Baseball Hall of Fame: Veterans Committee has elected some that don’t belong
Earlier this week I started to touch on some of my thoughts on the Hall of Fame’s Veterans Committee, so let’s continue from there.
Regarding Hall of Fame elections, what I really can’t abide by are men like Phil Rizzuto being honored. He played 13 seasons, hit .273, averaged about 70-75 runs and around 50 RBI per year. Yes, he was a valuable player on a team that won a lot, but he was not an elite player by any means, even given the two times he led the AL in fielding percentage or even considering the fact that he missed the opportunity to add to his career stats when he missed playing in three seasons while serving in the US Navy.
Baseball Reference says Rizzutto is comparable to players such as Jose Offerman, Marty Marion, and Claude Ritchey, and nobody argues that those men belong. In fact, the BBWAA never gave Rizutto more than 38.4% of their votes in a given year, and that came in his last time on the ballot in 1976. Then, some 18 years later, after gaining fame as a Yankees announcer, the Veteran’s Committee saw fit to let him join Babe Ruth and Company in Cooperstown.
Why do so many fans and even members of the media outside of New York buy into the nonsense about Yankee mystique? Why do members of the media in New York feel everything has to hyped and why, then, do they insist on inflating (or when it fits their needs to sell papers, deflate) their city’s ballplayers— and, more important, why do the rest of us fall for their “propaganda”?
Furthermore, why do Yankee fans and media types feel that if a player, such as the Scooter, played in x amount of World Series, he should have a leg up on others who, like an Ernie Banks, weren’t fortunate enough to make it to the Fall Classic? By that logic you’d put a Jorge Posada (.273 lifetime, 275 HR, 1065 RBI) in the Hall of Fame.
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By the way, a friend of mine who adores the Yanks says Posada and Paul O’Neill and Bernie Williams (and it seems like virtually any player who ever wore those pinstripes) is a Hall of Famer. Again, a player, on his own merit, either is or isn’t one of the greatest of the games.
Yankee mystique aside, here are just a few other Hall of Famers who didn’t exactly dazzle the BBWAA, but got in thanks to the Veteran’s Committee. Lou Boudreau, who owns a very good .295 batting average, but had only 68 HR, 789 RBI, and fewer than 1,800 lifetime hits. Pee Wee Reese, like Rizutto, was a shortstop from the New York media center during the golden era of the game and he played on strong (Brooklyn Dodgers) teams. He also missed three seasons to time spent in the military. Overall, he hit a mere .269 with just 885 RBI and little power, averaging about 35 extra base hits per season.
George Kell, like Rizutto, was a popular announcer who was also valuable, but not elite. He played a power position, third base, but hit just 78 career homers and drove home just 870 runs. Finally there’s Frank “Home Run” Baker, so named because in a dead ball era in which homers were not something players shot for, and were about as rare as phone booths are nowadays, he swatted two over a six-game World Series in 1911. He also produced 96 lifetime homers, including the 42 he hit when he lead his league in that department each year from 1911 through 1914, the season he led everyone with just nine home runs. He had about five or six good seasons, yet he’s in the Hall of Fame.
Still more to come in Part Three.