A quick note: This year’s Future Hall of Fame Hitters piece wound up being nearly 10,000 words. So, in order to break things up a little bit and make it less imposing, plus to buy me more time to work on the Pitchers piece, I’m going to be splitting it up. One half this week, one early next week. If you’d like to get an email notification when that goes up, you can subscribe to the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list in this box below; I only use it when there’s a new baseball piece up (even my pop culture site uses a different list), so you don’t need to worry about getting too many messages.
It’s once again that time of the spring, where I update my yearly Future Hall of Fame Series and look at which active players are on pace for an eventual Cooperstown enshrinement. But before I get into the weeds, allow me to go on a brief nostalgic tangent about the series.
We are just coming off the Baseball Writers inducting three new Hall of Famers in Billy Wagner, CC Sabathia, and Ichiro Suzuki (here’s my wrap-up on those results, if you missed them). I noted last year that Joe Mauer and Adrian Beltré marked the first two real-life Hall of Famers who had actually been covered in this series when they were active. I never got to discuss Wagner here, who retired in 2010, but Sabathia and Suzuki represent the third and fourth inductees that I’ve included in this series.*
*Technically, Ichiro only just made it, as my initial 2013 columns only covered players under 30 (although Sabathia got a specific mention despite being 31), and I kept things to 35-and-under until 2017, which wound up being his last full season.
It still feels notable, since it’s only the second time this has happened after writing this column for over a decade. But after thinking about it a little more… I guess this is just going to be the new normal? Like, Wagner was about to be aged off the ballot anyway, so we’re nearly out of the era of “guys who retired before I started”, and while it took a few years for me to start including the oldest players in the league and I missed some big names in that window, next year’s new candidates will be guys who last played in 2020, which was well after I started taking a more comprehensive approach.
At this point, it’s going to be difficult for an induction class to have not have someone who made this series at some point. Andruw Jones might go in next year and he retired after 2012, but he finished behind Carlos Beltrán (who made it onto that 2017 list with Ichiro) on this year’s ballot, and I don’t see any way the former makes it in next year while the latter misses out.
And that will be the case going forward… kind of indefinitely? Even if I just decided not to continue this series next year, the Hall will still be dealing with guys that I wrote about here for so long into the future that it’s kind of wild to think about. Like, just as an example, Manny Ramírez’s final year on the BBWAA ballot is next year, 2026, and he debuted as a 21-year-old back in 1993; using that as a reference, a 21-year-old that I cover this year could conceivably be on a hypothetical 2058 ballot, a year that only registers as “sci-fi setting” to me. The timescale that the Hall of Fame works at is just difficult to fathom, sometimes.
On a similar note, one thing I said last year was that it would be some time before the Hall inducted someone that I wrote about here before they were a lock. And going back to read those earliest columns again… I actually don’t know if I agree with that now? Joe Mauer and CC Sabathia built the bulk of their cases by that point, but go back and look at where they were in during that 2012-2013 time frame. They had a large chunk of their cases, but they were still in the mid-40s/low-50s in career Wins Above Replacement, and facing serious injury questions. I’ve been doing this long enough that I know that players in that situation can very easily see their Hall of Fame train derail (I’ll even talk about a few of them in this year’s entry). It took some serious re-invention from both players to pad their numbers the rest of the way.
And even though there were a lot of smart writers back in 2013 who could recognize how they stacked up historically and felt comfortable calling them future Cooperstown guys, there were also still plenty of other people who would loudly disagree if you said that; I remember that being the case, and I certainly wrote about them like I expected some pushback at the time. A lot of those fears were obviously assuaged pretty quickly in the following years, given that they retired five-to-six years later and got pretty widely deemed Future Hall of Famers en route to eventual first-ballot elections (for as long a timeframe as the Hall works on, it’s also funny how the whole thing can hinge of a two-to-four year inflection point). But that still wasn’t necessarily the case yet in 2013.
Yeah, there’s still a pretty big difference between discussing Hall projections for guys in their early 30s who have been through their peak seasons versus writing about players in their mid-20s, so I’ll probably feel like it’s a big development the first time a player I’ve covered from the start of their career gets inducted. But you know, I’m okay saying that Mauer and Sabathia weren’t the “shoo-in” picks that I initially thought they were.
