The Five Dumbest Hall of Fame Arguments

The Five Dumbest Hall of Fame Arguments

As we watched mediocre football on Thanksgiving, my dad and I debated the five best MLB second baseman since integration. In alphabetical order, we more or less landed on Roberto Alomar, Robinson Canó, Joe Morgan, Jackie Robinson, and Ryne Sandberg. You want to stump for Craig Biggio or Chase Utley instead? Fine. I don’t care. The world won’t hold its breath while we debate Lou Whitaker versus José Altuve, and neither will I. In fact, as I’m writing this article a few days later, I realize we forgot Rod Carew. Oh well. I blame the Houston Texans.

For argument’s sake, let’s pretend we all agree on the list my dad and I developed. (After all, we spent 5-10 good minutes on it in between drinks and complaints about pass interference.) Those five should all be easy Hall of Famers, yes? The absolute greatest players at their position from the last 70+ years would have to be no-doubt-about-it, first-ballot decisions.

Nope! Only two of the five made it on the first try. Morgan was probably the best of the bunch, and he made the Hall comfortably in 1990. Robinson squeaked past the 75 percent threshold in 1962 with 77.5 percent. Presumably, he didn’t receive more support because of racism (5.3 percent of votersdidn’tvote for Willie Mays in 1979 and 10.8 percent left Frank Robinson off the ballot in 1982). Alomar was the next closest. Voters penalized him on his first try in 2010 for spitting at an umpire in 1996. They forgave him in 2011, making him the first player ever to get 90 percent of the vote in his second year eligible. Sandberg got less than 50 percent on his first try, then reached the Hall on his third. Canó is still playing of course,but with two PED suspensions, he’ll probably never get a plaque in Cooperstown at all.

As it turns out, the only consistency in the voting process over the years is inconsistency. We wring our hands every year over the Hall of Fame— not only the current ballot but every borderline case since the Civil War. I suppose it passes the time and gives us an excuse to yell at clouds, so why not? It’s better than thinking about the miasmic doom of Real Life— or even worse, the NFC East. The problem isn’t that we shoot off hot takes like Matthew Stafford throws passes into double coverage, it’s that we’re just as inaccurate. We keep repeating the same dumb arguments over and over. Here are five we should eschew this year… but we’ll keep chucking them up anyway.

Defense

We have a reasonably solid idea of how good a hitter each player was over the past 100 years or so, but we have absolutely no frame of reference for defense. It’s an enormous part of each player’s value— for better or worse— but we are abjectly horrible at measuring it, especially historically. For most of baseball history, we just used Gold Gloves, fielding percentage, adages passed down from grandparents who saw Pee Wee Reese play one time, and overwrought prose from old-timey sportswriters.

Omar Vizquel is the most likely position player to get elected this year if anyone at all. He was undoubtedly a great shortstop. He was also a pretty underwhelming hitter for most of his career as well as anaccused abusive husband. Does all that add up to a Hall of Famer? In my opinion, absolutely not, but no one cares about that. If he does make the Hall, it will be on the merits of his defense.

As great as he was with the glove (or bare hand, if I recall correctly… I also Saw Him Play One Time), he may be the third-best defender on this year’s ballot. Andruw Jones and Scott Rolen were among the greatest defenders ever at their positions. For that matter, so was Barry Bonds! There are a handful of shortstops enshrined because of defense, but very few at any other positions. It’s hard to make a good argument for Luis Aparicio but not Graig Nettles or even Frank White.

How do we compare shortstops to each other, anyway? Sure, Ozzie Smith is probably the gold standard, but was Joe Tinker better or worse than Vizquel? Where does Davey Concepcion rank among them? In fact, how does Vizquel stack up to Andrelton Simmons? We don’t have any reasonable yardstick that measures across decades.

If you really want to go down the defense rabbit (Maranville) hole, there should be at least double as many catchers in the Hall as there are currently. No position provides more value defensively, yet there are only 18 in Cooperstown— less than any other position except third base. As great as Vizquel may have been, there’s no possible way he was more valuable than Bob Boone or Jim Sundberg. We just never had a way to measure it until a few years ago, and we might still not be very good at it.

If…Then…

Oh crap, just ignore the last few paragraphs. I broke this rule about a dozen times. In theory, player comparisons should be a good way to measure Hall of Fame-caliber.If Jim Rice is a Hall of Famer, why not Matt Holliday?That might work if the Hall wasn’t already ruined. Riceshouldn’tbe in the Hall of Fame, and neither should Holliday. Probably 10-15 percent of the players in the Hall don’t belong there.

Let’s meet some Hall of Famers. High Pockets Kelly eclipsed 4 WAR just one time. Rick Ferrell was probably not even the Brian McCann of his time (meanwhile his brother Wes probably should be in, but isn’t). Knuckleballer Jesse Haines was no better than Tim Wakefield. Joe Tinker made itbecause of a poem. Harold Baines got in because… well, I have no idea why. He’s a nice guy, and apparently has friends on the Veterans Committee, or whatever they call it these days.

