Replies

The ballot does instruct the voters that a player's character is to be taken into consideration as part of the vote. Some of the voters ignore this clause, but most of them don't. It's obviously a big part of the reason why Mark McGwire (one of the all-time great sluggers) can't get even 25%.

I wrote the following as part of a blog entry on this year's Hall results:

Yes, he has been punished enough for the evidence of things not seen. For the evidence of things seen, we might try to remember
a) Actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances have not really been proven to enhance much more, if anything, than muscle mass, which is not by itself equal to no-questions-asked intergalactic long ball power.
b) Androstendione---which McGwire used, by his own admission, for muscle replenishment primarily (you'd think muscle replenishment was a crime of itself, sometimes), rather than the way earlier baseball generations popped the greenies for stamina replenishment---was not illegal when he was using the sustance, which use he did cease and desist after it was first revealed.
c) McGwire was a murderous bombardier before 1998. (He isn't alone---one of the easiest things to forget about Barry Bonds was that he did have tape-measure home run power from his collegiate days; the power-speed combination he had deked baseball people into thinking he was the second, superior coming of his old man, and the Pittsburgh Pirates were fool enough to insist on seeing the combine and thinking "Bobby Jr." and to keep him locked in a leadoff role that didn't even begin exploiting the depth of his talent.)
We sure do forget that McGwire actually could do a few other things well, too. Want to carp on his strikeouts? Tell it to Reggie Jackson. Before his injuries began chipping away at him, McGwire was a good first baseman who might have bagged more than a single Gold Glove.
Mark McGwire didn't have to grovel to return to baseball as the St. Louis Cardinals' batting instructor. He shouldn't have to grovel---over using what was lawful when he used it; over being accused without trial or conviction of a chemical regimen that may or may not have done a blessed thing for him in the long run; for taking the wrong legal advice before facing the House Committee on Sending Swell Messages to Kids (thanks again, Mr. Will), all without a shred of evidence to proclaim him once and for all a chemical production, and is this about cleaning up the game for real or just a variant on the old-school cops who seemed more interested in beating prisoners than getting valuable or productive information---to get into the Hall of Fame, either.
And nobody ever accused McGwire of being a clubhouse cancer. Not even Jose Canseco. Come to think of it, nobody's ever accused McGwire or walking around moaning to anyone who'd listen that he's baseball's wronged man, either. Unlike some who actually did break baseball rules at the time they were rules.

I had a few things to say about a few of the other guys who didn't make it this time, too:

