Chasing Utley's Missing Gold Gloves
How retconning awards would reshape Chase Utley's Cooperstown case
If you wanted a quick statistical filter to identify the best multi-season stretches in MLB history, you might come up with something like: Players who put up seven wins above replacement five years in a row. Performing like an MVP frontrunner for half a decade is a remarkable accomplishment, requiring not just incredible skill but consistency and durability. According to FanGraphs’ WAR model, only 14 position players have ever achieved it.
Honus Wagner and Ty Cobb were the first two hitters to ever do it. They were joined by Babe Ruth a generation later. You may recognize this trio as literal-first-ballot Hall of Famers, who alongside pitchers Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson represented the inaugural class elected into Cooperstown in 1936. So far, so good. Fellow legends Lou Gehrig, Charlie Gehringer, and Rogers Hornsby were the only other position players to achieve it in the pre-integration era. The next two were Willie Mays and Henry Aaron, which does nothing to dissuade me from the usefulness of these criteria. Then came a pair of consensus all-time greats, Joe Morgan and Wade Boggs. Within my lifetime the group has expanded to include Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, and Mike Trout, who have collectively dominated the league landscape for most of the 21st century.
If I told you that these were the 13 best position players of all time, you might look at me a little funny, but you’d concede that we’re at least in the right ballpark. And most of the glaring omissions came awfully close to meeting this bar. Ted Williams, who missed three seasons in his prime while serving in World War II, joins the club if we go by seasons played in instead of calendar years. Round a single six-and-a-half-win season up to seven and you add in Eddie Collins, Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial, Mel Ott, Alex Rodriguez, Mike Schmidt, and Tris Speaker. If you were making a list of the best hitters in MLB history, this group is more or less where you’d start.
The final member of this elite club is Chase Utley.
By these objective (if contrived) criteria, Utley’s production from 2005 to 2009 ranks among the best extended stretches of performance in the history of the game. Over that five-year run he hit 301/.388/.535, averaging 29 homers, 73 extra-base hits, and 101 RBI per season alongside his signature strong defense and smart baserunning. He earned downballot MVP consideration in all five years and was named both an All-Star and a Silver Slugger in four. His 38.4 fWAR in that span trailed only Pujols (in the midst of a seven-win-season streak of his own) for the most in baseball.
Yet at the onset of his third go-round as a Cooperstown candidate, Utley has had trouble consolidating support. Just the fact that he is still on the ballot may be surprising — with comparables like the legends listed above, you’d think the voters would have waved him in as soon as he was eligible. But only 29 percent of the Baseball Writers Association of America electorate checked his box on the 2024 ballot, and even a modest jump in 2025 (to 40 percent) left him well below a majority, let alone the 75 percent threshold for induction.
The case against Utley is simple: critics would say he was not good enough for long enough to meet the Cooperstown standard. The latter point is fair. He had at most six more legitimately good seasons, so he was a true first-division player for barely a decade. Only one honoree in my adult life (Dick Allen) has been inducted as a position player with fewer hits than Utley’s 1,885. The BBWAA has not elected a batter with fewer than 2,000 hits through the normal election process since Roy Campanella in 1969. But career bulk is not a prerequisite for the Hall — Sandy Koufax got in on his first ballot.1 Voters would accept a relatively short career for a player with a sufficiently high peak.
I would argue that Utley’s prime was so excellent that he would deserve a place in Cooperstown no matter what the rest of his career was like. The problem is that the voters don’t seem to realize just how good he was. I have a few theories about why. He lacked a singular exceptional skill, and the parts of the game he was best at — getting on base, extra-base power, infield range, smart-over-speedy baserunning — were not quantified as readily or valued as highly 20 years ago as they are now. He got somewhat lost among his star-studded lineups, with teammates Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins winning MVP awards from both ahead of and behind him in the batting order. And like Bartolo Colón, he redefined his image so thoroughly in the denouement of his career that I suspect people think of him first as a wily veteran, not the premier second baseman of his generation. Would he be remembered more reverently if he had retired a few years earlier?
It occurred to me that Utley’s greatness would be more salient if he had earned more contemporaneous recognition. So I started digging through the National League’s annual awards in search of hardware that Utley should have won, in hopes of retconning some additional accolades for his résumé.
Chase (I feel like I can call him Chase) received two types of major honors multiple times. He was named to six All-Star teams and won four Silver Sluggers — an impressive collection of feats, though it’s unlikely to be a convincing rebuttal to detractors who would relegate him to the figurative Hall of Very Good. You can go through the seasonal leaderboards looking for additional years when he should have been honored, and I have.2 He wasn’t snubbed enough times to move the needle.