The Methodology
This part will be a review of how I build this list; feel free to skip ahead to the next section if you’re familiar with past years’ entries, as it’s the same system this year. Essentially, what I’m doing has two parts.
-The first is building a trendline tracking what the median career for a Hall of Fame position player looks like. This is pretty straightforward; I just go age by age among existing Hall of Fame position players, sort them all by their career Wins Above Replacement at that age, and then see what the WAR was for the player exact middle of the pack. Once I have that, I look to see which active players at each age fall above that median Hall pace.
(There are a few specific quirks I use, mostly for consistency in doing this. I usually only include AL and NL stats for simplicity’s sake, since I want to focus on something that can be applied to modern players, and the other major leagues were just a little too different for what I’m looking for. Also, I limit my median points to Hall of Famers who were actually in the league at that age; so for example, if only half of Hall of Famers played in the majors at age 20, I take the median of that half, not just set it at zero.)
-The second part is to see how players above that Median Hall of Fame Pace have done historically, to get some idea of what we might expect of the active players above their age’s median. To do this, I filter out the players who are still active or on the Hall of Fame ballots, since those results are inconclusive. Then, I look at every remaining AL or NL player who has been above the Hall median at each age, then see what percentage of them have gone on to make the Hall of Fame. It’s pretty simple, but the only real definition of what makes a Hall of Famer is to look at who’s already in and go off of that; this method is just putting numbers to that.
If you need a more concrete example with some fake numbers, think about it like this: say we have 100 Hall of Famers, and through their age 22 season, the median career WAR is 5.0; that gives us 50 Future Hall of Famers. Then, I’d look at how many total players in history had 5.0 WAR through their age 22 season; let’s say that I wound up with those 50 above-median Hall of Famers, plus another 100 players who didn’t get elected to the Hall of Fame. That gives us (50 Hall of Famers) out of (150 total players above the age 22 median WAR), so we’d get 33.3% chances of a player above the median at that age going on to make the Hall of Fame.
There are a few weird gray areas, but a lot of those spring from the weirdness of the Hall itself, and we can mentally correct for this. For example, this method is blind to position, when generally, catchers get their own sort of consideration due to their increased wear and tear; catchers can get away with being a little below the median, while everyone else should probably aim a little higher. Of course, the median definitionally means that half the inductees will be below that line anyway (and they very clearly aren’t all catchers), so falling short of the median pace is hardly a death sentence for your chances.
There’s also the issue that the Hall of Fame is a shifting institution that can change with the times. There have been players who have fallen off the ballot, only to make it in later; new Veterans Committee inductee Dick Allen was, for a long time, one of the “young players above the median who didn’t get in”… until he got finally inducted this year, after years of being considered a snub. Players can fall off, or they might hold up and just get overlooked by voters. That might get corrected one day, but it might not; Bobby Grich and Lou Whitaker still struggle to appear on Veterans ballots.
And conversely, Allen been replaced with a lot of players with PED ties like Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa, because obvious numbers aren’t the only thing voters consider; of course, that might also change again in the future as the electorate continues to change. Really, that’s why I try and keep it simple for the pure numbers side. “Did they go on to be deserving of Cooperstown?” can get messy, “Are they in or out?” is a simple binary. That’s also why I kind of like going down the list of players and discussing their cases individually, to discuss those external factors that can get left out.
Anyway, with all of that out of the way, let’s move on to what our 2025 Hall of Fame pace looks like, and who all is running ahead of it:
The Players
Age 20: 0.5 WAR Median; 30.84% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Jackson Chourio (3.8 WAR)
Junior Caminero (0.8 WAR)
It’s a testament to how stacked the NL Rookie of the Year race was last year that Jackson Chourio finished third. 3.8 WAR is a pretty historic mark for a player in their age-20 season, no matter how you slice it; it’s fourteenth-best mark for position players in the Divisional Era, and it’s still top 30 all-time even if you extend your window all the way back to the 19th century. He’s almost in the clear through the 2026 season!
Meanwhile, Junior Caminero is also off to a good start, but will need to improve to hit his mark for this year. Still, 2 WAR isn’t an unthinkable total to reach. Really, these totals are still low that even Jackson Holliday (0.1 WAR) could make his way onto the list for next year; those three account for every 20-year-old position player in the 2024 season.
