Free Friday: A Hall of Fame Special
So I did a bit of light Hall of Fame research that didn’t get into my last post, so I figure I’ll give that to you here — this is a handy-dandy “Who are the best players not in the Baseball Hall of Fame?” list, for clipping and sharing.* Happy holidays!
For this one, I’m only looking at post-World War II players, with just one exception. There’s obviously plenty to say about John Donaldson and Bill Dahlen and Jim McCormick and so on, but I’ll save that for another time.
*Since I looked up all the Win Shares totals as part of the research — and they’re not as easily accessible as Baseball-Reference or FanGraphs WAR — I’ll put those in as well. But, as you will see, Win Shares was not the only thing I used to come up with these lists. I rank them based on my own snap opinion of them as players and baseball icons.
Retired players who I believe will be elected:
Albert Pujols (508 WS). Eligible to come on the ballot in 2028, will be elected in 2028, perhaps unanimously.
Ichiro Suzuki (323 WS). Eligible to come on the ballot next year, will be elected next year, perhaps unanimously.
Adrián Beltré (373 WS). Eligible for the first time this year, he will be elected this year (though I suspect not unanimously).
Todd Helton (318 WS). Finished 11 votes shy of election last year. I have to believe he will get those votes.
Billy Wagner (182 WS). Finished 27 votes shy of election last year. I am not as confident he will get the needed votes as I am that Helton will, but I’m guessing he will.
CC Sabathia (242 WS). I think he will get elected. There will probably be Andy Pettitte fans and maybe Mark Buehrle fans who will say their lefthander was as good as Sabathia, and they will come armed with stats to prove it, but I think Sabathia was just a cut above and I think he gets the vote.
Andruw Jones (276 WS). Below, I talk about how Win Shares and WAR don’t see eye to eye at all on Gary Sheffield. Well, Andruw Jones is basically the mirror version of that; Win Shares isn’t nearly as convinced by Jones’ Hall of Fame value as WAR is. But I think the Andruw Jones train is rolling now, he received 58% of the vote last year, and I think that train stops at Cooperstown.
Retired players who I think have a shot at getting elected:
Joe Mauer (306 WS). Who doesn’t love Joe Mauer?
Chase Utley (291 WS). I’m utterly fascinated to see how his first year on the ballot turns out.
Jimmy Rollins (303 WS). Am I imagining things, or is the Jimmy Rollins’ momentum building?
Players not in the Hall of Fame because of steroid suspicions:
Barry Bonds (702 WS). I didn’t see Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig or Mickey Mantle in their primes. I didn’t see Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Roberto Clemente or Al Kaline in their primes. Barry Bonds is the greatest baseball player I ever saw.
Roger Clemens (437 WS). Underrated as a younger pitcher, overrated as an older one, his career, as Tom Tango has written, is essentially Pedro Martinez (256 WS) PLUS Sandy Koufax (194 WS)
Alex Rodriguez (491 WS). It’s yet to be seen if his very public persona will wilt the voters’ cold hearts. One of the purest five-tool talents in the game’s history.
Manny Ramirez (409 WS). Probably not a genius in any other part of his life, but at the plate, he was Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare and Carlsen rolled into one.
Mark McGwire (342 WS). The only player I know who filled ballparks BEFORE games even began, because people just wanted to see him take batting practice.
Gary Sheffield (430 WS). One of the very big arguments between the various WAR systems and Win Shares is Gary Sheffield … the WAR systems having him worth 61 or so wins above replacement, making him a good but hardly slam-dunk Hall of Fame candidate. Win Shares has him as one of the 50 best players in baseball history. The fighting point seems to be his defense; WAR has him as one of the worst long-time fielders in baseball history, but Win Shares doesn’t see it that way.
Rafael Pameiro (394 WS). Not as great a ballplayer as A-Rod, of course, but like A-Rod, Raffy had 3,000 hits and 500 home runs over his career. He continues to insist that he did not use PEDs.
Sammy Sosa (321 WS). You probably know this weird statistical fact; Sosa hit 60-plus homers THREE TIMES and didn’t lead the league in home runs in any of those seasons. He did lead the league in homers twice, with 50 in 2000 and 49 in 2002.
Kevin Brown (242 WS). I don’t know that Kevin Brown would have received much serious Hall of Fame consideration anyway, but I can’t imagine him falling off the ballot in his first year if he had not been named in the Mitchell report.