My main goal was to find a year when he should have won a Most Valuable Player award. It’s fair to say that the voters underestimated Utley, who ranked among the NL’s top five in WAR each year from 2005 to 2009, yet never finished higher than seventh in the MVP voting. But Utley made a crucial error that prevents me from retconning him a trophy: his peak fully overlapped with Pujols’, and therefore there was never a time when you could confidently point to him as the best player in the NL. Utley probably deserved the 2006 and 2007 trophies more than Howard and Rollins did, and depending on your preferred flavor of WAR you could call the 2008 and 2009 races effective ties between him and Pujols and surmise that Utley should have won one of them. Certainly the fact that not a single BBWAA voter ever ranked him first or second on their respective MVP ballots is an injustice. Still, it’s hard to say Utley was robbed of the honor when his main competition was The Machine.
But there’s one type of award missing from Utley’s mantle that stands out, both because I’m certain he would have won multiple times in an era when advanced metrics were more normalized, and because I’m convinced that his doing so would have changed the narrative around his Cooperstown candidacy: Gold Gloves.
Over the next few paragraphs, we’re going to spend some time with two metrics that don’t hold much purchase in modern player evaluation: Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) and Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR). Today these second-generation sabermetric defensive models, which predate the advent of modern Statcast tracking data, have no real constituency. Old-school baseball folks have long been skeptical of black-box formulae purporting to turn a concept abstract as defensive value into a concrete estimate of runs saved. Proponents of analytics would tell you that the margins of error are too high to be confident in the results, as evidenced by how often the two similar models disagreed with each other, and how wildly players’ ratings fluctuated from year to year.
Yet these metrics are at least reasonably correlated with popular perceptions of fielding skill, and for the pre-Statcast era they are likely the most-accurate estimates of defensive value the general public will ever see. Most importantly, right after Utley’s prime defensive years, these metrics gained an explicit role in the Gold Glove-selection process. Since 2013, not only have Gold Glove voters received a packet of sabermetric fielding stats alongside their ballots, but the Society for American Baseball Research Defensive Index is included as an input alongside the coaches’ votes, like a Bayesian prior weighed against the actual ballots.
And these models rated Utley very favorably. His +90.1 UZR leads all second basemen since tracking began in 2002. He ranks second in DRS (+125), but is much closer to first place (Mark Ellis, +130) than third (Orlando Hudson, +101), and would take the top spot if not for a specific relative weakness at turning double plays. His good range and sure hands were augmented by keen positioning. In an age before coaching staffs micromanaged fielders’ placements in accordance with batted-ball data, and when defensive metrics struggled to discern positioning from range — longtime sabermetricians may recall how Brett Lawrie and the Blue Jays’ shifts broke DRS — his baseball-rat penchant for shading towards where balls were more likely to be hit made him an analytics darling at the keystone.
In short, Utley’s defensive peak occurred in a very specific era in which the best available data painted him in the best possible light, but the coaches around the league whose votes determined the Gold Glove awardees presumably did not notice.
How many Gold Gloves would Utley have won if the voters had been looking at what were then considered state-of-the-art defensive metrics? To be clear, I am not interested in relitigating who should have won by making overconfident assertions from outmoded tracking data. I am merely peeking into a not-so-farfetched alternate universe where the player-evaluation standards that were popularized by the end of Utley’s career had been commonplace at the beginning of it, too.
Let’s go year by year. As a rookie in 2003, Utley did not play enough (37 games) nor well enough (+1 DRS, -0.2 UZR) at second base to merit real consideration.3 In 2004 you could have made a contrarian case for him, as he led all National League second basemen with at least as many innings in both metrics on a prorated basis. But given his limited track record and the large sample size required for these models to stabilize, you wouldn’t have gotten much traction.
The next season is when things start to get interesting. Utley led all NL second basemen with +15.5 UZR in 2005. He ranked just third in DRS (+20), trailing Craig Counsell by 10 runs. If you take the average of the two metrics, Counsell came out slightly ahead. Going by ordinal rankings, Counsell placed fifth in UZR, so you could conclude that the models had more collective confidence in Utley’s greatness. Both metrics put Utley ahead of the actual winner, Luis Castillo, who took home the trophy for the third year in a row. Again, this does not mean Castillo was the wrong choice, just that a decade later it probably would have gone to someone else — either Counsell or Utley. We’ll call this one a maybe for Utley’s résumé.
On to 2006. Based on the defensive metrics, there were three reasonable candidates for the Gold Glove that year: Utley, Jamey Carroll, and José Valentín. Utley tied with Carroll for the league lead in DRS (+18), and trailed them both in UZR (+7.5). However, Carroll and Valentín were merely part-time players at the keystone, making just 94 and 109 appearances at second base, respectively. An optimist could say that their accumulating so much defensive value in partial seasons is extra impressive. A skeptic would note that fielding metrics are less reliable in smaller sample sizes, and that award-voters strongly prefer players who play (close to) the whole year. Utley led the NL’s true everyday second basemen in both measurements, with a clear edge over real-life winner Orlando Hudson (+13 DRS, -5.3 UZR). In this parallel universe, I am certain that this would have been Utley’s first Gold Glove. (Unless he had also previously won in 2004.)
