Ryan Braun is on the Hall of Fame Ballot

Ryan Braun looked like a Hall of Famer early in his career. In his first six seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers, he was the National League’s Rookie of the Year, the league’s Most Valuable Player, had two other top-three MVP finishes, made five straight All-Star teams, and earned five straight Silver Slugger Awards as the league’s best hitting left fielder.

Braun is one of twelve first-time candidates on the 2026 BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America) Hall of Fame ballot, the results of which will be revealed on Tuesday, January 20th. Because his career petered out after his first six Cooperstown-caliber seasons, and, more significantly, because of his suspension in 2013 for being a part of the Biogenesis PED (performance-enhancing drugs) scandal, Braun isn’t expected to even get 5% of the vote in an election requiring 75% for a plaque in the Hall of Fame.

Assuming that Braun gets fewer than 5% “yes” votes from the writers, he will not appear on any further BBWAA ballots for the remaining nine years that he would have been eligible for that ballot.

Although he won’t ever make it into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, Braun is one of the greatest players in the history of the Brewers and had an excellent career.

Cooperstown Cred: Ryan Braun (LF)

• Milwaukee Brewers (2007-2020)
• Career: .296 BA, .358 OBP, .532 SLG, 352 HR, 1,154 RBI, 1,963 Hits
• Career: 134 OPS+, 47.2 WAR (Wins Above Replacement)
• 6-time All-Star, 5-time N.L. Silver Slugger
• 2007 N.L. Rookie of the Year: .324 BA, 34 HR, 97 RBI, league-leading .634 SLG, 154 OPS+
• 2011 N.L. MVP: .332 BA, .397 OBP, .597 SLG, 33 HR, 111 RBI, 198 Runs, 33 SB, 180 OPS+, 7.7 WAR
• Finished 3rd in the 2008 MVP vote, 2nd in the 2012 MVP vote
• Career postseason (27 games): .330 BA, .368 OBP, .491 SLG, 2 HR, 16 RBI

(Cover photo: USA Today Sports/Benny Sieu)

Ryan Braun: Before the Majors

Ryan Joseph Braun was born on November 17, 1983, in Mission Hills, California. His father, Joe, was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, and came to the U.S. when he was seven. His mother, Diane, was a brewer for Anheuser-Busch, an irony considering where Ryan spent his 14 years in Major League Baseball. Diane was Catholic, though, and in another ironic twist, grew up in a house previously owned by Hank Greenberg, the first Jewish player to be elected to the Hall of Fame.

Braun was a star at Granada Hills High School. He was offered baseball scholarships at Stanford and UC-Berkeley, but was offered a full academic scholarship by the University of Miami because of his excellent high school grades. As a junior, he hit .396 with 18 home runs, 76 runs batted in, 23 stolen bases, and a .726 slugging percentage.

Braun was the 5th overall pick in the 2005 MLB player draft, selected by the Milwaukee Brewers after his junior year, signing for $2.45 million. In his first professional baseball season, he hit a walk-off grand slam to lead the West Virginia Power (Class A in the South Atlantic League) into the playoffs. After progressing from high A to AA in 2006, plus a stint in the Arizona Fall League, the 23-year-old Braun started the 2007 campaign in Nashville (AAA). In 34 games, he hit .342 with 10 home runs and 22 RBI, earning him a promotion to the big leagues.

Ryan Braun’s Glory Years: 2007-12

Braun made his major league debut on May 25 in San Diego, starting at third base and hitting second, and delivered a sacrifice fly off future Hall of Famer Greg Maddux for his first RBI. The next day, Braun hit his first MLB home run off Justin Germano. Braun didn’t make the All-Star game as a rookie, but he could have if he had started the season in the bigs a bit earlier. In his first 40 games, he was hitting .350 with 11 HR and 32 RBI.

On August 26th, the right-handed hitting Braun hit his 25th home run in just his 82nd game, quicker than any major leaguer since Mark McGwire in 1987.

Braun was used exclusively as a third baseman in his rookie campaign, in which he hit .324, led the league in slugging percentage (.634), and was 5th in the N.L. with 34 home runs, to go with 97 RBI. His WAR was only 2.0, however, because he was a brutal fielder at third base. Braun led all players in MLB with 26 errors (yielding an unsightly .895 fielding percentage). Baseball Reference credited him with -32 runs from fielding, which is the worst total for a third baseman in the history of baseball.

The Brewers moved Braun to left field for the 2008 campaign and inked their young star to a eight-year, $45 million contract extension. Braun thrived at his new position, posting positive fielding metrics while hitting .285 with 37 HR and 106 RBI. Braun was the starting left fielder for the National League All-Stars; it was the first of six All-Star nods. Braun and future Hall of Famer CC Sabathia (a mid-season acquisition) led the Brew Crew to their first playoff berth since 1982.

In the last game of the regular season, with the Brewers needing a win to make the postseason party, Sabathia pitched a complete game, giving up just one run, and Braun hit a tie-breaking two-run home run with two outs in the bottom of the 8th to give the Brewers the runs they needed to win the game and make the playoffs.

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Braun went 5 for 16 in the NLDS (against the Philadelphia Phillies), but the Phillies prevailed in four games and eventually won the World Series. Braun’s prolific sophomore season earned the 24-year-old left fielder a 3rd place finish in the MVP vote, behind Albert Pujols and Ryan Howard. Braun also won the first of five consecutive Silver Sluggers.

