Yes, this is the clickbaitiest headline I could think of for this premise. It’s the first week of January, the free agent market has seized up due to lack of routine maintenance, and the sun hasn’t come out since the Aquaman sequel was released, perhaps as divine punishment for humanity’s crimes. So let’s find pizazz where we can.

Though in all honesty, it shouldn’t be that difficult, because Gunnar Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr. are pretty exciting all on their own. We just saw a Rookie of the Year campaign from the former and a breakout season from the latter. Here’s something that might sound like hyperbole, but really isn’t: Both players are on a Hall of Fame track now.

In case you needed a refresher:

Both Henderson and Witt needed a minute to adjust to the majors, but by two-thirds of the way through this past season, it seems like they’d figured things out. (You can read Dan Szymborski on Witt’s supergalactic summer here.)

Five WAR, give or take, and a wRC+ in the high 110s or low 120s is obviously great work, particularly from a shortstop, and even more particularly from a shortstop who’s young enough to still be living with his parents. But it’s rarer than you’d think.

Since the start of the live ball era, there have only been 223 seasons in which an AL or NL shortstop, age 23 or younger, has even played enough to qualify for the batting title. Only 39 of those seasons involved the shortstop in question posting 4.5 WAR or more; only 42 times did the shortstop have a wRC+ of 115 or better. Witt and Henderson accounted for two of the 33 seasons in which the player did both.

Those 33 seasons belong to 25 individual players. (Sorting the leaderboard this way will return the names “Ripken” and “Rodriguez” a lot.) Here they are, with their standing in relation to the Hall of Fame. “HOVG” stands for “Hall of Very Good,” i.e. a player who’s in the 40 career WAR neighborhood, with multiple All-Star appearances or high MVP finishes, but who didn’t make the Hall of Fame. A-Rod got his own unique designation:

If you’re a young Orioles shortstop and you don’t have an All-Star caliber season by age 23, apparently something’s wrong with you.

Six of 16 eligible players on this list are in the Hall of Fame already. Two others — Grich and Rodriguez — would be if I were dictator of the world. And even A-Rod’s greatest detractors would concede that his on-field record alone is worthy of enshrinement. (Okay, maybe not his greatest detractors. People get really weird about A-Rod. But you get the point.)

Two other retired players, Reyes and Ramirez, haven’t yet had their Cooperstown fates decided, but I expect both to fall into the Hall of Very Good category when everything shakes out. Among active players, Bichette and Tatis are too early in their careers to make serious projections on, but one nice thing about working here is I get to peek at Jay Jaffe’s homework on Hall of Fame issues. This summer, he weighed in on the progress of both Machado and Lindor. Machado still has some work to do, but is in really strong shape, while Lindor probably needs at least one more monster season and some hang-around value in order to get into comfortable Hall of Fame territory. If I had to bet, I’d say Lindor gets in, but it’s not a sure thing. (Feel free to call me out in 20 years if I turn out to be wrong.)

Seager is an interesting case that went unremarked-upon in Jay’s midseason analysis. The rule of thumb is that 40 WAR over a player’s seven best seasons results in about a 75% chance of getting into the Hall at some point. Seager’s best seven seasons only total up to 29.9 WAR now, but his career has been doughnut-holed by injuries and the pandemic. He’s coming off a second-place MVP finish and just became a two-time World Series MVP, and he’s still only 29. He still has a pretty good chance of making it to Cooperstown as well.

Let’s say that two of Machado, Lindor, and Seager make the Hall of Fame and take the kids out of the equation entirely. Basically, a 23-and-under shortstop who posts 4.5 or more WAR and a wRC+ of 115 or better is a little less than even money to either become a Hall of Famer or to have a Hall of Fame-worthy career.

