What to make of the six new Hall of Famers coming to Cooperstown.
What to make of the six new Hall of Famers coming to Cooperstown.
O n Sunday, the Baseball Hall of Fame announced six new Hall of Famers, elected by the Golden Days Era Committee (covering the 1950s and 1960s) and the Early Baseball Era Committee (covering the years before 1950). Whether you like the results depends in good part on what exactly you think the Hall of Fame should be honoring.
To begin with, it is past time to shut the door to new enshrinees from long, long ago. Nearly all of them are long dead, and some time periods (especially the 1920s and 1930s) are already over-represented.
For example, the committees passed again over Bill Dahlen, and it is a shame Dahlen never made it; aside from players such as Barry Bonds and Pete Rose who are kept out on character grounds, Dahlen may be the best position player not in the Hall. The modern Wins Above Replacement metric gives him that title, but only narrowly over Lou Whitaker. But Dahlen, a shortstop who played 21 seasons with the Cubs, Dodgers, Giants, and Braves between 1891 and 1911, lived to age 80 and has been dead for 71 years; nobody now living knows anything about his game except what can be gleaned by reading about him.
It is fair to argue that the Hall still has some catching up to do when it comes to Negro League players, but even in that case, a one-time-only committee assembled for the purpose could easily pick all the right names to fill out the roster and close up shop. Instead, the Hall has decided that the Golden Days Era Committee will meet every five years, and the Early Baseball Era Committee will meet every ten years.
These bigger-picture objections aside, what to make of the six new inductees? Most of them are not terrible choices. Overall, it is hard not to see a mix of sentimentality and politics in the selections. But more than anything, the new elections raise the definitional question of what the Hall honors.
The best and most overdue choice was Minnie Minoso. In his prime, from 1951–60, Minoso batted .307/.397/.476 (136 OPS+), led the league in stolen bases three times, and almost never missed a game, averaging 654 plate appearances, 99 runs, and 90 RBI a year at a time when the season was 154 games. He was also a fine defensive outfielder who won three Gold Gloves. He finished fourth in the MVP balloting four times. Minoso was a bit short of the kind of career in the integrated big leagues that would have made him a clearly qualified Hall of Famer, although in a 2006 column I found his offensive prime to be comparable to those of Goose Goslin, Earl Averill, and Joe Medwick. But the Cuban-born Minoso deserves the benefit of some doubts: He began his career in Cuba in 1941, and played in the Negro Leagues — where current records list him as batting .313/.366/.484 — for three seasons before getting a late start in the integrated majors in 1951. How late? He was probably 25, according to his own autobiography, although for a long time, his officially listed birthday would have made him 28.
Minoso also went on to play productively in the Mexican League into the 1970s, batting .360/.439/.567 in 1965 and still hitting .315/.402/.426 in 1971. When I was a kid, Minoso was known largely for making stunt appearances in the majors in 1976 and 1980. Giving Minoso credit for his Negro League years makes him fully qualified.
The second relatively straightforward choice is Buck O’Neil. Nobody would try to convince you that Buck — everybody just called him Buck — was a Hall of Fame-caliber ballplayer; over his ten seasons of Negro League baseball, he was credited with a batting line of .258/.315/.358. (I qualify my description of Negro League statistics because they are somewhat fragmentary and still being continually reviewed and revised.) There is nobody else quite like him in the Hall, but then, his career (which included managing in the Negro Leagues and becoming the first black coach in the league with the Cubs, for whom he also did scouting work for many years) was pretty unique.
Buck’s real value was as a storyteller and ambassador for Negro League baseball and its stars, a role he performed admirably until his death at 94 in 2006, long after many of his contemporaries were gone. He already has a statue in the Hall of Fame, which is not true of most of the men with plaques.
