With the Hall of Fame results out today, it’s a good time to take a look at how a few active Mets’ players stack up against those already enshrined in Cooperstown. It’s early yet to start casting the mold for David Wright and Jose Reyes’ plaques, but in the meantime we can take a look at the cases of Carlos Delgado, Carlos Beltran, Pedro Martinez and Billy Wagner.

Before we get into that, let’s take a look at the system I’m using to judge hall worthiness. JAWS—short for “JAffe WARP Score”—is a statistic put together by Baseball Prospectus author Jay Jaffe. JAWS seeks to balance the strength of a player’s full career alongside their very best seasons in order to paint a truer picture of a player’s accomplishments, using Wins Above Replacement Level. There are three versions of WARP, and JAWS uses the third, WARP3. This version adjusts for basically everything you can think of, including league difficulty, era, etc, so it’s the most applicable for a historical piece like this.

First up we have Carlos Delgado, who started out his career as a catcher but has long since moved to first base:

Name           POS  EqA  BRAR  BRAA  FRAA  WARP3   Peak   JAWS
Cooperstown    1B  .311   803   548    1   115.1   66.9   91.0
Carlos Delgado 1B  .312   697   477   -38   83.8   56.0   69.9

For explanation’s sake, EqA is Equivalent Average, which is basically an all-offense measure adjusted for park and scaled to batting average. BRAR is Batting Runs Above Replacement, BRAA is Batting Runs Above Average, FRAA is Fielding Runs Above Average. Peak is defined as the seven best years of a player’s career, as measured by WARP3. JAWS is WARP3 plus Peak divided by two to give us a neat, clean figure to work with. The first line is the average of currently enshrined first basemen in Cooperstown.

Delgado, despite a few huge years while with Toronto in the late 90’s/early 2000’s and a career of average or better performances, is well off the mark. He will be 36 years old next year, and, considering he only managed to hit .258/.333/.448 this past year, is a long shot to improve his standing. His Peak score is well off, since he only has three seasons which you can classify as dominating: 1998, 2000, and 2003. Those three years account for 27.8 of his career WARP3 by themselves, but the rest of his Peak years aren’t as impressive with only three more seasons meeting or exceeding 7.0 WARP3. He’s got the rate stats, as EqA shows, but he hasn’t been able to rack up the counting stats.

In order to meet the JAWS Hall standards, Delgado would need a Barry Bonds-esque resurgence to his career. Giving him 50 additional WARP3 to his career total would put him above the JAWS average by a small amount, but that would also mean Delgado pumps out ten-win seasons for five years in a row; considering he’s never done that once—even during his peak—that’s asking a bit much.

Luckily for Mets’ fans, there’s another Carlos to count on for potential enshrinement. Carlos Beltran is going to be 31 in 2008, and he’s put together an impressive resume thus far:

Name           POS   EqA  BRAR  BRAA  FRAA  WARP3   Peak   JAWS
Cooperstown    CF   .310   774   525    3   113.4   66.9   90.1
Carlos Beltran CF   .290   381   208   81    73.2   65.3   69.3

He’s got a ways to go in order to become Hall worthy, but he’s still young enough to do so. His EqA is shy of the JAWS standard, and as he comes off of his peak that number will most likely fall a bit further, but he’s also almost 80 runs above the average defensively, which makes up for a lot of the difference.

His Peak is close enough that you can waive off the difference, and another season like last year would put him above that anyways. Beltran has three seasons of 10+ WARP3 to his credit, the first of these his 2001 for Kansas City when he hit .306/.362/.514 with 21 FRAA in center. Last year was his second best campaign at .276/.353/.525 and 15 FRAA, but his second year with the Mets—and most likely his first healthy season with them—was the best of his career. Beltran hit .275/.388/.594 with a .327 EqA, 12.4 WARP3 and 24 FRAA. You could have made a case for an MVP award that year for Beltran, but it was not to be. For those wondering, his split season with Kansas City and Houston is the fourth best of his career, with 9.7 WARP3, and as long as he puts out one more season with more than 6.2 WARP3 he can continue to improve his Peak score.

