on the end of Mauer’s career, when he played first base. The correct focus, he argued, is on the decade Mauer was a catcher.
During the 10 years between 2004 and 2013 when he served as the Twins primary catcher, Stark said Mauer’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR), a baseball statistic designed to measure a player’s overall value to a team, was 44.6, a much higher number than other star catchers of his generation, including Victor Martinez and Yadier Molina.
Torii Hunter, a Twins outfielder who played with Mauer, told MPR News in 2006 that most catchers aren’t terrific when it’s their turn to bat.
“Most catchers, they’re not great hitters because all we want them to do is focusing on catching and calling the game the right way,” Hunter said. “But Mauer does it all. The guy can run. He can throw. He can hit.”
Mauer was a gifted athlete at Cretin-Derham Hall in St. Paul and received a football scholarship to play at Florida State University. He entered the baseball draft instead.
Bill James, a baseball historian and statistician, wrote this about the former Minnesota Twin on X, formerly known as Twitter: “Joe Mauer is an obvious Hall of Famer. That is all.”
The BBWAA will announce the results of its 2024 Hall of Fame vote on Tuesday evening. Electees will be inducted on July 21 in Cooperstown.