Whether or not Buck should be in the Hall of Fame is really a question of categories. Traditionally, the Hall has tended to think in silos: Some guys were elected as players, some as managers, some as executives, some as umpires, and some — from the 19th century — as pioneers who built the game. (There are separate wings for the sportswriters and broadcasters.) But that has sometimes been a pretense: A number of Hall of Famers are really better understood as being honored for the combined, cumulative effect of their careers — e.g. Al Spalding’s tenure as a pitcher, manager, owner, promoter, and equipment magnate, or Joe Torre’s long service as a player, manager, and league administrator. Frank Chance was a great player and manager, but he probably wasn’t great at either for long enough to justify being enshrined as one or the other; it’s the combined effect of his having been the star player-manager of one of the all-time greatest teams that makes his case plausible.
Much as it sands the gears of the orderly, statistics-oriented parts of my brain, a decision to honor the truly immortal baseball lives is consistent with why it is a Hall of Fame in the first place. Over his long life, Buck O’Neil did an enormous amount to promote knowledge and understanding of the game and its history, and to spread the pure joy of baseball. It seems appropriate to honor those efforts with Hall enshrinement.
Then there’s Gil Hodges, a sentimental choice whose 95-year-old widow is still with us. Hodges was undoubtedly a star, batting .284/.372/.515 (130 OPS+) while playing excellent defense from 1949–57. But just as a ballplayer, was he better than Dwight Evans, Norm Cash, Bernie Williams, Keith Hernandez, John Olerud, Rocky Colavito, Fred McGriff, or any number of other outstanding players not in the Hall? In 2006, I didn’t think so. By career WAR, he ranks behind Darrell Evans, Bobby Bonds, Will Clark, Evan Longoria, Johnny Damon, Robin Ventura, Jeff Kent, Vada Pinson, Ellis Burks, Ron Cey, Brian Downing, Mark Teixeira, Jason Giambi, Lance Berkman, Jack Clark, Miguel Tejada, Dale Murphy, Rusty Staub, and George Foster.
But his case, too, is a combined one. He was a pivotal part of bringing the first world championship to Brooklyn in 1955, the first to Los Angeles in 1959, and the first to Queens in 1969 as the manager of the Miracle Mets. His managing career was cut short by his early death, so you wouldn’t put him in solely for his work as a manager, either — but his résumé is greater than the sum of its parts.
To a certain extent, you had to be there. I was born a year before Hodges died. Nobody of my generation was clamoring for Hodges in the Hall; many who saw him play or manage were. Hodges was the archetypical strong, silent father figure, Tom Seaver’s mentor, a man of few words who had huge hands and forearms. He was a Marine on Okinawa, where he won a Bronze Star and saw some of the worst combat in the history of human warfare. His abrupt death from a heart attack at the age of 47 was the strong, silent man’s way to go. Roger Kahn’s 1972 classic The Boys of Summer, a hagiographic memoir of growing up with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the early 1950s, caught up with the players two decades later. The book gained much deeper emotional resonance when both Hodges and Jackie Robinson died the year it was published, both far too young (Robinson was 53).
Vin Scully made an influential case for Hodges as a man of unique and outstanding character, who deserved extra credit for his role as a teammate of Jackie Robinson when the Dodgers were first integrated:
Over the next 12 seasons, I had the privilege of watching Gil every day. . . . Gil stood out as not only one of the game’s finest first basemen but also as a great American and an exemplary human being, someone who many of us were in awe of because of his spiritual strength. I often heard Dodgers players refer to Gil as a “saint.” . . . Gil was always there to protect Jackie as the unassuming, yet effective, peacekeeper on the field. . . . Gil’s support for Jackie and the Robinson family was not limited to just the playing field. The Hodges family supported the Robinsons and did whatever was needed to help them during difficult times, including grocery shopping for the Robinson family while the Dodgers were in Florida for Spring Training at a time in the South when, sadly, African Americans were not allowed to shop in many of the nearby markets. . . .
Hall of Fame voters have long used the “integrity, sportsmanship, and character” clause to exclude nominees for a host of committed transgressions. It seems only logical for voters to use that same clause in the affirmative to consider nominees who embodied those positive virtues.
I’m uncomfortable with using that criteria as a way of elevating plainly undeserving candidates, just as I continue to believe that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Pete Rose should be in the Hall and that we should not be dis-enshrining players with questionable characters. But if we are mixing and matching the playing and managing accomplishments of Gil Hodges, it is a defensible position to argue for a tiebreaker.
