Mets legend David Wright’s Hall-of-Fame credentials had been pretty cut and dry.
When healthy, he was on a fast track to Cooperstown, but spinal stenosis derailed his career during his age-32 season in 2015, relegating him to one of the more prominent “what ifs?” in recent baseball history.
Yet the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) appears to be taking his entire journey, and just how good he was during his peak years, into consideration, which surprisingly bodes well for potential enshrinement down the road.
In his third year on the ballot, Wright received a 6.7% spike in the voting, jumping from 8.1% to 14.8% (63 votes), as confirmed during the ballot’s official release on Tuesday night.
He has a long way to go before a serious conversation about the potential for enshrinement is had. A player must receive 75% of the BBWAA vote to get the call to the Hall, which his former teammate Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones received to round out the Class of 2026.
But what he was able to do when healthy was undeniable. Over his first 10 MLB seasons from 2004 to 2013, Wright slashed .301/.382/.506 (.888 OPS) with 222 home runs and 876 RBI — 162-game averages of 26 home runs and 103 RBI.
He made seven All-Star appearances, won a pair of Gold Gloves, and finished in the top 10 of the National League’s MVP voting four times. But after he was diagnosed with spinal stenosis, he appeared in just 77 games before retiring in 2018. His No. 5 jersey was retired by the Mets last summer.
Wright received 6.2% of the vote in his first year of Hall-of-Fame eligibility, narrowly escaping the drop, as a minimum of 5% is needed to remain on the following year’s ballot.
It would still take a drastic swell of support for Wright to get elected to the Hall, and such a decision would be as hotly debated a topic as we have seen in recent voting. But the conversation is being had about what the former Mets captain was able to do when he was healthy, and support is obviously growing.