These low Win total at this age might seem weird next to the actually-decent election chances (we’re already over 30%!) given how far even the best players at this point have to go, but it’s partially a self-selection issue. Players who are talented enough to hit the majors at age 20 are already off to an amazing start, and being able to accrue positive value at that young of an age on top of it is a good indicator of serious talent: across all of baseball history, only 201 position players have reached even half a win by that age. Sure, the majority of that list isn’t in Cooperstown, it's also not hard to find a lot of inductees, especially at the top.
Age 21: 2.0 WAR Median; 35.48% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Jackson Merrill (4.4 WAR)
Evan Carter (2.2 WAR)
And now, we have the other big Jackson of the 2024 rookie class. Merrill’s slightly better season is actually a little less historic than Chourio’s because of that extra year, but it’s still in highly-rarefied air: Baseball-Reference has it tied for the 69th-best season of all time by a non-pitcher 21 or under, and one of just 86 such 4+ WAR seasons. He’s also already above the next age’s median, meaning he can spend this season working towards that Age-23 mark.
Evan Carter’s injury-wrecked 2024 didn’t live up to his incredible September 2023 call-up, but it was still positive value overall thanks to his fielding. So between those two stints, he has managed to cross over the Hall median for his age, despite having just 68 major league games under his belt. Hopefully, he can bounce back to a healthy 2025 and begin working to get ahead of the curve.
Age 21 is still young enough that not every Hall of Famer has debuted by this point, but most have; we are at about a 2-to-1 ratio on the historic split. Ages 22 and 23 add another 20-30 Hall member debuts each, and the remaining 20 or so will trickle in up until about 30.* And before moving on, I’ll note that James Wood (1.1 WAR) and Jasson Domínguez (0.2 WAR) are the only other hitters in this age bracket who have positive career WAR totals at the moment.
*Really, 24 or 25 is about the absolute latest most will debut. A lot of the exceptions in my data are early Black stars post-integration or guys from the 1800s, who played in major leagues that got filtered out by my decision to use only AL/NL stats. One major exception there is actually new inductee Ichiro Suzuki, who made his MLB debut at 27; I believe that’s the oldest major league debut for a Hall of Fame position player since Earl Averill, a West Coaster who played three seasons with the San Francisco Seals in the Pacific Coast League before coming east to Cleveland in 1929 for his age-27 season. And if you expand your window to pitchers, you also have things like knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm, who debuted in his age 29 season.
Age 22: 4.2 WAR Median; 39.43% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Elly De La Cruz (6.0 WAR)
Ezequiel Tovar (5.9 WAR)
Masyn Winn (4.4 WAR)
We have two exciting young NL shortstops in a virtual tie at the top here, and they’ve kind of taken the differing approaches to reach this point. Elly De La Cruz’s career total is bolstered by his big breakout last year, when he locked up his first All-Star Selection and finished eighth in MVP voting; that accounts for 5.2 of his 6.0 WAR. Tovar’s 2024 was also good (3.8 WAR), but his total is more evenly split between that and his 2023 campaign (2.5). The destination is the same for now, but De La Cruz’s season probably bodes better for future Cooperstown chances; the Hall median will start to rise aggressively very soon, and better seasons buys you a little more of a buffer. Tovar will need to actually take a step forward, rather than just hold steady.
Masyn Winn actually gives us a third NL shortstop here, although he got a little overlooked by the other two last year. De La Cruz has the better bat while Winn is more of a glove-first type, but he was blocked from the Gold Glove by Tovar. Still, he put together a 4.9 WAR season, which was a huge step forward (in large part because his bat was so awful in his 2023 debut that it cost him about half a win over a month of games), and also seems like an encouraging sign. And our first runner-up takes us back to the Rangers, with Wyatt Langford (3.9 WAR) close enough that he could also possibly make it over the Hall median by this time next year.