BARRY LARKIN---He's probably hurt because his career intersected well enough to Ozzie Smith's that it's easy to forget he was the best-fielding shortstop in the National League who wasn't named The Wiz; and, because it intersected well enough to Alex Rodriguez's shortstop life that it's easy to forget he was a) one of the best-hitting shortstops in the game, who b) could hit leadoff or third with authority, and c) is probably one of the ten greatest shortstops who ever played the game. I thought he'd get in on the first ballot and I think he'll get in in due course. And he deserves to get in.
EDGAR MARTINEZ---I'm on the fence with him. He has gaudy rate stats, but Tom Verducci points out something that's going to make it tough for him to get to Cooperstown no matter what you think of his long career as a purely designated hitter: He only had four seasons in which he played 150 games or more with a 120+ adjusted OPS, which ties him since 1987 with thirty six players including . . . Richie Sexson.
DON MATTINGLY---He's the Dale Murphy of first basemen, even if his home-road differential is better. His injuries buried him enough to keep him out of no-questions-asked Hall contention, but until they began chipping away at him in earnest he was probably the best all-around first baseman in the American League.
FRED McGRIFF---I think he'll make it sooner or later. In time people are going to see the Crime Dog was a better run long-term run producer than he looks at initial glances. And if you can name one first baseman who hit twenty bombs or more a season for fourteen seasons or better who isn't named McGriff, well, mister you're a better man than I.
JACK MORRIS---I'm still on the fence with Morris. I can't really reconcile his reputation as a big-game pitcher to his actuality as a pitcher who probably did pitch to the score preponderantly enough, leaving his wins to reflect his teammates' as much, if not slightly more than, his own performances.
And yet . . . and yet . . . Morris is the Andre Dawson of pitchers without Dawson's reputation for wonderfulness. One minute you think no, the next you think yes, and the dilemna is not unattractive.
The classic dumb move of Morris's career: Hitting the road on tour to feel out his market at the onset of the first collusion, then meeting with the Minnesota Twins in a rather expensive-looking fur. On the other hand, it wasn't even half as stupid as Lou Whitaker showing up for a bargaining session during the 1994 strike in a stretch limousine. Jack Morris may have behaved like a mercenary over the final half of his career but he wasn't that dim.
And though I think the world of that magnificent, surreal ten-inning, Game Seven, 1991 World Series-winning shutout, I know I saw one better: Sandy Koufax's nine-inning, Game Seven, 1965 World Series-winning shutout. And I will tell you why Koufax's was the better game:
a) His usually surreal curve ball was a dead issue by that point; his arthritically-compromised arm was exhausted enough to make gripping a forkball (his usual, periodic change-of-pace serving) problematic. Koufax was working with nothing left but a fastball that only mimicked its infamous self.
b) He was also working on two days' rest for the second time in just over a week. He'd pitched and won the pennant clincher on two days' rest.
c) He was medicated heavily enough, because of the arthritic arm, to leave him a little high and enough at the mercy of a line drive back up the pipe to take his head off if he couldn't and didn't react with customary swiftness.
It's no disgrace to say Jack Morris wasn't exactly in Sandy Koufax's league. Nobody else was, either.
DALE MURPHY---He's the Don Mattingly of outfielders. He was also Jim Rice without the reputed attitude problems---a home-road split too wide, with his home park during his peak seasons just too yummy a hitter's park, and he, too, was curtailed by injuries at a peak near enough to when Rice was curtailed. If you were picking a Hall of Famer on character alone, however, Murphy would win it with about a hundred nautical miles to spare.
DAVE PARKER---Cocaine use and injuries sapped him out of solidifying a Hall of Fame case. The Cobra was certainly on the proper route before those matters occurred.
But if you want to found a Hall of Fame class on good people who really do learn from their foolishness, Parker would go in the inaugural class with Tim Raines right by his side. Parker cleaned up and once again became clubhouse class, strong-arm division, especially on one of those late-1980s Oakland Athletics teams.
Where is Dave Parker when you need a clubhouse enforcer? The A's always knew, sooner or later, they'd need Big Dave to quell a cellblock riot, just as the '77 Reds desperately missed Tony Perez after they traded him. In '88 Canseco popped off about beating the Dodgers in five games. The Dodgers won in five. In '89 Parker promised to clean, stuff, and mount Jose if he spoke above a whisper. The A's swept. Now Dave's gone. Jose predicted a sweep. General manager Sandy Alderson makes a lot of good moves, but saving money on Parker may have cost him a world title.
---Thomas Boswell, Washington Post, 22 October 1990; republished in "1990: Hubris, the Sequel," in Cracking the Show. (New York: Doubleday, 1994.)

TIM RAINES---Don't knock the Rock. You may wish to murder me for this, but Allen Barra (in Clearing the Bases) was absolutely right: Raines's fifteen best seasons shake out as being better than the fifteen best of a should-be Hall of Famer who was practically his match, a switch-hitter with a little power who extorted his way on base and hit early in the lineup.
The player is Pete Rose.
Citing Total Baseball's estimate of the fifteen best seasons by Rose and Raines, Barra shook them out thus: it took Rose 204 more games to reach base 34 more times a season than Raines in the career shakeout, and to produce 9.3 more runs a season.
That Rose had to play in 204 more games to do that convinces me that Raines was, perhaps, more skilled than Rose in the art of producing runs. The question is, does Rose's durability automatically make him more valuable? After all, he did accumulate more total runs.
Actually, the question is a great deal more complex than that. First of all, although he played alongside some fine hitters in Gary Carter and Andre Dawson, Raines had nothing like the career-long quality of teammates that was afforded Pete Rose. Rose played nearly all his best years on the Reds with teammates such as Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, and Dave Concepcion, and on the Phillies, he batted in front of Mike Schmidt and Greg Luzinski. Given Raines's greater home run total and far superior speed, I think if he batted in front of the same hitters Rose had, he would have produced not only more runs but signficantly more runs per season---and remember that's in 200 fewer games. Second, think of how many fewer outs Raines would have used up to produce those runs, and how many more runs those outs would have produced spread around the lineup.

