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Baseball Hall of Fame: Best of the one-vote guys since 1988

By Bobby Mueller

OAKLAND, CA - 1989: Tony Phillips of the Oakland Athletics runs the bases during a game in the 1989 season at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum in Oakland, California. (Photo by Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images)
OAKLAND, CA - 1989: Tony Phillips of the Oakland Athletics runs the bases during a game in the 1989 season at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum in Oakland, California. (Photo by Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images) /
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Baseball Hall of Fame: Catcher

Best—Gene Tenace, 45.0 fWAR, 16th among catchers

5525 PA, .241/.388/.429, 653 R, 201 HR, 674 RBI

Many of these one-vote guys are well below the standard for the Baseball Hall of Fame and probably shouldn’t have received even the one vote they got. Gene Tenace is not in that category. He comes closer than any other player on this list to the standards for the Baseball Hall of Fame at his position.

According to FanGraphs WAR, Tenace is the 16th best catcher in history. He’s tied with Mike Piazza for the highest wRC+ among all catchers (140, meaning he was 40 percent better than league average on offense after league and ballpark are taken into account). He wasn’t good on the bases and not much behind the plate, but he could hit.

Unfortunately, Tenace played in the wrong era to be fully appreciated. His career went from 1969 to 1983 and included an outstanding eight-year peak from 1973 to 1980, during which he averaged almost 4.7 WAR per season. That’s essentially the seasonal value that Buster Posey has provided the Giants over the last five years (average of 4.8 WAR). Gene Tenace had an eight-year stretch during which he was as good as the previous five years of Buster Posey’s career.

Tenace was an on-base machine who didn’t hit for average at a time when batting average was king. In the middle of his career, he had six seasons in a seven-year stretch in which he walked more than 100 times. He also had five seasons with 20 or more home runs. The brightest moment of his career was winning the MVP Award in the 1972 World Series when he hit .348/.400/.913 and hit four home runs for the Oakland A’s. He also drove in nine of the team’s 16 runs in their seven-game victory.

With just 5525 plate appearances in his career, Tenace didn’t get the playing time to reach the Hall of Fame level in WAR, but he came close. If you divide his WAR by his plate appearances, he was more valuable on a per plate appearances basis than Bill Dickey, Roy Campanella, Gary Carter, and Yogi Berra.

Others—Jim Sundberg (29th), Javy Lopez (39th), Benito Santiago (45th), Terry Steinbach (49th), Rick Dempsey (52nd), Darren Daulton (58th), Terry Kennedy (62nd)

Darren Dalton didn’t get established in the big leagues until he was 28 years old in 1990. He was part of the “No Fear” 1993 Philadelphia Phillies squad that looked like a beer league softball team. That season, he hit 24 homers and drove in 105 runs as the Phillies made it to the World Series, which they lost to the Toronto Blue Jays in six games. He got his World Series ring four years later as a member of the Florida Marlins when they beat Cleveland in seven games. Then he retired.

In retirement, Dalton hosted the “Talking Baseball with Dutch” radio show on WPEN in Philadelphia from 2010 to 2016. In the middle of this stretch, he underwent surgery on two brain tumors and believed he was cancer-free. Sadly, the disease returned early last season, and he died in August at the age of 55.

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