Nine Hall of Famers who would never get in today
Cap Anson is a special case outside my purview. Home Run Baker should not be on the list at all. The author is kidding about Billy Hamilton because of the two guys with that name and similar abilities. I assume he's also kidding about Gaylord Perry. As for the others, I dunno. There are a lot of marginal guys in the Hall. The ones mentioned don't stand out that much.
1) Maz was not a good hitter (lifetime adjusted OPS of 85), but is generally considered the best-fielding second baseman of all time, which probably means he's just as deserving as Pee Wee Reese and Phil Rizzuto (99 and 93), who also sucked as hitters, and were not the best-fielding shortstops of all time. A better comparison to Maz would be Ozzie Smith who was a similarly inept hitter (87), and is arguably the best-fielding shortstop.
And all four of those guys are just as qualified as Red Schoendienst and Pie Traynor. In fact, Mazeroski's lifetime WAR is the same as Traynor's.
Maz was a 10-time all-star. Hall of Famer Bert Blyleven, over the course of 22 years in the majors, made the all-star team exactly twice.
I'm not saying that I support Maz, but I don't see any reason to single him out among the infielders with marginal credentials. By the way, just in passing, Lou Whitaker and Bobby Grich, two second basemen who are not in the Hall, as well as Whitaker's double-play partner Alan Trammell, were better overall players than any of the infielders I just mentioned.
2) I do agree with the case against Rick Ferrell. His election to the Hall was one of history's worst demonstrations of the failure of vox populi, as bad as the 1933 German elections, although not as bad as Roberto Benigni's Oscar. Ferrell's lifetime WAR is below 30, and it took him 18 seasons to amass even that paltry number. There are lots of guys from the 1920s and 1930s who are in the Hall because they put up big offensive numbers in an era when everyone put up big offensive numbers, but Rick Ferrell didn't even do that. His lifetime adjusted OPS is below 100! The myth is that voters thought they were voting for his brother Wes, who is the best-hitting full-time pitcher of all time, a six-time 20-game winner, and has a lifetime W-L pct of .601, higher than Glavine, just below Maddux. Wes, who is not in the Hall, has a lifetime WAR over 60! Is it just a coincidence that Rick is arguably the worst player in the Hall and Wes is one of the best players not in? Maybe the "wrong brother vote" is not a legend after all.
3) Heinie Manush is below average among Hall of Famers but, following up on the point of inflated stats from the 20s and 30s, there are plenty of other guys to start booting out before him: Highpockets Kelly, Ross Youngs, Chick Hafey, Freddie Lindstrom, Sunny Jim Bottomley, etc. Heinie Manush, who had four finishes in the top five in the MVP balloting, plus a career .330 average, had a better career than any of those guys, so if you're going to start culling the herd, you don't start with the Heinie. The worst player in this category is Lloyd Waner, who had a career WAR of a mere 24, and joins Rick Ferrell in the exclusive club of guys who are famous because their brother was a good player. And they aren't even the best players in this club. Dom DiMaggio, who is not in the Hall of Fame, was a better player than either of those guys, and his brother Joe was, I hear, pretty dag-blasted good his ownself.
4) Jim Rice was in the top five in the MVP balloting six times in his career. He led the league in total bases four times. Yeah, his stats were inflated by Fenway, but he's nowhere near marginal, given the core of other guys actually in there. When you get rid of Freddie Lindstrom and Lloyd Waner, then you can talk to me about the case against Jim Rice.
5) Placing Home Run Baker on this list is just ignorant. He was one of the greatest players of the AL of his era, probably in the top four overall with Cobb, Speaker and Shoeless Joe, which would make him the best infielder. Don't diss his low home run totals. He got his nickname from clutch homers in big moments, not from the quantity of his round-trippers. In the 1911 World Series, he hit tying or winning homers in consecutive days against a couple of guys you may have heard of: Rube Marquard and Christy Mathewson. He was the greatest power hitter of his era, by the way, and did lead the AL in homers four consecutive years. It's not his fault that the ball was made of old rolled-up socks in those days. He was also Mr Clutch, the David Ortiz of his day. In addition to the two homers that earned his nickname, he hit .363 in World Series play, and that was over the course of six fall classics. (After his spectacular performance in 1911, he again terrorized Marquard and Mathewson in the 1913 World Series, going 7-for-12 in their three starts.) Oh, yeah, and he could also be counted on to steal 30-40 bases in his prime. Before Eddie Mathews came along, Baker was probably the best third baseman of all time.
6) Cap Anson - what can you say? He was a great player, but an evil motherfucker. I'm not the right guy to deal with his qualifications, because it's not a statistical matter, but a moral one, and I can't measure to what degree evil motherfucking should disqualify people.
7) Rabbit Maranville. Well, I'll tell you this to start with. When Maranville was an old man, at the tail end of his career and as weak a hitter as you can imagine playing MLB full time, he always received strong support in the MVP balloting. In his final full year, at 41 years old, he batted .218 with no homers, but placed among the top ten position players in the balloting. So you gotta figure the man could play some D. In his youth he put up fielding numbers that were absolutely extraordinary. His 1914 season is #4 in history for putouts at shortstop and #9 for assists! He was Gretzky on dry land. Maranville handled 1046 total chances that year, far greater than the greatest season Ozzie Smith ever had (933) - and Ozzie's second-best season was a mere 844, while Maranville had a dozen seasons better than that. In fact, the Pirates asked him to switch to second base one year, at age 32, and he proceeded to put up the 6th-best assist total of all time at that position!
So here's one way to think of Maranville: he was approximately as good a shortstop as Ozzie and as good a second-baseman as Maz. His defense was so brilliant that in both 1913 and his aforementioned spectacular 1914 season, he placed among the top three in the MVP balloting despite hitting below .250 with no power! Ozzie and Maz each had only a single appearance in the MVP top ten, and in each of those cases their support was there because they had good offensive years. (Ozzie did finish second one year when he hit .303 with 75 RBI, 40 doubles and 40 stolen bases. Maz topped off at eighth when he hit his lifetime high of 19 dingers.) Maranville, on the other hand, finished in the top ten five times and came close three other times, and his hitting was consistently awful in all eight of those years, during which he never reached an adjusted OPS as high as 90. In other words, he was considered that valuable on the basis of defense alone. Is there anyone else in history in that category? You might fairly argue that Maranville is the greatest defensive player in history. So is he a legit Hall of Famer? Given that "best defensive player in history" is a very big deal, I would say "yes," despite his lifetime WAR of only 43 (which is still far better than Lloyd Waner).
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