One of the two living men inducted, and one of the two Cuban-born players, is Tony Oliva. Unlike Minoso, Oliva came up after the color line was broken, so while his debut at age 25 (or 22, depending on whom you believe) may have come a bit late — by then he’d been destroying minor-league pitching for three years — he has to be evaluated just as a Major League player. (He also had a second act as a coach, in which role he was an important hitting mentor to another Hall of Famer, Kirby Puckett). Oliva was, for many years, a textbook illustration of a Hall-worthy talent who did not make it because his prime was cut short by injuries. In my 2006 column, I classed him with other players who didn’t last a decade as elite-level players, such as Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Steve Garvey, and questionable Hall of Famers Hack Wilson and Chick Hafey. Oliva hit .313/.360/.507 (140 OPS+) from 1965–71, a batting line that is all the more impressive for the low-scoring era in which he amassed it. He was also a good defensive outfielder. All told, he accounted for 5.3 WAR/year in those years, a Hall-worthy level of production. But he also missed more than 30 games twice in eight years, and a 1971 knee injury ended his time as a serious offensive force, compelling him to become a designated hitter. His career 43.0 WAR places him below Hodges.
In particular, it is ridiculous to elect Oliva and leave out his contemporary, Dick Allen, a comparable player whose prime lasted three seasons longer. Amid the recent waves of statistical re-evaluation of the game, Allen’s standing has diminished somewhat from where it stood 20 years ago; he was a dreadful fielder, so his overall career WAR of 58.7 is a good deal lower than his 70.2 career batting WAR. (From 1965–71, Oliva’s glove was worth 51 runs; Allen’s was worth -85 runs.) But what a monster he was at the plate: Over the eleven seasons from 1964–74, he batted .299/.386/.554 (165 OPS+), an offensive performance on par with that of Ken Griffey Jr.
I am also unimpressed by the selection of Jim Kaat. Kaat pitched 25 years in the majors, fielded his position so well that he won 16 Gold Gloves (the most by a pitcher until Greg Maddux came along), and followed that with a long career as a broadcaster. Kaat won 283 games, and as time goes by and the workloads of starting pitchers decline, that has come to seem more and more impressive. But if you look at other starting pitchers whose careers overlapped significantly with Kaat’s years as a rotation starter (1961–78), nine of them won more games: Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan, Don Sutton, Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry, Tom Seaver, Tommy John, Bert Blyleven, and Fergie Jenkins. All of them but John were very clearly better than Kaat, and were seen as such at the time. So were Jim Palmer, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, Sandy Koufax, Luis Tiant, and Don Drysdale. (It was a great era for big starting pitchers.) By WAR, Kaat ranks 23d among all pitchers for the years 1959–83. His ERA+ (a park-adjusted comparison of his ERA to the league average) from 1961–76 was 113, meaning that even across his best years, he was only 13 percent better than a league-average pitcher, and his average workload of 238 innings a year was not all that impressive by the standards of the era. Kaat had a big year in 1966, when he won 25 games, and he may have been even better the following year. But on the whole, he just wasn’t a genuine star for most of his long time in the league, and his big win total was padded during the last six seasons of his career, when he went 36-36 with a 4.29 ERA. I didn’t buy Kaat’s case in one of my early baseball columns 20 years ago, and I still don’t. I’d put Tiant in the Hall over Kaat any day.
Finally, the Hall elected Bud Fowler. It would be a misnomer to describe Fowler as a Negro Leagues player. The modern Negro Leagues were not founded until 1920, seven years after Fowler died, and while he organized black barnstorming teams, Fowler is distinguished in history as the first black player in organized baseball (in 1878), and his career played out in the white leagues of his day. (For the Hall, Fowler has an added attraction: He grew up in Cooperstown, where his father settled after escaping from slavery). Fowler was said to be an excellent ballplayer, and the willingness of some white teams to employ him between the late 1870s and the mid 1890s would suggest that they saw him as worth the grief that came with playing a black man at the time. But there really is nothing resembling an objective way to evaluate him as a player. Fowler is instead best understood as a pioneer of the game.