I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but it seems every year the controversy rises up about who is worthy to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. By now you know that Barry Larkin was the only player voted in by the writers to the Class of 2012.
Maybe it’s some sort of historical mystique, but as I get older I find the majority of the players for whom I have a personnel recollection don’t seem to measure up to the old timers like Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, etc. Jeff Kent? Jeff Bagwell? Jack Morris? Barry Larkin? Yes, I know they were good, perhaps even great, but Hall-worthy?
(Then there’s the inevitable “If X is in the Hall of Fame, then so should Y.” Here’s a case from The Wall Street Journal comparing Larkin with the Detroit Tiger’s Alan Trammel.)
And yes, I know there are a ton of metrics out there that can be used to show that Kent compares favorably with other second basemen who have been enshrined in Cooperstown, but havign watched him, I have a hard time reconciling it.
Maybe my “requirements” are too stringent. I certainly disagree with this blogger who thinks the Hall should be more inclusive. There’s a great line in A League of Their Own in which Jimmy Duggan, the manager of the Rockford Peaches, tells his star player, who says she would not come back for another season because the game has become too hard, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great” (the sentiment is correct even if the lines aren’t verbatim).
The Hall is supposed to be for the best of the best. Sure, the game has changed over the years. There are dozens of articles claiming Ruthian-era players wouldn’t fare as well under contemporary conditions (night games, relief pitchers, bigger gloves), but I still think you have to be something special to merit inclusion, and with all due respect to the majority of current and future nominees, I don’t see it.
Needless to say, there are several books that address the topic, including
- Cooperstown by the Numbers: An Analysis of Baseball Hall of Fame Elections
- Baseball’s Hall of Fame-or Hall of Shame?
- They Tasted Glory: Among the Missing at the Baseball Hall of Fame
- Out by a Step: The 100 Best Players Not in the Baseball Hall of Fame
- Baseball’s Best: Hall of Fame Pretenders Active in the Eighties
- Outrageous Fortune: What’s Wrong With Hall of Fame Voting, and How to Make It Statistically Sound
Here are a few additional links for your edification:
- Adam Darowski on “The Hall of Fame and the Myth of Exclusivity” (with more on Beyond the Boxscore)
- Which active players are Hall of Fame worthy? (ESPN)
- An All-Haiku review of the 2012 HoF results (Value Over Replacement grit)
- A preview of the 2013 election (Rob Neyer/Baseball Nation) and another (Tim Kurkjian/ESPN). Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens will be on the ballot, so this will be an interesting test (see also, Mark McGwire).
- Allen Barra asks why aren’t Richie Allen and Tim Raines in the Hall? (Atlantic)
- A look at the process from Eric Nussbaum on The Classical (one of my favorite sports sites).
is available on Amazon.com,
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