MLB Hall of Fame: Their mortality brought them immortality
If Dick Allen is elected next year, he will hardly be the first to be enshrined in the MLB Hall of Fame soon after his death
If Dick Allen, who died Monday, is – as many expect — elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame next year, he will be only the latest in a string of stars whose immortality appeared to have been enhanced by their mortality.
Allen is considered one of the most likely candidates for enshrinement when the “Golden Days” committee convenes a year from now. Allen was most recently on a Veterans Committee ballot in 2015. He – and Tony Oliva – led the field, but both fell one vote short of election.
Between 1983 and 1997, Allen’s candidacy was considered 14 times by the Baseball Writers Association of America, but he never emerged as a leading candidate. In fact, under present rules, his name would have been removed from the ballot in 1983, when he was supported by just 3.7 percent in his first year of eligibility.
Allen’s candidacy peaked at 18.9 percent in 1996, when he finished 11th. He was a career .292 batter with 351 home runs and 1,119 RBIs over a 15-season career. Playing for the Chicago White Sox, Allen led the American League in both home runs (37) and RBIs (113) in 1972, and led again in home runs in 1974, when he hit 32.
He played nine of his 15 seasons with the Philadelphia in two stints, 1963 through 1969 and 1975-76.
Allen played in one post-season series, the 1976 NLCS, which his Phillies lost to the Cincinnati Reds.
As maudlin as it sounds, Hall decision-makers have a long history of overlooking a candidate until his death, and then suddenly sweeping him into enshrinement. At least a half dozen times in the course of the Hall’s history, candidates lingered on the ballot well into old age without receiving the necessary support, then were elected at the earliest opportunity following their mortality.
We’re not talking here about enshrinees like Roberto Clemente or Lou Gehrig, who were quickly inducted in circumstances anticipating or immediately following an early death. Nor does it consider non-players such as Marvin Miller, who was elected last year following his death, which followed many years of consideration of his candidacy.
Here’s a look at one of the Hall’s oddest, most awkward, election tendencies…one that may find Dick Allen next in the starring role.
Roger Bresnahan
There are those who will tell you that Roger Bresnahan was the best catcher in the game’s first half century.
In 17 seasons with five teams, Bresnahan hit .279 and would have been a perennial All Star had such a thing existed at the time. But he is best remembered as the catcher who handled the great New York Giants staff headed by Christy Mathewson and Joe McGinnity between 1902 and 1908. Mathewson won 191 games in those seven seasons, almost all of them pitching to Bresnahan.
Late in his career, Bresnahan became a field manager with the St. Louis Cardinals, but his teams never finished higher than fourth. In retirement, he purchased a minor league team in his home town of Toledo, later dabbling in politics and other pursuits.
When the Hall of Fame was created, Bresnahan attracted steady support, but only in the 20 to 30 percent range. In the final election of his life, held in 1942, Bresnahan finished only 21st with 24.5 percent of the vote. He was approaching his 63rd birthday at the time.
In December of 1944, the 65-year-old confronted mortality. He suffered a fatal heart attack at his home. A few weeks later, the Hall’s Old-Timers Committee convened to consider candidates who had been ignored by the writers. In his mortality, Bresnahan was immediately moved to the top of their list.
Jimmy Collins
For much of the game’s history. Collins was considered the greatest third baseman to ever play the game. A star in Boston, for the National League Beaneaters from 1896 through 1900 and then for the team that would come to be known as the Red Sox, Collins was a career .294 hitter and by consensus the best gloveman at the hot corner over the course of a 14-season career.
He won a home run title in 1898, although his total of 15 would not impress today. Five times his batting average topped .300, his career best of .346 coming with the 1897 champion Beaneaters. He starred on four pennant winning teams including the first World Series winners, the 1903 Red Sox.
When the Hall held its initial vote in 1936, Collins’ candidacy was hurt by the fact that voting was conducted in two phases: pre-1900 and post-1900. Players like Collins and Cy Young, whose stardom spanned both groups, tended to be hurt by split voting. He peaked at 32.8 percent in 1937.
That may not sound impressive, but it’s worth considering how saturated the ballot was in those early years. The top 20 vote-getters that year, and 26 of the top 30 – have since been inducted.
When Collins’ vote share fell to 29 percent in 1942, Bob Stedler, sports editor of the newspaper in Buffalo where Collins lived, launched a campaign to get him elected to the Hall at the next election in 1945. Collins was 73 and in ill health at the time. He didn’t make it to 1945, dying in March of 1943.
The writers again rejected Collins in 1945, although they did give him his highest vote share of 49 percent. But the Hall’s old-timers committee, voting a few weeks later, elected Collins unanimously alongside Bresnahan.
Herb Pennock
Pennock was a 241-game winning pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics and New York Yankees. He pitched on seven pennant winners, five of which – the 1913 Athletics, 1923, 1927, 1928 and 1932 Yankees – won the World Series.
Pennock won all five of his post-season decisions, with a 1.95 ERA in 10 World Series games.
His best season was probably 1926 when Pennock posted a 23-11 record.