Braun continued his prolific play in 2009 (in which he led the N.L. with 203 hits) and 2010, and then had his MVP campaign in 2011. Before the season, the Brewers and Braun agreed to a five-year, $105 million contract extension, putting him under team control through 2020.

Ryan Braun: MVP and Runner-Up (2011 & 2012)

In his MVP season, Ryan Braun hit .332, had 33 HR, 111 RBI, scored 109 runs, stole a career-high 33 bases, and led the league in slugging (.597) and OPS (.994). With a 7.7 WAR and 166 OPS+, he bested Matt Kemp for the MVP title, while also leading the Brewers to the N.L. Central crown.

Braun slashed .467/.529/.867 in the N.L. Division Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks, leading Milwaukee to a 3-2 series win, the franchise’s first series win since the ’82 ALCS. Braun slashed .370/.433/.630 in the NLCS (against the St. Louis Cardinals), but the Brewers fell in seven games. Overall, Braun hit .405 with two HR and 10 RBI in Milwaukee’s 12 postseason games.

At the end of that MVP campaign, Braun tested positive for an elevated level of synthetic testosterone. He faced a potential 50-game suspension, but the suspension was overturned in February 2012 by an arbitrator who cited procedural errors in the sample collection process and the chain of custody.

Braun had another big year in 2012; he hit .319 while leading the N.L. with 41 HR, 108 Runs, and a .987 OPS. He finished 2nd in the MVP vote, behind Buster Posey.

At the end of the 2012 campaign (his age 28 season), Braun had a career slash line of .313/.374/.568, resulting in a 147 OPS+. He had averaged 34 home runs, 107 RBI, 102 Runs, and 21 stolen bases per season. Additionally, his cumulative WAR was 33.1, an average of 5.5 per campaign.

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While these ranks aren’t overwhelming and not enough to make a “peak performance” case for Cooperstown, his rankings in the power categories (HR, RBI, SLG) are behind only first basemen (with the exception that Miguel Cabrera played third for two of the six seasons in question).

Regardless, if Braun could have sustained this level of excellence for a few more seasons, he could have become a serious contender for the Hall of Fame.

Ryan Braun’s Final Years (2013-20)

Unfortunately, Ryan Braun’s career started to fizzle in 2013 because of a persistent right thumb injury and, worse, on July 22nd, he was suspended for 65 games for violating Major League Baseball’s drug policy after being linked to the Biogenesis PED scandal. Much more detail about Braun’s PED transgression can be found in Jay Jaffe’s profile/bio piece on FanGraphs.

Although he had a couple of decent seasons in 2015 (made his sixth All-Star squad) and 2016 (got down-ballot MVP votes), he never approached the level of excellence that he showed in his first six campaigns.

Take a look at the average seasons posted by Braun from 2007-12 compared to 2013-2019, along with his final campaign in 2020, shortened due to COVID-19:

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The Brewers paid Braun a $4 buyout at the end of the 2020 campaign, and he never played again, officially retiring on September 14, 2021.

Ryan Braun and the Hall of Fame Ballot

Of all of the twelve first-time candidates for the 2026 BBWAA ballot, Ryan Braun’s career statistics look the most like numbers posted by Hall of Famers of yesteryear. In fact, the #1 player on Braun’s Similarity Score list is the recently inducted Hall of Famer Dick Allen. (Similarity Scores is a Bill James invention found on Baseball Reference).

It should be noted, however, that Similarity Scores don’t put context into the raw statistics. Allen played from 1964-77, a relatively dead time for hitters (especially in the 1960s). Braun played in a more offense-friendly era. Take a look at Braun’s and Allen’s statistics side-by-side. They look the same until you scroll to the right for their WAR and OPS+ (which normalizes OPS across the years, putting 100 as “average.”)

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Allen had the best OPS+ from 1964-74, during an era in which he played against sluggers like Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Harmon Killebrew.

The Hall of Fame Monitor (another James invention) assigns Braun 107 “points” under a statistical formula that deems 100+ a “likely Hall of Famer.” Again, James designed this formula decades ago, before the super-charged offensive numbers we’ve seen in recent decades.

Regardless, even if Braun didn’t have the PED suspension (and had been kind of a prick in his denials about the previous near-miss suspension), his statistical resume falls a little short of the Hall of Fame. Of the 27 candidates on the 2026 BBWAA ballot, Braun’s career WAR (47.2) is only the 15th-best overall, and 11th-best among position players. Given that writers are limited to 10 votes, it’s hard to see how he gets a top-10 treatment, although out of the first 111 writers to publicly reveal their votes on Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame tracker, four did vote “yes” for Braun.

But he does have that PED suspension, and if the writers haven’t seen fit to induct the likes of Bonds, Clemens, A-Rod, McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro, Ramirez, and Sheffield, they are definitely not going to show any love to Ryan Braun.

Braun’s legacy is that he’s the third-best player in the history of the Milwaukee Brewers (behind Hall of Famers Robin Yount and Paul Molitor). He was inducted as the 23rd member into the Brewers’ “Walk of Fame” in 2024, and that’s where his “Fame” legacy will end. Excellent hitter, but not a Hall of Famer for Cooperstown.

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