Dawson Gets HoF Call; Blyleven, Alomar Get Snubbed

The Baseball Hall of Fame.  The most prestigious honor that could be bestowed upon a baseball player.  Names like Mantle, Aaron, Robinson, and Ruth line the walls of Cooperstown.  And every year, the Baseball Writers Association of America decides who among whom is worthy of being named a Hall of Famer.  This year, they dropped the ball.  Andre Dawson was the only player to be voted in.  Andre Dawson.  An excellent player, a worthy member of the Hall of Fame, but when compared to Bert Blyleven and Roberto Alomar, Dawson does not supersede them.

The voting for the Hall of Fame is a complex process.  To be able to cast a ballot, one must be a baseball writer for ten straight years, and once you’ve achieved that, you get to vote for the rest of your life.  No player voted in by the BBWAA has ever received 100 percent of the vote, not even Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron or Jackie Robinson. And now, with players from the steroid era making their way onto the ballots, controversy is created.  Many writers have debated whether or not Mark McGwire deserves a place in Cooperstown, with some saying that his checkered, chemically-induced past has barred him from honor, while others believe the issue of PED’s should not be swept under the rug, and that it is possible to embrace players without condoning their actions.

Unbelievably, Bert Blyleven has been the most debated name on the ballot.  The pitcher has 287 wins, 3,701 strikeouts, and yet people believe that certain parts of his career exempt him from consideration.  From Jon Heyman’s reasoning for leaving Bert off his ballot:

Some will say that Blyleven’s career was equal to Hall of Famer Don Sutton’s but I say it is just short of Sutton’s. They both had big totals in other categories but Sutton wound up with 37 more victories, going over the magic 300 mark by 24.

Many stat people suggest wins are not important in evaluating careers. But until wins don’t decide who’s in the playoffs and who’s out, who makes the World Series and who doesn’t, I will continue to view them as important. A pitcher’s goal for each game is to win the game, not to strikeout the most batters. And until that changes, I will count wins and losses. I also believe the truly great pitchers pitched to the scoreboard with the real goal in mind.

Heyman is one of the few people left in the baseball world that still lets the W-L record dictate a pitcher’s value.  True, wins and losses are the most important element of the game.  But to say that the lack of 13 wins negates any Hall of Fame consideration? Heyman not only insults the logic of the baseball fan, he represents a strong minority of writers who still refuse to acknowledge statistics, even simple ones such as ERA, WHIP, and SO/BB.  Had Blyleven been able to scratch out thirteen wins, he’d be a sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famer. But because he was unable to reach that mark, he is shunned by many.

Alomar is a head-scratcher.  Roberto was easily the best player on the ballot.  He was a 12-time All Star, a perenial Gold-Glove/Silver-Slugger winner, and in 1999 he led the American League in runs score.  He has a career .300 batting average.  He is one of the best second-basemen the game has seen.  Yet, voters left him off.  It’s difficult to tell why.  It could have been the time he spat on an umpire.  It could have been the accusations of AIDS that were dismissed as quickly as they had surfaced.  It could have been that, much like Blyleven, Alomar never had the “feel” of the Hall of Famer; the only way to say he deserves a spot is to look at his numbers, and there will be many people who refuse to look at numbers.

Blyleven and Alomar have tremendous bodies of work.  They just need to wait for people to actually take a peak at them.

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