After he retired, Pennock became an executive. In 1943 he was named general manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, running that team from 1944 until his death in 1948.
Pennock’s popularity with Hall of Fame voters built only gradually. Gaining just 7.5 percent support in 1937, his first season on the ballot, he surged to 53.4 percent in 1947. Still that left him only ninth and well short of the 75 percent threshold that had recently been put in place.
Then while attending a meeting of National League executives in January of 1948, Pennock suffered a stroke, dying within hours. Former teammates, among them Babe Ruth, eulogized him profusely. The tide of emotion surrounding his death swept over to the 1948 Hall of Fame vote, which was held only a few weeks later.
In mortality, Pennock leaped to the top of the list of candidates, winning election with 77.9 percent of the vote. He was inducted that summer.
Harry Heilmann
One of the great hitters of Detroit Tigers history, Heilmann played 17 major league seasons, all but two of them for the Tigers. A career .342 batter, he won four batting titles, each of them with prodigious numbers. Heilmann batted .394 in 1921, .403 in 1923, .393 in 1925 and .398 in 1927.
When he retired in 1932, he ranked 11th in batting average. In the intervening 90 seasons, only one player – Ted Williams – has left the game with a higher batting average.
Heilmann was so beloved in Detroit that once his playing days were over he was a natural for the radio booth. Tiger fans could tune in regularly through the 1940s to hear him regale them with stories of his playing days alongside Ty Cobb and other legends.
Somehow, however, he was not as highly thought of elsewhere. Perhaps Heilmann’s problem lay in the perception of him as one-dimensional. Yes, he could hit, but he was slow afoot, an indifferent fielder and with an arm that was average at best.
Perhaps for that reason, his Hall candidacy never took off. In the first five Hall elections, he never got more than 5 percent of the vote. That only began to change in the late 1940s. Still, by 1951 Heilmann’s pulling power had only peaked at 67.7 percent. That left him fourth behind Mel Ott and Jimmie Foxx – both of them inducted – as well as Paul Waner.
The election had been held early in the year. That spring Heilmann was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in July, a few days after Cobb – in a gesture designed to make him feel comfortable in his waning mortality – told Heilmann that Hall of Fame voters had elected him. In truth they had not.
Within months, however, Hall voters gave truth to Cobb’s lie. In the 1952 election, he was the top vote-getter, picking up nearly 50 votes of support from the previous election.
Rabbit Maranville
Maranville played 23 seasons for five teams, but peaked as a 22-year-old second-year star with the Boston Braves in 1914. The team’s shortstop, he led the ‘Miracle Braves’ to a stunning pennant and even more stunning World Series sweep of the Philadelphia Athletics, after which he was runner-up to teammate and double-play partner Johnny Evers in Most Valuable Player voting.
Never much of a hitter, Maranville compiled a lifetime .258 average, a fact that has made him a particular target whenever pundits gather to discuss the least worthy members of the Hall. Following his 1935 retirement, Hall voters accorded him modest recognition, his vote totals generally ranging between 25 and 40 percent. He peaked at 56 percent in 1947, fell back and in 1951 begane another gradual climb.
By then it was a race with Maranville’s own mortality. Although only 60 years old in 1951, it had been a hard 60 years: Maranville’s life was populated with alcohol, late nights, injuries and other inducements to mortality. Chronic heart disease was diagnosed.
Perhaps that incursion into mortality moved voters. He climbed to 52 percent in 1952, and to 62 percent a year later. But in January of 1954, just weeks before that year’s Hall vote was to be taken, Rabbit Maranville succumbed to heart disease. When the Hall votes were counted, he led the ballot at 82 percent. He had gained the support of 76 voters in just two seasons, but missed by weeks living to know of it.
Ron Santo
Santo was a 15-year veteran who held down third base at Wrigley field in Chicago’s North Side for virtually all of that time. He batted .277 with 342 home runs, closing out his playing days in 1974 with the cross-town White Sox. In retirement, he dabbled in private business before returning to Wrigley Field as part of the team’s radio booth.
Despite his numbers, Santo never seemed to catch the enthusiasm of the BBWAA voters. In 15 elections between 1980 and 1998, he annually garnered between 20 and 40 percent, enough to be considered but nowhere near enough for induction.
He fell off the ballot in 1998, peaking at 43 percent. When the hall’s Veterans Committee met in 2004, Santo and Gil Hodges were the leading candidates for induction, both with 52 votes. But that fell eight votes short of the necessary number.
Two years later, Santo again led the veterans ballot, this time drawing 70 percent support and missing by just five votes. By now, the effects of a lifetime fighting diabetes were taking their toll. Santo, 66, had lost one leg to the disease and would soon lose his other.
dark. Next. Keep HoF ballots private until January 1
What turned out to be the last vote of his lifetime took place in 2009. Again Santo led the veterans ballot, and again he fell maddeningly short of election, this time by nine votes. In December of 2010, mortality came to Santo. In his next year of eligibility, 2012, a restructured veterans committee enshrined him with 94 percent of the vote.