Juan Gonzalez (233 WS). Another player who wasn’t likely to get elected anyway, but there was a fairly big PR push for the two-time MVP … and his getting named by Jose Canseco certainly didn’t help.*
*Though getting named by Canseco was not entirely disqualifying, as Canseco wrote that he personally injected Ivan Rodriguez with steroids, and Pudge 2.0 was elected first-ballot.
Players not in the Hall of Fame for various non-baseball reasons:
Pete Rose (549 WS). At pretty much every appearance I make, someone asks me my opinion on Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame. I used to give my full view, which I’ve written many times, but now I say that the question is moot. It honestly doesn’t matter what I think or, really, what anybody thinks. It’s clear to me now that Rose will never be elected to the Hall of Fame, not while he’s alive and not after he passes away, either.
Carlos Beltran (369 WS). We don’t yet know how this will play out — Beltran received 47% of the vote in his first year on the ballot — but the questions surrounding his case have little to do with his Hall of Fame worth as a player and a lot to do with how voters view his role in the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal.
Shoeless Joe Jackson (294 WS). Even though he obviously played before World War II, he’s very much a modern figure because of “Field of Dreams.” I can’t begin to count all the people who were upset that I did not put Shoeless Joe in the final version of The Baseball 100, which is actually kind of funny, considering exactly zero percent of them saw him play.
Curt Schilling (252 WS). There’s a spectacular irony playing out in the Curt Schilling Hall of Fame drama, one that I wonder if he will ever fully grasp. Schilling, as you probably know, has waged a longstanding war with a certain group of sportswriters. This led to him, eventually, asking for his name to be withdrawn from the Hall of Fame ballot because he has so little respect for sportswriters’ views. “I’ll defer to the veterans committee and men whose opinions actually matter,” he said. The irony? Unless I’m very wrong (which I certainly could be), he had a MUCH better chance of getting elected to the Hall of Fame by the sportswriters than by any veterans committee. In fact, if he’d have just shut his yap, he’d be in Cooperstown right now.
Best remaining players not in the Hall of Fame:
Lou Whitaker (352 WS). In my view, the Hall of Fame will never live down the missed opportunity to put Whitaker and Alan Trammell in the Hall of Fame together. I suspect Whitaker will get elected at some point in the relatively near future, but it won’t be the same.
Dwight Evans (347 WS). It’s utterly unclear to me why Evans was so cavalierly cast aside by the writers in 1999. He had the fourth-most Win Shares among position players on the ballot, behind only George Brett, Robin Yount and Carlton Fisk. He has 65 more Win Shares than his teammate Jim Rice, who was eventually elected.
Dick Allen (352 WS). It’s shameful that Dick Allen fell one vote short of election in 2015. That year, the veterans committee didn’t vote anybody in. It was inexcusable then and more than a little bit tragic now after Allen died in December of 2020.
Luis Tiant (256 WS). I worry, really worry, that the veterans committees are going to make the same mistake with Tiant that they did with Allen. El Tianté is 83 years old, he’s baseball royalty, he’s as beloved as any player living today, I mean, what’s the holdup? Stop overthinking this nonsense and get this man into Cooperstown already.
Tommy John (289 WS). Like so many, I was thrilled to see Jim Kaat elected to the Hall of Fame; he has lived an extraordinary baseball life and is so utterly deserving. John was better in pretty much every way. He also has to rank as the most name-checked retired baseball player on earth, ahead of Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron. His election is long overdue.
Bobby Grich (329 WS). It’s sad but true that the two players whose legacies were probably hurt the most by the 1981 strike are Dewey Evans and Bobby Grich, and they are two of the best players not elected to the Hall of Fame. Grich and Evans tied for the league lead in homers in that shortened season, On top of that, Grich led the league in slugging. An MVP that season might have put one or the other over the top, who knows?
Graig Nettles (321 WS). He played in a time where someone with a .248 batting average simply could not be elected to the Hall of Fame. When he retired in 1991, there was only one player in the Hall of Fame with a sub-.260 batting average, and that was Deadball era catcher Ray Schalk. After him was .262-hitting Luis Aparicio, who was elected because of his electrifying defense and 500-plus stolen bases. Well, Nettles was equally electrifying defensively, but at third base, not short, so it didn’t really count in the voters’ eyes. And Nettles’ 390 career home runs are exponentially more valuable than those stolen bases, but, again, the voters left unimpressed. I’m hoping Nettles’ Hall of Fame case starts to gain momentum.
