Joe Mauer took what today appears a charmed, unprecedented path to Cooperstown: local kid (St. Paul) drafted first by his hometown team (Minnesota Twins) who spends his entire career with that one team and goes into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot. He is only the fourth player among the 59 players drafted first to make the Hall—joining Harold Baines (1977), Ken Griffey Jr. (’87) and Chipper Jones (’90)—but the first to do so with his hometown team.
Storybook stuff, right? Except for this: When the Twins drafted Mauer out of high school instead of USC pitcher Mark Prior, the team was ripped in many quarters—like its own backyard—for being cheap. The Twins signed Mauer for $5.15 million. They left Prior for the Chicago Cubs to take at No. 2. The Cubs gave Prior a record $10.5 million.
Wrote Dan Barreiro in the Minneapolis , “The Twins passed on the best player in the amateur draft. They blinked, they surrendered, they choked, they conceded.”
You know what happened next. Prior was done at age 25. Though he possessed tremendous stuff and makeup, Prior had a serious flaw in his delivery—he was late in loading the baseball—and could not stay healthy. Mauer won three batting titles, three Gold Gloves, five Silver Sluggers and six All-Star selections while hitting .306, trailing only Bill Dickey and Mike Piazza among all players who played at least 1,500 games while spending more than 40% of their career behind the plate.
The only surprise to me was that many people thought Mauer wasn’t a first-ballot Hall of Famer. (He cleared the 75% barrier by just four votes.) He is one of the best hitting catchers of all time and was one of the game’s best hitters over a nine-year span regardless of position (.323/.406/.466). He was one of my easier calls on my five-player ballot.
It’s a good time to revisit the Mauer/Prior decision. Prior was the more finished product; he reached the big leagues the next year and punched out 147 in 116⅔ innings. He looked like a franchise pitcher. But Mauer was the picture of stability: a perfectly balanced, efficient batting stroke combined with elite athleticism—he was the nation’s top quarterback with a full ride to Florida State and was an all-metro point guard.
Pitchers are notoriously fragile. Fourteen pitchers have been drafted first and none have made the Hall of Fame, though Gerrit Cole (2011) could be the first. Those picks are mostly littered with sad stories of injuries (Prior, Stephen Strasburg, Mark Appel, Paul Wilson, Casey Mize, etc.)
A similar position player vs. pitcher choice presented itself last year, this time with college teammates. The Pittsburgh Pirates chose pitcher Paul Skenes from LSU, leaving outfielder Dylan Crews for the Washington Nationals. History tells us Crews was the better, safer long-term choice.
There has never been a career like the one Mauer enjoyed. Only eight players made the Hall of Fame by playing for one team in their home state: Lou Gehrig, Phil Rizzuto and Whitey Ford (New York Yankees); Charlie Gehringer (Detroit Tigers); Tony Gwynn (San Diego Padres); Barry Larkin (Cincinnati Reds); Cal Ripken Jr. (Orioles); and Mauer. Among them, only Mauer was also the first pick in the draft, which began in 1965.
It was a storybook career arc unlike anything else, as well as the ultimate affirmation that Twins GM Terry Ryan and his staff got it right.
