As promised, my take:

• The voters finally stopped screwing Goose Gossage. This business about Bruce Sutter paving the way for him is absolute garbage. Gossage came first and was a better pitcher.
• They completely dropped the ball on Tim Raines. There is no way in Hades that Jim Rice was a better player than Raines. Why folks in charge of this sort of thing fail to recognize this is beyond me.
• Speaking of outfielders, if Andre Dawson is a legitimate borderline candidate, then Dave Parker deserves much more serious consideration than he’s getting.
• Jack Morris was not a better player than Alan Trammell. Sorry, he just wasn’t.
• How many years will it take Lee Smith to overcome the idiocy that kept Gossage out for so long?

Sigh. I’ve probably missed some others, but I hate to work myself up over this stuff. I just would like to see the folks in charge of these things do a better job of it. Is that so much to ask? Apparently it is.

Post from: Knuckle Curve

1. Billy Williams (133 OPS+)
2. Tony Perez (122)
3. Dave Parker (121)
4. Al Kaline (134)
5. Harold Baines (120)
6. Dwight Evans (127)
7. Ernie Banks (122)
8. Dave Winfield (130)
9. Luis Gonzalez (119)
10. Vada Pinson (110)

As a point of reference, Dawson’s OPS+ was 119. Anyway, five of these guys have been enshrined in Cooperstown: Williams, Perez, Kaline, Banks, and Winfield. Of those five, three were clearly superior players: Williams, Kaline, and Winfield.

The other two guys? Banks spent half his career playing shortstop and hit 500+ homers. Yeah, Dawson spent half his career playing center field and fell a little short of the mystical, magical home run total. He also didn’t get quite the same media coverage in Montreal that Banks did in Chicago, although of course that changed later, when Dawson played for the Cubs. Unfortunately that version of Dawson — MVP in ‘87 notwithstanding — isn’t the one that was headed toward a potential Hall of Fame career before his knees stopped doing what knees are supposed to do.

That leaves us with a lot of really good players. Parker basically is the same as Perez, only he got hurt, had a drug problem, and didn’t play for the Big Red Machine. Baines was a brilliant hitter, but thanks to the American League’s designated hitter experiment, he wore a mitt in just 81 games over his final 15 big-league seasons. Make him play the field, like in baseball, and he’s not even part of the discussion.

Luis Gonzalez is still playing, but he doesn’t fit my idea of a Hall of Famer. That is a poor justification for keeping someone out, but I’m sure I could find better reasons if I looked. Oh, here: Dwight Evans. He was a much better player than Gonzalez, and he’s not in Cooperstown. In fact, you could make a very strong case for Evans over Dawson (or Perez, for that matter).

Evans’ main problems were that he played alongside flashier guys (i.e., Jim Rice) and that his career year coincided with a players strike. Evans still has the Fenway thing working against him (though not to the degree that Rice does), but I’d be more inclined to buy into his candidacy than Dawson’s.

The big issue for me with Dawson is that I find myself making excuses for the guy as a way to get him into the Hall. Well, if he hadn’t rotted in Montreal for the first decade of his career. Or if he hadn’t gotten hurt. The thing is, he did rot in Montreal and did get hurt. If we’re willing to cut him slack for those “transgressions,” then we need to start lowering our standards and admit guys like Dale Murphy and the aforementioned Parker.

If you do that, then what do you tell Bobby Grich, Tommy John, Jim Kaat, Alan Trammell, and probably dozens of others? Oh, sorry, you’re too late; better luck in some other universe…

Post from: Knuckle Curve