Age 23: 7.75 WAR Median; 44.57% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Gunnar Henderson (16.2 WAR)
Julio Rodríguez (15.9 WAR)
Michael Harris II (11.7 WAR)
Corbin Carroll (9.9 WAR)
Riley Greene (8.6 WAR)
We finally have an AL shortstop to go with all of the NL ones in the last section! Gunnar Henderson improved from winning Rookie of the Year and finishing eighth in MVP voting in 2023, to making his first All-Star team and finishing fourth in 2024. Baseball-Reference credited him with an incredible 9.1 WAR, which got him just over the age-25 Hall median, meaning he’s in the clear through 2026 at the moment.
Julio Rodríguez, who finished fourth before Henderson in the 2023 AL MVP race, coincidently, is just a hair short of Henderson right now. 2024 was a down year for him, although that still translates to 4.3 bWAR, so it’s almost as much as statement on the standard he’s set for himself. A down year could be a bad sign, but Julio did seem to turn things around in the second half before dealing with injuries, so I’m fine just marking it up to random fluctuation for now.
It's a bit of a drop from those two to our next three names. Michael Harris II is already set up through 2025, but there is more reason for concern here. Neither of his last two seasons has lived up to his Rookie of the Year-winning 2022, and his offense has trended downward both times. His glove has been enough to make up for some of that, but he will actually need to return to that All-Star form soon to remain on-track in the long-term; stacking up 3-ish Win seasons is actually going to become a net-loss when the median starts jumping by 4 or 5 Wins every year (which it will do every season between ages 25 and 32).
His successor, 2023 Rookie of the Year Corbin Carroll, also has some of that apply. Once again, his 2024 was still good, although definitely not as good as his first season. Although I suppose the difference in how I perceive them is that it’s just a sophomore slump until it happens twice. Just at a glance, a one-year, 55-point drop in average caused by a 70-point drop on average on balls in play seems a lot more flukish to me, but I haven’t put any serious effort into comparing Harris and Carroll’s struggles. Of course, that extra season has given Harris a little extra runway to correct course, too, while Carrols does still need to stay healthy and productive just to stay on pace for next season.
Riley Greene’s case is technically more precarious than either of them, at less than a full Win above the age-median, but he’s actually trending upwards. It’s easier to feel optimistic about the talented young guy finally coming off a big breakout season where he finally put it all together, even if his total is lower and there is technically less of a track record of success. And after Greene, we have yet another trio of young shortstops as runners-up for this age bracket, all about 1 Win shy of the median: CJ Abrams (6.8 WAR), Zach Neto (6.8 WAR), and Anthony Volpe (6.7 WAR).
And to follow up on something I mentioned back in the Age 21 section, this is the other reason that getting onto the Hall of Fame track usually starts in the 21-to-22 range: if you don’t make it to the big leagues until 23, you need to be sprinting out of the gate to make this 7.75 WAR mark (or reach that sprint pretty quickly to match what comes after). This quintet of players above the median are all incredibly talented, but they needed multiple seasons to reach their totals; in fact, between all five of them, Gunnar Henderson’s 2024 is the only single season of theirs that B-R values at 7.75 WAR or higher. And the median track begins rising aggressively from here on out, making catch-up extra difficult (not even getting into having a buffer to make up for seasons affected by injuries and such).
Age 24: 11.0 WAR Median; 43.09% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Bobby Witt Jr. (14.7 WAR)
It's a little bit funny coming on the heels of such a crowded age group, but we only have one player repping Age 24, and it’s the reigning AL MVP Runner-Up. Bobby Witt Jr. actually wasn’t above the Age 23 median last season, but he was close; go figure, a 9.4 WAR-season will go a long way to overcoming any shortfalls! It is kind of surprising to see him a full win and a half below Henderson, though, given that Bobby has over 550 more plate and appearances and has narrowly edged out Gunnar in MVP voting two years in a row now (seventh vs. eighth in 2023, then second vs. fourth last year). For anyone else wondering, the answer there is that Henderson’s similar batting line gets a bigger park adjustment, and that the fielding stats B-R uses thought Witt was below average until last season, while they liked Henderson from the jump (although Fangraphs’ defensive component disagrees, and consequentially has their order flipped). Our runner-up here is Gabby Moreno at a distant 7.6 WAR, although he is a catcher and thus should get a little leeway for coming up short (although it’s hard to say exactly how much).
