Baseball Remembers: Dobie Moore
If he’d been a worse citizen and a better husband, Dobie Moore would be in the Hall of Fame now. I’m pretty certain of that, the principal reason being that there’s an argument to be made that he was the best shortstop ever.
Let’s talk about the shortstop part first, just to establish Moore’s credentials for those who may not be familiar with his game. This is the entire list of everyone in the history of baseball who did the following between the ages of 24 and 30:
Played at least 400 games, at least half at shortstop.
Had a better OPS+ than Dobie Moore.
You get all that? Okay, here’s the full list.
End of list.
Obviously we don’t have the full statistics of every game Moore played between those ages because he played them for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro National League, and complete league records aren’t available. But we do know that on a per-162-game basis, Moore was every bit the all-around player Rodríguez was.