Repeating in 2007 would have been possible, but not assured. Utley again tied for the NL lead in DRS (+18), this time with Hudson. In our timeline, Hudson won for the second year in a row, though the disparity in UZR between him (-2.1) and Utley (+12.5) would have made for an easy tiebreaker. But the crowded field also featured breakout years from Brandon Phillips (+9 DRS, +17.0 UZR while playing 24 more games than Utley) and Kazuo Matsui (+14 DRS, +11.5 UZR in just 102 appearances). I would lean slightly towards Phillips, but it’s a tossup. This is another maybe.
Both metrics agree that 2008 was Utley’s finest defensive season. His +30 DRS was the best in all of baseball (at any position, not just second base) and his +19.3 UZR led all infielders in either league. With apologies to Phillips, who took home the trophy after another strong showing, this is the second year when Utley clearly would have won.
In 2009, Utley’s primary competition from an analytics perspective was Clint Barmes. Barmes had a slight edge in DRS (+13 to +12) but Utley doubled Barmes’ UZR (+11.0 to +5.6). The real winner, Hudson, was not close in either. Advantage: Utley. A year later he was clearly at the top of the leaderboards in both categories, with the actual honoree (Phillips) in second place in each. That’s two more seasons in which a more analytics-oriented electorate would have given Utley the hardware.
Utley would have been in the mix one last time in 2011, when he put up an impressive +7 DRS and +9.2 UZR in just 100 games at second base. He may not have been favored to usurp the award from Phillips, who earned similar ratings in a full season. Though that implies Utley was a better defender pro rata, and that argument would have been more convincing now that he was a multiple-time winner than it was in 2004. This is our final maybe.
If you’re keeping score at home, we have retconned Utley has having won at least four Gold Gloves, and possibly as many as seven. Even on the conservative end, winning four Gold Gloves as a middle infielder would put him in rarified air with just 21 other players in MLB history.4 He would rank on par with such luminaries as Craig Biggio, Bobby Grich, Andrelton Simmons, Alan Trammell, and (most fittingly) his longtime double-play-mate Jimmy Rollins. He would be the equal of Mark Buehrle, Eric Hosmer, Kevin Kiermaier, and Kenny Lofton, all contemporaries of Utley who were considered the best at their respective positions in their day.
It’s fair to further expect Utley to have won in at least one of his three maybe years, bringing his total to five Gold Gloves. At that point he joins the company of Adrian Beltré, Dave Concepción, Dale Murphy, Ron Santo, and even the great Joe Morgan. If you flip one more season — an optimistic assumption, but clearly a plausible one — then Utley would become just the ninth middle infielder in baseball history to win six Gold Gloves. The others: Roberto Alomar, Luis Aparicio, Mark Belanger, Bill Mazeroski, Ryne Sandberg, Ozzie Smith, Omar Vizquel, and Frank White.
Granting Utley a cabinet full of Gold Gloves would completely change the narrative of his Cooperstown candidacy. No longer would the case for Chase start with he was a solid all-around player, or people don’t realize how good he was. Instead you could lead with something like he was one of the best fielders of his generation, and he was also a really good hitter. (Aparicio, Mazeroski, and Smith are all in the Hall with OPSes in the mid-.600s; Utley’s career OPS is .823.) Or he was an anchor of one of the most-iconic lineups of the 21st century, and also he won [four/five/six/seven] Gold Gloves. I suspect these framings would be more convincing, especially since they would redirect voters’ focus towards his exceptional prime.
We already know that the man can give a celebratory speech. If the voters consider how many Gold Gloves Utley so plausibly could have — and probably should have — won, maybe he’ll have occasion for another oration in Cooperstown next summer.
The story of Koufax’ early retirement has taken on a tragic, mythic quality in the popular imagination. Utley’s knee issues surely played a role in his decline, though obviously not to the same extent as Koufax’ arm.
In 2005, Utley, who had an .894 first-half OPS, first lost out on a reserve middle infield All-Star team spot to César Izturis (.660), then was passed over as Izturis’ replacement in favor of his double-play-mate Rollins (.714).
Though I’d be remiss not to mention that, four years prior, Rafael Palmeiro had won a Gold Glove while playing only 28 games at first base. So there are exceptions.
There are actually 23 middle infielders who have reached this threshold, but two of them are Hudson and Phillips, whom we’re now assuming would have at least two fewer Gold Gloves.
What a great breakdown of an amazing career. Loved reading every bit of it.
Amazing content.