How many times do you need to be great to become immortal?

More than ever before, that’s the question that has weighed on my mind this winter as I follow the progress of the 2025 Hall of Fame voting. Actually, it’s two questions: How many great seasons does a player need to put up before he’s a Hall of Famer? And once he has recorded those seasons, can he then play his way out of the Hall?

There is no perfect way to answer the first question, though with the second question, I’ve emphatically landed on “no” as the answer. That is, once a player has put up a Hall of Fame performance, he can’t then un-Hall himself on the field.

Let’s consider the career patterns of two players on the current HOF ballot:

Player A: First 10 full seasons: 57.9 bWAR; Remainder of career: Six seasons, 4.7 bWAR

Player B: First 10 full seasons: 54.8 bWAR; Remainder of career: Nine seasons, 5.2 bWAR

Before we reveal the players, let’s put the measurements in some historical context: Both players are hitters. When you compare the 10-year numbers to every 10-year chunk of any player in history, those figures both land in the top percentile — Player A is at 99.5; Player B at 99.4. The median Hall of Famer has a peak 10-year measurement that slots in with a percentile rank of 99.1. In other words, in this first step of taking the empirical temperature of these two careers, both are clearly above the line.

Now, who are the players?

Player A is Andruw Jones, who is teetering on the brink of an eighth straight winter of falling short on the balloting. As of now, he clocks in at 72.6%, a figure that is likely to fall when final results are revealed. Last year, Jones’ number dropped about 3% once anonymous ballots were folded in.

Player B is Ichiro Suzuki, who stands a solid chance to become the second-ever unanimous Hall selection. If that happens, it’s deserved — he’s a no-brainer Hall pick.

But what I can’t understand is how Jones, in the minds of so many voters, has somehow played himself out of the Hall while literally none of them think that Ichiro did the same thing.

How does that happen? It’s a fascinating case study in what makes a Hall of Famer.

The pro-Ichiro arguments are obvious. He surpassed 3,000 hits despite not debuting in the majors until he was 27. During those first 10 seasons, he hit .331 while averaging 224 hits, 38 steals and 105 runs. He won a Gold Glove in all 10 of those seasons.

Had Ichiro quit then, he’d be in the Hall of Fame already. Few would question his worthiness. His days as an impact player were over at that point, but that’s fine. No one defeats time.

When Jones’ first 10 seasons were complete (not counting his 31-game debut in 1996, though his postseason performance that year is very much a part of his Hall résumé), he had an aggregate OPS+ of 117. Ichiro at his 10-year mark? Exactly the same. Like Ichiro, Jones won 10 consecutive Gold Gloves.

I’d posit this: Just as Ichiro would already be enshrined if he had to retire after his first 10 seasons, so too would Jones. It wouldn’t be a no-brainer selection, and the debate would be hot. But I’m certain he’d be in.

Why? Simply put: He had already recorded enough Hall-worthy seasons, and voters had yet to witness his not-so-pleasant decline phase. But he had the audacity to not retire at his peak like Sandy Koufax or Jim Brown. Instead, he kept going, bouncing from team to team, his once otherworldly athleticism vanishing, his offensive numbers cratering.

Among the Hall’s short list of requirements for possible inclusion is that a player has to have participated in at least 10 seasons. Yet career numbers tend to hold sway, even as recognition of peak value measures, such as in the JAWS system has spread. Round-number milestones for career counting totals can mean automatic entry (PED issues aside).

For Jones and players like him, their biggest issue is a kind of James Dean/Marlon Brando problem and one that behavioral scientists might refer to as the difference between the experiencing mind and the remembering mind. We tend to forget the pleasure we experienced with a thing and recall only our last encounters with it. Because Dean died young, he’s iconic in a way Brando can’t be because we saw his decline.

