The sham that is baseball’s Hall of Fame – Arkansas Online

I try very hard not to care about baseball’s Hall of Fame.

It’s a complete sham–a lot of the players enshrined in Cooperstown are there because they played at the right time, with the right teammates. Frankie Frisch and his cronies, who held sway over the Veterans Committee in the late ’60s and ’70s, packed the place with old-timers who had a good season or two back in the 1930s.

Baseball writers aren’t much better–not only are they sanctimonious and petty, some of them don’t know quality baseball when they see it. It’s shameful that it took 32 years for the Cubs’ Ron Santo to be elected to the Hall. And the shame was compounded by the fact that the Veterans Committee didn’t correct the writers’ oversight until 2012, two years after Santo’s death.

It’s easy to see why Santo was neglected. He played 15 seasons, from 1960 to 1974, and he hit 342 home runs over that span. Those numbers don’t look that impressive today, but at the time he retired he was the second leading home run hitter (after Eddie Matthews) at his position. And when I was a kid, 300 career home runs was a big milestone–like 500 home runs is today.

If you know a little bit about baseball, you might know that pitchers like Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson dominated in the ’60s, to the extent that, following the 1968 season, the pitcher’s mound was lowered from 15 inches to 10 to give hitters a better chance. Casual fans know that Gibson posted a mind-boggling 1.12 earned-run average in 1968, the lowest since Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown posted a 1.04 ERA in 1906, when baseballs were still stuffed with wool and driftwood.

But even more alarming, the game-wide ERA that year was 2.98, the lowest in 50 years. The collective batting average of the American League was .231, and Carl Yastrzemski won the league’s batting title by hitting .301, the lowest average of any batting champion ever.

In the midst of this second dead-ball era, from 1960 to 1968, Santo averaged .281, with 25 home runs and 77 runs batted in, per year. Ho-hum, right? But in that period Santo won four Gold Gloves for fielding over those years, and he was an All-Star six times. (And more importantly, he led the league in walks four times during that span, and in overall on-base percentage twice.)

Then, before the 1969 season, baseball lowered the mound, restricted the strike zone and diluted the pitching ranks by adding four expansion teams. And Santo had arguably his best offensive year. His batting average rose from .246 in 1968 to .289, home runs to 29 from 26, and his RBI total rose to 123 from 98. It’s not unreasonable to wonder how much better Santo’s career numbers would have been had he played his entire career under post-1968 conditions.

It counts against Santo that he faded relatively early; only 28 years old in 1968, he played his last game at 34. He didn’t reach any of what are now considered traditional milestones–no .300 career average, no 500 home runs, no 3,000 hits. And even if you believe that his numbers from 1960 to 1968 were depressed by a factor of 10 percent–a very generous assumption–he wouldn’t have wound up close to those numbers.

And by the time Santo became eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1980, the Phillies’ Mike Schmidt was coming off his best year–a year in which he’d led the National League with 48 home runs and 121 RBI while hitting .286. Santo’s power numbers looked anemic next to that line.

But 1980 wasn’t 1968, or even 1969. We can’t know what Schmidt’s numbers would look like had he been born in 1940, like Santo, instead of 1949. We do know is it was harder to make the majors in Santo’s era because there were fewer teams.

Schmidt made his major league debut in 1972 when he was 22. He played in 13 games. Santo came up as a 20-year-old and quickly established himself as the Cubs’ everyday third baseman. He played 95 games his first season, finishing fourth in the Rookie of the Year balloting, and stayed there until the end of the 1973 season when he was traded across town to the White Sox.

For whatever reason, it took Schmidt longer to establish himself. And when he did, conditions were more favorable to hitters than they were for the first nine years of Santo’s career. It’s reasonable to assume Schmidt would have had a different career had he broken in in the ’60s.

My point is not that Santo may have been better than Schmidt. I don’t think he was. But I think he was pretty close, and that’s borne out by the new age wins above replacement stat–as a Cub, Santo averaged 5.1 wins per season above the “average” replacement player, while Schmidt averaged 6. That’s a meaningful difference, perhaps, but is it the difference between being a first-ballot Hall of Famer and having to literally die to get into Cooperstown?

Stupid writers. You see the same phenomenon playing out now. Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza, voted into the Hall last week, are deserving. (Piazza should have been in last year, but somebody thought the acne on his back was evidence of steroid use.) But so were about 10 others who didn’t get in. And because the writers are limited to voting for 10 players on their ballot, the bottleneck of worthy players will continue. (The problem is exacerbated by writers who vote for fewer than 10 players, reckoning, I suppose, that the HOF ought to be more exclusive, or cast a sentimental vote for a favorite like Fred Kendall or David Eckstein. Three writers didn’t vote for Griffey, maybe because they wanted to deny him the honor of unanimous election.)

For the time being, let’s leave aside the PED cases of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens–the best hitter of all time and the best pitcher of his generation–and the tainted by association Jeff Bagwell. I still count seven no doubt Hall of Famers on the ballot–Edgar Martinez, Tim Raines, Mike Mussina, Alan Trammel, Billy Wagner, Trevor Hoffman and Lee Smith–and a couple of borderline cases–Curt Schilling and Fred McGriff.

I’m hopeful Raines, Martinez, Hoffman and Bagwell get in soon. I think Schilling probably will.

But most of the rest won’t. Smith has a couple of years left on the ballot. This was Trammel’s last year. Wagner’s support was shockingly light, despite his being one of the most dominant pitchers of all time.

I know, it shouldn’t matter. And it’s called the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Really Good Baseball Players. And if you’re talking celebrity, name recognition, or Q score, then sure, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa should get in. (Pete Rose should get in anyway, though I’m starting to believe he sees an advantage in being banned from baseball.) We could just open up and let people text in their votes, American Idol-style. It couldn’t get any worse.

Not that I care about the Hall of Fame.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Editorial on 01/10/2016