How many Hall of Famers will you see play in 2017?

How many Hall of Famers did you watch play in 2016? How many will you see live and in person in ’17? In the same way older generations were able to say that they saw Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron play at the height of their powers, we are with certainty seeing some of baseball’s all-time greats play right now.

The trick, obviously, is that you can’t say for sure which ones. There’s a few slam dunks, but for most players in the conversation, so much could still happen on and off the field that might affect their paths to Cooperstown, and even the best of the best need to finish off their careers and wait five years before they get onto the ballot anyway. So to look at today’s players and say we know who ends up with a plaque in upstate New York is just pure speculation.

So let’s do exactly that: speculate. Last winter, we looked ahead to wonder how many Hall of Famers we thought we’d maybe see in 2016, and let’s update that to do exactly the same for 2017.

As we showed last year, we’ve historically seen an average of roughly 31 future Hall of Famers per season, and that held true even if we did “percentage of Hall of Famers per active player,” although, of course, that number is much less over the last two decades. Part of that is the obvious fact that many of the most recent stars, like Derek Jeter, simply aren’t eligible yet, but there’s also evidence that voting gridlock has caused stars of the 1980s and ’90s to be underrepresented — only 18 players have been inducted in the last 10 elections, an average of fewer than two per year.

How many future HOF will we see in 2016? I made a list, but it gets harder every year: https://t.co/wF7xinjqLs pic.twitter.com/dz0xPe6ty6

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) January 4, 2016

How many future HOF will we see in 2016? I made a list, but it gets harder every year: https://t.co/wF7xinjqLs pic.twitter.com/dz0xPe6ty6

Still, let’s stick with that 31 per year average, and have some fun. If there are 31 players likely to see time in the Major Leagues in 2017 who could end up in Cooperstown someday, who are they? And how likely are they to make it?

For simplicity’s sake, we’ll do this in tiers and order the players by their career Wins Above Replacement (from FanGraphs) totals; even though voters don’t (and shouldn’t) choose based on WAR alone, it’s a solid enough estimate of a player’s career worth. Don’t worry too much about how a player is ordered within a tier, because it doesn’t really matter. For reference, the “average” Hall of Famer compiled between 50 WAR and 70 WAR, and all-time greats like Ruth and Barry Bonds topped 160 WAR.

With the retired Alex Rodriguez and David Ortiz off our list from last year, let’s find 31 Hall of Famers you’re likely to see on the field in 2017.

No questions asked, no doubt about it

1. Albert Pujols (91 WAR) 2. Adrian Beltre (81 WAR) 3. Miguel Cabrera (68 WAR) 4. Ichiro Suzuki (58 WAR)

Pujols and Cabrera need no explanation, because they could have retired years ago and still have been slam dunks — and while Pujols has slowed down, Cabrera keeps on hitting. Ichiro’s case on both sides of the Pacific has been secure for some time, but especially so now that he has 3,000 hits in the Majors.

It’s the inclusion of Beltre on the “slam dunk” list that might surprise some, but it shouldn’t. Even at 37 in 2016, he had one of his strongest seasons (.300/.358/.521, 32 homers), and he’ll likely end up one of the five best third basemen ever. He’ll likely get to 3,000 hits in …

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