If we add the same 50 WARP3 to his career total that we gave to Delgado, Beltran easily surpasses the JAWS standards. His career WARP3 would be 123.2 and his JAWS—assuming his Peak remain unchanged—would be 94.3, above the Hall average. This scenario is easier to envision than the previous one, since we’re assuming about 5.0 WARP3 per year from Beltran for a 10-year span in order to achieve this goal. He could just as easily put three more 9-10 win seasons out there in a row, then fall to a five or six-win player for the remainder of his career and finish well above the JAWS standards. Since somewhere between 4.0 and 5.0 WARP3 is an average season, it’s safe to assume Beltran is capable of this feat.

The Mets have a couple pitchers who may make the Hall as well, although more than likely not with a Mets’ cap on their plaque. Pedro Martinez put his stamp on the game’s history well before signing with the Mets after the 2004 season, and at his age it’s likely he won’t outshine his past performances while in New York. Regardless of that, looking at his numbers is always a fun exercise:

Name             PRAA  PRAR  WARP3   Peak   JAWS
Cooperstown      279   1099  106.0   67.2   86.6
Pedro Martinez   431   1213  118.0   78.0   98.0

That isn’t a typo—Pedro Martinez could retire now and he would destroy the Hall averages at his position. In fact, his case is already as rock solid as Bert Blyleven’s, who has a career WARP3 of 135.0, a peak of 65.3 and a JAWS of 100.2. Pedro has five seasons with 10.0+ WARP3, with his two best campaigns two of the most productive in recent memory for a starter. In 1999, Pedro amassed 13.5 WARP3 with a 23-4 record, 313 strikeouts in 213.1 innings pitched and an ERA+ of 243.

The next year, he was somehow even better: Martinez dropped his ERA to 1.74, struck out 284 hitters in 217 innings, went 18-6 and had an ERA+ of 291. Martinez has five seasons with an ERA at least 200 percent better than the league average, and his 291 figure is the greatest of the modern era for a single season. For his career, his 161 mark is well ahead of second place Lefty Grove, and as long as he doesn’t implode while continuing to throw a high volume of innings, that mark should be safe.

Assuming his arm doesn’t fall off—this is a possibility given his fragility over the past few years—let’s give Pedro another 25 WARP3 as a high-end projection for the rest of his career. That would give him 143 career WARP3 and a JAWS score of 110.5. In conclusion, Pedro Martinez is pretty good.

Billy Wagner doesn’t have it as easy as his teammate, but given his age and recent performance, he may be able to squeak out a visit to Cooperstown without buying himself a ticket. How the BBWAA is going to react to relievers on the ballot from year to year is not something I would put my own money on, but assuming they are in a pleasant mood regarding them, Wagner is in a solid position:

Name             PRAA  PRAR  WARP3   Peak   JAWS
Cooperstown      218   877    89.1   49.6   69.3
Billy Wagner     239   622    66.7   49.2   58.0

Wagner’s Peak is right on the mark, and he is already ahead on PRAA. He really just needs to stick around and throw quality innings for another few years in order to make himself worthy, statistically speaking.

In order to make up the 11 points in JAWS he’s missing, Wagner would need about 25 more WARP3 to finish his career. Based on his last three seasons, this isn’t impossible. Wagner’s last three years saw him post 7.9, 6.4 and 5.2 seasons. Yes, those are clearly declining in production, but he’s getting older. 25 WARP3 is 5.0 a season for the next five years, which might be pushing it, but isn’t so much that we can throw it out of the realm of possibility. Another big year or two before his decline really sets in could do wonders for his JAWS and make his case easier, and it would certainly put some of those bullpen woes out of mind for fans of the Mets.