Educating Twitter: Maris and the Hall

I’m of two minds about this one.

The subject today is Roger Maris, and whether or not he belongs in the Hall of Fame. Secondarily, we have to explain the reasons why he isn’t, specifically whether or not he was punished for breaking a record seemingly no one wanted to see broken. Here’s the origin tweet that launched this exercise:

To get at this I first have to clear the decks a bit, because lots of ground was covered in Upton’s tweet. Let’s start by dealing with “certainly.” No, there isn’t any certainty at all about Roger Maris’ worthiness to be in the Hall of Fame. It may be a certainty in Upton’s mind, or the Maris family’s, or with some famous Yankee fans like Billy Crystal, but they stand in a pretty lonely group.

For most of us there’s tons of uncertainty on that score, and we need look no further for proof of that than the fact that’s Maris’ case has been reviewed by two different bodies of voters a total of 19 times and he’s never received the support of even half of the people voting. That includes four different shots on the Veterans/Eras Committee ballot, the last one being in 2022 when he got so few votes that the total wasn’t reported to save him and the others in his range some public embarrassment.