Royals World Series Champion Quickly Has Hall of Fame Hopes Dashed
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Alex Gordon entered the Kansas City Royals Hall of Fame last summer, and it appears that will be the highest honor of his excellent career.
Gordon was on the Baseball Writers' Association of America ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame this year, and the results of the writers' votes were announced on Tuesday. Gordon received just one vote, or 0.2% of the 500-odd writers who participated this year.
Because players need 5% of the vote to return to the ballots for another season, Gordon is officially one-and-done on the writers' ballot, putting his odds of making the Hall someday at next to nothing, though there are technically other pathways.
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Gordon's Royals career wasn't quite HoF worthy
Gordon wound up playing 14 big-league seasons, all in a Royals uniform. It was a career befitting of the player the Royals dreamed they would get when they selected him with the second-overall pick of the 2005 Major League Baseball Draft.
10 years later, when the Royals won their second World Series in franchise history, Gordon was at the center of the action. He clubbed a game-tying home run in the bottom of the ninth of that Fall Classic, the most iconic moment of his career, and finished that postseason with a .775 OPS.
Best known perhaps for his incredible defense in left field, a position he learned in 2010 after he was optioned to Triple-A, Gordon racked up an incredible eight Gold Gloves from 2011 to 2020. He added three All-Star selections and even finished 12th in Most Valuable Player voting in 2014.
However, Gordon also finished his career with 34.9 bWAR and 190 home runs, well short of the typical Hall of Fame averages. He totaled 23.8 of those bWAR from 2011 to 2014, so if he was on a Hall of Fame trajectory at that point, it was derailed beginning with his age-31 season.
Falling just short of the Hall of Fame conversation is still a great place for a major league career to wind up, and Gordon will have his place in Royals lore for the remainder of the franchise's existence.
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Jackson Roberts is a former Division III All-Region DH who now writes and talks about sports for a living. A Bay Area native and a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, Jackson makes his home in North Jersey. He grew up rooting for the Red Sox, Patriots, and Warriors, and he recently added the Devils to his sports fandom mosaic. For all business/marketing inquiries regarding "Kansas City Royals On SI," please reach out to Scott Neville: scott@wtfsports.org
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