Age 25: 16.1 WAR Median; 52.53% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Juan Soto (36.4 WAR)
Fernando Tatis Jr. (21.7 WAR)
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (21.5 WAR)
Andrés Giménez (18.6 WAR)
We now reach the player who will be our overall WAR leader until we reach the 29 year olds. Newly-minted Mets star Juan Soto is running so far ahead of the Hall median for his age that he’s already set through the 2028 season. It’s kind of funny to think about how he hasn’t won an MVP yet despite average 6.3 WAR per 162 games, although he does already have five top ten finishes. So there’s a chance he finally wins an MVP on his fourth team and in the process becomes the first Met MVP ever; both of those distinctions would feel comically late, the kind of thing that would make for fun trivia years down the line. Anyway, Soto has three more seasons before he’s technically even qualified to make Cooperstown, so I’m curious to see where he lands by that point; just copying and pasting his last three seasons would land him around 55 WAR, about one year shy of the overall median Wins for a Hall of Fame position player, and he still won’t even be 30 by that point.
A good ways after that, we’ve got a pair of Juniors in a virtual tie, and both of them are already above where they need to be in 2025. I still really don’t know where opinions on Tatis will land, given his PED suspension and how views on that might evolve over the next two decades, but he’s keeping up on the playing field at least. He was slowed by some injuries last year, but was solid when healthy. If he goes on to have the numbers, he probably won’t be on the ballot until the 2040s, and that feels long enough away that maybe voters views on PEDs will soften? It seems unlikely at the moment, but two decades can be a long time… Of course, forgiveness will also require him to not mess up again in that span. There are a lot of big “Ifs” here that don’t seem like they’re in his favor at the moment, even if he goes on to perform well.
Vlad Jr., meanwhile, bounced back from some weaker years to post another great season, possibly one even better than his MVP runner-up year back in 2021. He dropped to sixth in voting this time however, because that year only had one historic season to compete with rather than several, but not much you can do about that. He’ll be heading into the Juan Soto Free Agent Vortex next offseason, so we’ll see if he can repeat those numbers one more time before hitting the market.
Closing out this quartet, we have Guerrero’s new teammate (for this year, at least), Andrés Giménez. I don’t really understand why the Guardians dealt Giménez, who’s young, good, and in a relatively affordable deal for the rest of the decade, but I suppose we’ll see if Cleveland’s front office can pull another surprising win out of their hat here. As for Giménez, I like his chances to make his contract worth it, but I don’t know about his continuing Hall odds. He’s well set-up for the moment, but his last two seasons have been a great glove bolstering weak hitting. Defense is valuable, but it’s hard to build up a run of All-Star-level seasons for a Cooperstown case on glove alone, and even if you pull it off, it’s still an area where Hall voters can be rather oblivious. Maybe Andrés can beat the odds here, but I’d feel better about his chances if he rediscovers his 2022 bat in Toronto. And our runner up for this age is yet another Blue Jay in Alejandro Kirk, with just 9.0 WAR to his name so far, but also some catcher extra credit to go with it.
Age 26: 21.0 WAR Median; 56.76% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Ronald Acuña Jr. (25.8 WAR)
Ronald Acuña Jr. is perhaps the clearest example of the coinflip you can see with players at this age. He’s already in the clear through this season, so in theory his odds of Cooperstown should be above 60%. His last four seasons have included: 1 huge, historic MVP-winning campaign where he played a full season and racked up over 8 Wins; and 3 also more years where he was generally solid when healthy, but only played in 250 out of a possible 486 games due in part to separate season-ending tears to each ACL. How much do you bet on a player’s talent outrunning their chance of injury? How many times can a massively talented player suffer huge injuries and not see their play suffer?
Every now and then, I think back to the first edition of this series from 2013, which included both David Wright and Troy Tulowitzki, both of whom were running reasonably ahead of the Hall median and had not hit their age-30 season yet. Both of them were essentially out of baseball within five years of that. It’s not a death sentence for Acuña’s chances or anything; indeed, Wright was listed right alongside Joe Mauer, who outran his own injuries to garner an induction to Cooperstown last year (and both were in the same age grouping as Miguel Cabrera, likely to join him in a short time in spite of a rough post-33 decline). I hope he can bounce back; this is just the type of scenario where I become starkly aware of how far away 60% is from 100%. On a similar theme, the first runner-up here is Bo Bichette (17.5 WAR), who had also been above the Hall median for three years until injuries wrecked his 2024. I’ll also highlight Adley Rutschman (13.1 WAR) as part of our catcher-watch exceptions, even though he’s a little further back.
