Baseball Hall of Fame: Best of the one-vote guys since 1988

Baseball Hall of Fame: Right Field

Best—David Justice, 40.4 fWAR, 58^th among right fielders

David Justice played 14 years in the big leagues, and his team made the playoffs in 10 of them. He first came up for a partial season with the Atlanta Braves in 1989, when they won 63 games. They would win just 65 the next season, as Justice won the NL Rookie of the Year Award. In his third season, the Braves went from last to first before losing an epic World Series to the Minnesota Twins.

From 1991 to the end of his career in 2002, Justice’s teams made the postseason every year there was a postseason. The only year his team didn’t make the playoffs was 1994 when the strike prevented a postseason from happening. That was also the only year the team he ended the season with did not finish in first place. Despite getting to the playoffs so often, he only won two World Series rings in six attempts. One came with the 1995 Atlanta Braves, and the other was with the 2000 New York Yankees.

Along the way, Justice was an All-Star three times and received MVP votes five times. Other than the 16-game stretch he played in 1989, he was an above-average hitter each season of his career. According to FanGraphs WAR, he had similar career value among right fielders as Dave Parker, Paul O’Neill, Reggie Sanders, and Jesse Barfield.

Others—Terry Puhl (110^th), Danny Tartabull (139^th), Jay Buhner (143^rd), Jeff Burroughs (171^st), Ellis Valentine (188^th)

Before being traded by the New York Yankees in a now legendary trade, Buhner was traded in December of 1984 by the Pittsburgh Pirates, along with Dale Berra, for Tim Foli and Steve Kemp. Three-and-a-half years later, in July of 1988, the famous Buhner for Ken Phelps trade was made. It would become famous because of Frank Costanza’s rant on the TV show Seinfeld. In 2015, Phelps and Buhner talked about the deal while in the broadcast booth together.

After the trade, Phelps hit .224/.339/.551 in 45 games with the Yankees, but his career was nearing its end. He only played two more seasons. Buhner’s career was just getting started. It would be another five years before he was an average MLB player, but he would eventually have three straight 40-homer seasons and be part of the first Mariners team to ever make the playoffs (in 1995).