Nevertheless, that path can be precarious. Based on their careers through age 27, Garciaparra and Ramirez looked like absolute stone cold locks to make the Hall of Fame. But Garciaparra suffered a wrist injury in 2001 and an Achillies tendon injury in 2004. These ailments cost him the best parts of two prime seasons, prevented him from getting the 3-0 comeback shine from the 2004 Red Sox, and genuinely diminished him as a player. The same goes for Ramirez, whose body started falling apart in 2011 after a torrid start to his career.

That’s the shadow looming over both Witt and Henderson — that any athlete is just one false step or one bad collision from a career-altering injury. Sometimes the margins aren’t even that thin.

Jim Fregosi was the manager of the first baseball team I was ever interested in, the 1993 Phillies. (I was also watching a lot of The Wonder Years around that time, so between him and Dan Lauria, I thought male authority figures all looked like that when I was a little kid.) I did not know then that Fregosi had been a star player in his time, and even if you remember that he was once traded for Nolan Ryan, you probably don’t remember how good he was.

For some context, let’s go back into Dan Szymborski’s bag of tricks and pull out this 2021 article, which used ZiPS to imagine a world in which Fregosi did not come down with Morton’s neuroma in his foot after his age-28 season. Fregosi was coming off a 6.8 WAR season, but was never the same afterward: 41.6 WAR in parts of 10 seasons before the tumor, 2.6 in parts of eight seasons thereafter. Fregosi was an all-time great, just not for long enough to consolidate a Hall of Fame case.

And then there’s World War II, which influenced the careers of three shortstops on this list: Stephens, Pesky, and Travis.

Stephens missed the Hall of Fame despite putting up monster numbers through his prime with the Browns and Red Sox, including a ludicrous 159-RBI season with Boston in 1959. But even at the time his reputation did not match his numbers. Stephens drove in all those runs hitting behind Dom DiMaggio (.383 career OBP), Pesky (.394 OBP), and Ted Williams (.482 career OBP). And his best seasons in St. Louis were viewed as the product of beating up on competition weakened by stars going off to war.

Stephens’ defense was likewise not well-regarded. His SABR bio quotes a minor league manager as saying, “Stephens will never play shortstop in the major leagues as long as he has a hole in his ass.” One could argue that no major league shortstop has ever lacked that attribute, but scouting was apparently different in the 1930s. At any rate, Stephens also declined rapidly in his early 30s and never put up the raw numbers to force a Hall of Fame case. That decline was variously attributed to failing eyes, failing knees, or the result of hard partying as a young man.

Pesky didn’t come close to having a Hall of Fame case, even though his historical proximity to Williams makes him notable in baseball history. Nevertheless, he led the league in hits and finished third in MVP voting in 1942, then missed his age-24, age-25, and age-26 seasons due to military service. When he came back, he led the American League in hits again and finished fourth in MVP voting. The effect of losing such a big chunk of his early prime could’ve been greater on Pesky than we can appreciate just by backfilling the numbers.

That’s certainly true for Travis, whom Bill James once singled out as an obvious example of a Hall of Fame career lost to World War II. Travis was a star with the Senators in his early 20s, and in his age-27 season, he hit .359/.410/.520, a 142 wRC+ and 6.3 WAR by the standards of the time. Unfortunately, that was 1941; Travis went into the service and not only missed the last four seasons of what should’ve been his prime, he suffered severe frostbite at the Battle of the Bulge and almost had his feet amputated.

The ramifications of such an injury on a professional athlete would be obvious, to say nothing of the fact that Travis returned to Washington at 31 years old, after an extended layoff. He was never a productive baseball player again.

Travis and Pesky were two of the five shortstops I flagged as not even achieving Hall of Very Good status, but those five all had extended, productive careers. That seems to be the absolute floor for Witt and Henderson based on the available evidence. Maintaining their current level of production brings them into Hall of Very Good territory, with only modest development needed to start a conversation about Cooperstown several years down the road.

That road is long, and obviously strewn with obstacles. But barring the outbreak of another World War, it’s straighter than you’d think.

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