Those who watched Jones dominate center field for all those years in Atlanta experienced something special during that time — a truly unique player. But last impressions — and career numbers — tend to dominate in the remembering mind, and we have easier access to that aspect of our memory. For Jones, we remember glimpses of what he was at the beginning, but can’t let go of the player he was at the end.

Heck, we still do it with Babe Ruth. The man was one of the most dominant athletes who ever lived for 20 years, yet you can’t read any kind of biography about him that doesn’t fixate on his lackluster partial finale season with the Boston Braves.

A player’s legacy isn’t built on his mediocre and poor seasons but on what he did during his best campaigns. Sure, you need a body of work — one or two career seasons won’t do it. And there is certainly something to be said about durability and sustained excellence — the Adrian Beltre-type career. It’s greatness, to be sure, but greatness comes in different shapes.

While career standards and epic statistical milestones are essential to the fabric of baseball history, I’m not sure we give enough credit to players who largely define an epoch of the game, not if they didn’t go on to also reach some of those end-of-the-line standards. Such players are rare, and recognizing them in the Hall isn’t going to cause any great flood of borderline players.

Let’s consider those 10-year measures again. Jones’ 57.9 bWAR, as mentioned, has a percentile rank of 99.5. To put it another way: Only 0.5% of all players, ever, have had a better decade than Jones did at his best.

There are 96 players who have had a 10-year period better than that, at least by bWAR. That’s not many when you consider the database I’m working with has 20,783 players in it. Among that peer group for Jones, 77 are already in the Hall of Fame.

Not all of those 77 got to Cooperstown because they did so much outside of that 10-year peak. Certainly some did, the upper-tier members like Ruth, Walter Johnson and Willie Mays. Jones would be in the lower quadrant of this group in non-peak bWAR, but 15 of its members had lower totals than his 5.2.

As a group, these 77 Hall of Famers compiled 75.3% of their career value during their 10-year peaks. With few exceptions — the absolute best of the best — those prime years are when legacies are built.

If we move beyond the 77, that leaves 19 10-year standouts on the wrong side of some kind of Cooperstown threshold. Let’s start by removing 19th century pitchers, whose bWAR totals are bloated because of the vast differences in the game during those early days. That’s six of the 19, leaving us at 13.

Now let’s remove those not eligible because they got themselves kicked out of baseball. That’s two more — Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose. We’re left with 11.

Then there are Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling, who also have not been omitted for performance reasons. We’re down to eight.

More removals: Well, two of them are on the ballot with Jones. One is Alex Rodriguez, who fits with the previous group of removals. The other is Chase Utley, and we’ll touch on him more in a bit. We’re down to six.

Well, five of those remaining six are easy, because they’re either active (Max Scherzer, Clayton Kershaw, Mike Trout, Mookie Betts) or not yet eligible (Albert Pujols). All those players are going to wind up in Cooperstown.

So we’re down to one player in the Jones peer group not in the Hall: Depression Era pitcher Wes Ferrell. I’d advocate for Ferrell, but that’s not what we’re doing here. The point is that rewarding Jones for the decade of excellence he did put up isn’t cheapening the Hall, it’s recognizing someone who met most of the same standards of those already there.

Utley is a similar case in some ways, but while Jones gets just two more cracks after this year, this is Utley’s second year on the ballot. He’s got five-year and 10-year measurements even better than those of Jones and Ichiro, and his career value is also above the Hall median. Utley isn’t going to get in this year, but the growth in his support from roughly 33% in 2024 to 55% this time around suggests he’s going to get there soon. He should.

Hopefully that will also be the case for Jones. Even if his support doesn’t take an unexpected upturn when the balloting results are announced Tuesday, he’s getting close enough that he’s going to be the lightning rod in the debates over the next year or two. Perhaps we can focus those debates on what he was, not how he ended up.

How many years do you have to be great to be immortal? There is never going to be a precise way to answer that. But is 10 enough? It always has been. It remains unclear why that wouldn’t also be the case for Andruw Jones.