Dale Murphy (294 WS). Sure, this is a personal choice, but hey, I should be writing my football book now, anyway, so I get a personal choice. I’m often asked by somewhat casual baseball fans why Dale Murphy is not in the Hall of Fame, and the last thing they want to hear is that his career WAR falls short. I try to explain that his peak was short, he didn’t fully give up catching until he was 24 and he dramatically declined after age 31. But in those eight seasons (one shorted by the strike), he won two MVPs, five Gold Gloves and had four seasons with 30-plus Win Shares. And, of course, he has always been a credit to baseball. To me, the Hall of Fame could use a little bit more heart.
Dave Parker (321 WS). I’ve come around quite a bit on Dave Parker. I think his rather incredible career has been diminished by two things: His drug use in the early 1980s and his sub-Hall-of-Fame 41-ish career WAR. His pretty high Win Shares total (Bill James says that 325 Win Shares players are expected to be elected) is a reminder that there is another way to look at the numbers. Parker was a so damned good and complete player between 1975 and 1979, hit for average, hit for extra-base power, stole some bases, won Gold Gloves, had a bazooka for an arm, he was the best player in the National League in that window between a declining Joe Morgan and ascending Mike Schmidt. Then when he got older he became a big ol’ slugger, twice leading the league in total bases.
Darrell Evans (363 WS). Let’s pause for a moment to talk about Darrell Evans.
Nobody ever talks about Darrell Evans as a Hall of Famer, and I suspect this is in part because his WAR (58.7/61.1), while good, doesn’t put him near the top of filtered search lists.
The bigger reason, surely, is that he wasn’t often viewed as a great or even especially good player when he played. I’ve talked about how baseball card dealers used to categorize players as “Stars,” “Minor Stars” and “Commons.” Darrell Evans was ALWAYS a common; he wasn’t even a minor star. He made two All-Star teams in his career, never finished top 10 in the MVP voting, hit .248 and drove in 100 runs once in his entire career. He never won a Gold Glove.
Even Win Shares, which ranks him among the Top 100 all-time, rarely sees him as a real MVP candidate. His best year was 1973, when he hit .281/.403/.446 with 41 homers, had career highs in runs and RBIs and led the league in walks. He played superb third-base defense that year too. And even so, Win Shares has him sixth, behind Joe Morgan, Willie Stargell, Pete Rose, Tony Perez and Bobby Bonds. And that’s in his BEST season; he never had another 30 Win Shares season.
Still, he was so utterly consistent, putting up 20-30 Win Shares seasons eight times and adding another seven seasons between 9 and 19 Win Shares. and he played for such a long time that when you add it all up, he’s got more career Win Shares than, among others, Brooks Robinson, Johnny Bench, Ryne Sandberg, Andre Dawson and so on.
How do you make sense of a career like that? When Darrell Evans retired after the 1989 season with 414 home runs, there were only 20 Hall of Fame-eligible players in baseball history with 400 homers … and every single one of them was in the Hall. It was clear that streak wasn’t going to continue because in 1986, Dave Kingman retired with 442 home runs and nobody thought Kong was going to the Hall (he eventually got just three votes).
Of course, Evans was a much better player than Kingman.
When Evans retired, he was eighth on the all-time list — EIGHTH — in career walks. Evans actually walked more times in his career than Stan Musial or Pete Rose did. Take a look at the seven ahead of Evans on the list at that time, and you can get a sense of the scope:
Babe Ruth, 2,062 walks
Ted Williams, 2,021 walks
Joe Morgan, 1,865 walks
Carl Yastrzemski, 1,845 walks
Mickey Mantle, 1,733 walks
Mel Ott, 1,708 walks
Eddie Yost, 1,614 walks
Darrell Evans, 1,605 walks
Look at that — six all-time greats and Eddie Yost, who was known ONLY for walking, so much so they called him The Walking Man (he walked 125 or more times in eight different seasons*).
Of course, Darrell Evans was a much better player than Yost.
*Note to self: Write an Eddie Yost post when you have a few free, non-book-writing moments.
What do you do with a career like that? I’m not entirely sure. I do feel confident, though, that we don’t talk enough about Darrell Evans.
What's with three 'keep going until..' and then a hard stop. Can't we get a 'be like the Energizer Bunny and just keep going and going and...'
Joe, please write about whatever and whomever you want.