What Does The Oakland A’s Matt Chapman Need To Have A Hall Of Fame Career?

The Oakland A’s have a young star in Matt Chapman. His power, patience and elite defense make him one of the best players in the league, and he should remain so for at least a few years. He is off to a torrid start to his career, having put up six-win seasons in each of his first two full years. Still, many excellent players have started great and settled into good or just average as they get into their thirties. Can Matt Chapman be more than that? Sure. Here’s how he might forge a path to the Hall of Fame.

While “Hall of Famer” is a moving target with shifting standards, one useful benchmark is Wins Above Replacement (WAR). Sixty WAR is generally considered to be at least in the Hall of Fame conversation and 70 means you have a good chance. So let’s see if we can get Chapman up into that range. According to Fangraphs, Chapman has 15.5 WAR, but by Baseball Reference’s calculation, he’s just shy of 20. If he can rattle off another five seasons like the one he just had, he would already have a borderline case according to BR, and another three seasons away for Fangraphs.

However, that level of consistency is hard to maintain for all the normal reasons: injuries, slumps, skill slippage to name the three most common. Hall of Fame careers are remarkable in that there are so many ways for a career to come off the rails – excellence is rare enough, but sustained excellence is a true rarity. Also, and perhaps this will change, the steady Eddies tend to not do as well in Hall of Fame voting. What Chapman would need, then is to find a higher summit, maybe win an MVP or two, with an attention getting peak with some 4-6 win seasons on the other side of it as well.

How can an elite player get better? His defense is already top notch, he’s unlikely to suddenly become fast, and his power and patience seem to have found their level (though he could roll some big home run totals in future years). The stat that could lift him to a monster year is batting average.

Some of that can come from luck, but if he wants to up his game in a sustainable way, the best way might be to learn to lay off high or outside pitches. Teammate Mark Canha stopped swinging at outside offerings and had a breakout year. If Chapman could do the same, he could find more power and get on base more. Same goes for pitches above the strike zone. He rarely does any damage on either type of pitch, and so there is no downside to letting those go by, especially because he can hone in on the pitches he does want.

Easier said than done, of course, but Chapman might try erring on the side of taking too many pitches to see what happens. Canha’s philosophy became that if a pitcher can hit the outside corner three times, so be it, but most pitchers can’t do that. The challenge is to gain the benefits of laying off those pitches without giving pitchers too big a target on the outside part of the plate.

The other adjustments Chapman can make will come from the pitchers that challenge him. Hitters’ weak points become apparent before long (or they develop over time) and Chapman’s continued greatness will depend on his ability to make adjustments. After all, if he can continue putting up six-win seasons, it will be hard for the Hall of Fame voters to write him off.