Age 27: 25.8 WAR Median; 60.28% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: None
Former teammates (sadly) Yordan Alvarez (23.7 WAR) and Kyle Tucker (23.0) are the top misses here; maybe they could have made up the difference with good health in 2024, but alas. Both are close enough to the median that they could catch up, but Age 28 does represent the single steepest one-year jump along the entire Hall median pace, so they’d need a pretty darn great 2025 to match that and overcome their existing deficits. They’ve at least had seasons of that quality before though, albeit often ones shortened by injuries. But that’s more than I can say for Rafael Devers (22.5 WAR) or Ozzie Albies (21.8 WAR), who are the next two down the list; they’ll likely need to play for the long-term catch-up to have any chance.
Age 28: 31.1 WAR Median; 66.15% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: None
Cody Bellinger (24.5 WAR) was ahead of the Hall pace once upon a time, but it’s been several years since that was the case. His rebound the last two years has been a good story, but not nearly enough to keep up with the rapid rise the median goes through during this ages, let alone make up for all the ground he lost back in 2021 and 2022. But even with that slump, Bellinger is still far ahead of his contemporaries; Willy Adames (21.5 WAR) is an even further-away second place, and his hopes for a long-term catch-up are dim thanks to his low peak so far (neither B-R nor Fangraphs WAR has any of his seasons at MVP-level, just constantly above-average). I suppose he’ll just have to find some new solace in that new mega-deal with the Giants.
Age 29: 35.6 WAR Median; 71.67% of all players at this mark elected
Active Players: Carlos Correa (44.4 WAR)
Shohei Ohtani (43.8 WAR)
I don’t really know what to make of Carlos Correa’s Hall of Fame chances? On the one hand, he’s basically three-quarters of the way to the overall career median for position players, and even in the short term, he’s basically good to go for the next two seasons. His 2024 campaign wasn’t healthy (nothing shocking there), but he was playing at an All-Star (if not MVP) level when he did actually reach the field.
On the other hand, just glancing at his accolades, he still seems under-decorated, for as close to the Hall standard as he is at this young age. 2024 marked just his third All-Star Game, he has just one Gold Glove despite great defense (in fact, he even got the Platinum Glove for best overall defender that one time), he only has three seasons where he’s received MVP votes, and only one where he landed in the top ten. Shortstops usually don’t wind up reaching the big counting milestones, and Correa’s frequent injuries make even the medium-big ones questionable. There are players who have gotten in with, say, an unusually light amount of All-Star seasons (make some guesses at which modern Cooperstown members you think have the fewest, then check your results here), but a lot of those guys still wound up regularly getting awards votes and such. There’s still plenty of time to see how things shake out here, though; maybe he’ll have a late career like Adrian Beltré (who still hadn’t made it to an All-Star team at this point in his career, eleven seasons in!), or injuries will make him come up short, and all of this speculation will become irrelevant. I also wonder if this lack of award recognition is due to voters souring on members of the 2017 Astros in recent voting, but if that is the case, I’m not sure that will be an issue once he actually hits the ballot way down the road (even just going off of Carlos Beltrán’s recent rise).
Shohei Ohtani is the exact opposite, at 3 MVPs through just (most of) seven seasons. Technically, he’s only above the Hall median if you include his pitching value; his batting value alone doesn’t get him to 35 Wins. But on the other hand… come on. We’re only seven years into his MLB career, and a Future Hall of Fame that doesn’t have Shohei Ohtani in it just feels wrong. His current four-year peak is already the stuff of legends, and feels like it should automatically garner him eventual induction regardless if where his career numbers wind up. How could you tell the story of Baseball in the 2020s without mentioning Ohtani? After Correa and Ohtani, Pete Alonso (19.8 WAR) is a distant third place for this age group.
To be continued…
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Love this post! Looking forward to more.
ReplyDeleteLove this series you have been doing for over ten years!
ReplyDeleteSeems like a very good crop of young players in baseball these days. It will be interesting to watch and see which ones continue to rise and which ones fall into the injury ridden path and fall off the list.