There are enough headscratchers in the Hall at every position that any borderline candidate compares favorably to someone else. Should Willie Randolph be a Hall of Famer? Maybe so, but not because he was demonstrably better than Billy Herman, Tony Lazzeri, and Red Schoendienst. Hell, Ben Zobrist and Chuck Knoblauch were better than those guys, but that doesn’t make them half as good as Joe Morgan.

Honestly, this is a bigger problem with respect to off-the-field contributors than players. Bud Selig was a terrible commissioner and does not belong in the Hall of Fame. Bowie Kuhn was a REALLY terrible commissioner and might be the most undeserving Hall of Famer in the whole museum. But, uh, don’t we just put all the commissioners in if they serve long enough? There are ten umpires in the Hall of Fame. That’s fine, I guess, but other than longevity, how do we know they were any good? It’s nearly certain that they weren’t the ten best umps ever. Meanwhile, there’s no precedent for anyone likeCurt FloodorEdith Houghtonin the Hall, but their impact on the game was much larger and more positive than, say, Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s or Ed Barrow’s.

Steroids and Scandals

Do you realize how old Barry Bonds is? He’s 56! He started his career while Reagan was president, won MVPs under the George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations, and retired after Barack Obama announced his candidacy. Since he hung up his cleats, we’ve had four more presidential elections, two global recessions, world population growth of nearly one billion people, and discovered thousands of exoplanets. Luis Garcia, starting second baseman for the 2020 Washington Nationals, was four years old when he played his last game.

And we’re STILL arguing over steroids.

It doesn’t matter whether you believe he does or does not belong in the Hall. Think whatever you want; I don’t care. But it’s been 19 years since he belted his 71st home run in a season and 13 years since the 756th homer of his career. We’ve been braining ourselves senseless over whether he deserves a plaque and a speech ever since.

This is a procedural flaw. We have to wait five years after retirement before voting on any given player to make sure they’re good and finished.We certainly can’t risk putting anyone in the Hall before their legacy is complete. Then we spend up to ten years debating each player, waiting for them to either get inducted, fall below the five percent threshold, or term out. It’s exhausting. I’ve never had a decision in my life so excruciating that it took me 15 years to figure out what to do. There is absolutely nothing more to be said about Bonds that hasn’t been repeated ad nauseam. Vote him in or don’t, but we must find a way to move on.

A Moment Like This

I was born in 1983. I remember Bill Mazeroski’s World Series-clinching home run in 1960 as clearly as Joe Carter’s in 1993. It doesn’t matter that the former occurred before I was born whereas I saw the latter live on TV. I recall Bobby Thompson’s “The Giants Win the Pennant!” blast from 1951 as vividly as José Bautista’s bat flip in 2015.

No sport memorializes its seminal moments as well as baseball, and the Hall of Fame is the exact best place to do it. Every year, the Hall collects dozens of mementos from players who accomplished something special.They’ve got the cap Ubaldo Jiménez wore when he struck ten Dutch players in the 2009 World Baseball Classic, so you can be damn sure they’ve got something from Chris Chambliss’s 1976 ALCS walkoff homer.

Does that mean the players who hit those famous blasts all belong in the Hall? Absolutely not! One moment does not define a career. Of the four players listed above, Mazeroski is the only one in the Hall. There are exactly two reasons for his enshrinement: 1) great second base defense (see the defense section above), and the homer he hit in the 1960 World Series. Ironically, Carter, Thompson, and Bautista all had better careers, but they won’t ever make it in. Rightly so— if a player’s career doesn’t merit the Hall without a seminal moment, they shouldn’t be in at all. Send their batting gloves or jock strap instead.

Besides, if someone’s a Hall of Famer because they hit a big home run, shouldn’t that count against the pitcher who gave it up? One of the most famous home runs ever belonged to Kirk Gibson in Game One of the 1988 World Series. He had a very good career, including an MVP, but he’s no Hall of Famer. The guy who threw the pitch, however, is a Hall of Famer. Dennis Eckersley is one of the greatest relievers of all time. He reinvented the closer role and was a first-ballot inductee in 2004. No one held Gibson’s shot against him when they voted him in.

Blow It Up and Start Over

The Hall of Fame is broken, sure. Here’s my plan to fix it: only leave the top 100 players, as determined by me and me alone, and take everyone else out. When we vote a new player in, someone else has to get bounced. What do you think?

You probably think I’m an idiot. Iaman idiot. My plan would leave the Hall just as wrecked as it is now, if not worse. With the exception of Mariano Rivera, we can’t even get consensus on a single player, so there’s no conceivable way to “fix” the Hall. What’s done is done; all we can do is make the best decisions possible going forward.

The Hall of Fame is a mess, but it’sourmess. We can’t kick High Pockets Kelly out any more than we can put Lou Whitaker in (at least until the Arbitrarily Named Era Committee takes up his case again). There’s no way to change it meaningfully without exacerbating historical double standards and pissing everyone off even more. We’re stuck here arguing endlessly about stupid nonsense that barely matters. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing— it’s not like much else is happening in the MLB realm these days— but let’s at least argue a little less stupidly. By which I mean according to these rules I have set forth, with which no one can possibly disagree, right?