This isn't even beginning to consider the point that Raines probably hung up an uncounted extra parcel of runs by his more consistent ability to go first to third or second and even first to home on base hits, an ability Rose didn't always have despite his reputation as diving Charlie Hustle.
The Rock's big problem is that he didn't leave a glaring statistical benchmark by which to judge him, not even the 200-hit season. On the other hand . . . so what of it? Do you think a decade of 200-hit seasons equals an automatic, no-questions-asked great hitter? Then why would you consider as mediocre hitters one Hall of Famer who had six measly 200-hit seasons; a second Hall of Famer who had three such seasons; a pair of Hall of Famers who had exactly one such season; and another pair who had exactly no such seasons? Now, tell me you plan to argue that Pete Rose was a greater hitter than Stan Musial (the six), Babe Ruth (the three), Willie Mays (one), Frank Robinson (one, too), Ted Williams (never), or Mickey Mantle (neither did he).
Better, still, tell me why you would think Pete Rose was a better hitter than a guy who was his near-equal skill-set player but, over their fifteen best seasons each, reached base more often, used less outs to get there (ponder, too, that Raines was so good at wringing out walks he wouldn't have put up three thousand hits even without losing so much time to cocaine addiction---to which he copped and sought treatment on his own---and lupus), hit with a little more power, produced quite a few more runs, and had hugely superior speed?
"Simply put," Barra concluded, "all the indications are that under the same conditions and in the same situations, Tim Raines would have produced at least as many and probably more runs than Pete Rose. That's not going to make him as hot an item on the autograph circuit as Pete Rose, but it ought to be good enough to get Tim Raines a plaque at Cooperstown."
Indeed. But you don't have to make him a might-have-been case. What was should be enough.
And, just for the record, Tim Raines also reached base more and scored more runs than Tony Gwynn.
ALAN TRAMMELL---I'm still where I was last year: a long career with a photo-finish Hall of Fame case leaves me, still, thinking that while I'm not completely convinced you can cross him over the border safely, I'm not completely convinced that you can't.
And, sorry, but since enough people insist on dragging him into the discussion in that way, still, here we go again:

DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT . . .
PETE ROSE---Let's get it out of the way right now, and hopefully for all time until a certain condition is changed: Pete Rose does not belong in any Hall of Fame discussion, whatsoever, period-dot-period, until or unless the Hall changes its 1990-91 ruling that no player on baseball's ineligible list can be considered eligible for Hall candidacy.
Do you remember why the Hall passed the rule? I do. There was a very real chance the Baseball Writers Association of America in 1990-91 was going to elect Rose to Cooperstown in spite of his being banned from baseball, an election that would have traduced a long-standing tradition (it was never a formal rule before that point, but it was honoured among generations of voting writers) that those on the ineligible list wouldn't be elected to the Hall of Fame or even considered as candidates. (I can think of two such players prior to Rose, both teammates on the infamous 1919 White Sox, who would have been no-questions-asked Hall of Famers except for the scandal: Joe Jackson and Eddie Cicotte.)
Do you really want to explain why someone who isn't eligible to wear a uniform or hold any job in organised professional baseball anywhere, for anyone, or who needs special dispensation just to show up in a ballpark, should be eligible to receive the highest known honour in the game, even if the Hall of Fame is not in and of itself a division or branch of formally organised professional baseball?
Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame. His overall record supports it, even if I happen to agree that there but for the grace of breaking Ty Cobb's lifetime hits record should he have waited a couple of years past year one to get in. Absent Cobb, I'm not completely convinced he would have been or should have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Second? Perhaps. Third? Surely.
But should Rose be in the Hall of Fame in spite of being banished from baseball?
No way.
"Pete Rose isn't banned from baseball just because he's a bad person. He's banned because he broke the rules," Bill James has written. "As Tom Heitz says, the problem with Pete Rose isn't that he gambled. The problem is that he broke the rule against gambling . . . [y]ou don't begin the rehabilitation of [Pete Rose] by putting him in the Hall of Fame. That's where you end it."
And that's where you end the discussion. That's where the discussion should have ended, long enough ago.

Me, I'll be looking forward to seeing Alomar and the Rock on the podium next year, at least. I'd like to think Blyleven will make it at last, too, since this time he missed by a mere five votes . . .