Guess The Players: Four Corner Outfielders
I didn’t make this point explicitly when I compared the careers of Harold Baines and Dwight Evans, but the Hall of Fame creates a real problem for itself when it elects players who aren’t up the the standards of the other players who are already enshrined. Specifically, Evans is so obviously better than Baines that it begs the question of why Evans wasn’t the one elected.
The problem I’m talking about, however, isn’t exactly that one. People have always, and will always, argue that Player X deserves to be in the Hall of Fame because he was better than Player Y, who is a Hall of Famer. The more dangerous argument, in my view, is when people argue that Player X should be in the Hall of Fame not because he’s better than Player Y, but because he’s equal to Player Y, with Player Y being someone who really shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame.
For instance, instead of comparing Baines to the obviously better Evans, let’s put him next to a pair of roughly equal players who were primarily right fielders or designated hitters:
Do you see much difference between Baines and Chili Davis or Dave Parker? I don’t. Their careers are roughly interchangeable, in my view. WAR totals bear that out: All three had between 38.2 (Davis) and 40.1 (Parker), too narrow a difference to bother with.
I’ve seen a few arguments for Dave Parker to be inducted over the years, and he received significantly more support than Baines in Hall of Fame voting when he was eligible, but still never topped 25%. As for Davis, the next argument I see for his induction will be the first. He received 3 votes in 2005, his only year on the ballot. But, now that Baines has been elected - an essentially equal player, from the same position and time period - supporters of Parker and/or Davis could make the argument that one or both of them was the equal of a Hall of Famer, and therefore they should be elected, too. In Parker’s case, folks have already made that point.
With all of that in mind, let’s play another guessing game. Here are four corner outfielders who all played the bulk of their careers during or prior to Word War II. Before giving you their career statistics, I’ll give you their photos:
Other than the glasses on #3, they’re a pretty nondescript group, and I’m betting you don’t recognize any of them. Here are their career statistics, and I’ll include the years they played so you can account for the different run-scoring eras in which they played.
They all had pretty short careers, around 1,200 games each. It certainly looks like Player 1 was the best hitter of the group. That 151 OPS+ stands out, a product of his career taking place during the dead-ball era when scoring was low and anyone who could slug close to .500 was rare. It doesn’t appear the other three differ too much, other than style. Player 2 had the shortest career, but got on base the most. Player 3 had the best power, but played in the highest run-scoring environment. Player 4 was more of a slap hitter and base stealer than a power guy, and his career was over before he turned 30.
In terms of career accomplishments, Player 1 stands out again. He led the league in home runs six times, and in RBI twice, and also led the league at various times in walks, runs, hits, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS and OPS+. Each of the others led their league in something (Player 2 - walks; Player 3 - batting average and slugging; Player 4 - runs and doubles), but far less frequently than Player 1.
Advanced stats show them all being of roughly equal value:
In short, these are four of the more equal careers you’re going to find. If you want, you can give Player 1 a slight edge because he led his league so much more often in so many different categories, but if I revealed that he played in an extremely hitter-friendly ballpark (which he did, the Baker Bowl in Philadelphia), he basically comes back to even with the others. Just as a final note, I’ll add that each of them played in at least one World Series, but none of them had any noteworthy postseason heroics that separate them from the others.
Now, maybe you have memorized that faces of a lot of ballplayers from before World War II, but I’m guessing you didn’t recognize any of them. None of them are particularly famous to the average baseball fan.
But two of them are in the Hall of Fame, and the other two aren’t.
Player 1 - Gavvy Cravath
Player 2 - Roy Cullenbine
Player 3 - Chick Hafey, Hall of Famer
Player 4 - Ross Youngs, Hall of Famer
There really isn’t any meaningful difference between these four players, yet two have been given baseball’s highest honor, and two haven’t. The reason why is pretty silly, and it’s the same silly reason why Harold Baines got elected: They knew someone on the Veterans Committee. Someone loud, and persuasive.
In the cases of both Hafey and Youngs, that someone was Frankie Frisch.
Frisch was a teammate of Youngs with the New York Giants for 8 season, 1919 to 1926, before Frisch was traded to the Cardinals and Youngs’ career was cut short by Bright’s Disease, which killed him at the age of 30. Once on the Cardinals, Frisch became teammates with Hafey for five years.
In 1967, Frisch became a member of the Veterans Committee of the Hall of Fame, and, along with Bill Terry, immediately began cajoling and arm-twisting the other members of the committee to elect their old teammates. It worked. They managed to get some of the least-qualified members of the Hall of Fame rammed through, including Hafey in 1971 and Youngs in 1972.
Cravath and Cullenbine, meanwhile, had no such advocates on the committee, and so they don’t get plaques. That’s proper, because while they were each solid ballplayers, their accomplishments fall well short of the level the Hall of Fame would ordinarily recognize. And yet, folks could make the reasonable argument that the Hall of Fame has already blessed careers of the exact sort that Cravath and Cullenbine produced, and wonder why they haven’t been similarly honored.
Hafey and Youngs benefitted from a bad system that allowed a small number of persistent people to have outsized influence over a small voting body. They used that influence for blatant cronyism, and the Hall of Fame not only allowed it, but has perpetuated a version of that same system to this day, through all of the iterations of the Veterans Committee(s) that have followed.
You’d think, after several decades of this sort of outcome, they would eventually figure out something better.
You’d think.