The Santo Debacle

Hearken back to late February, if you will. The groundhog had failed to see his shadow a few weeks earlier, supposedly an omen that an early spring would find us this year. Pitchers and catchers had been in camp for 10 days or so. Manny Ramirez showed up early, sporting a few red dreadlocks and doing Manny things once more. There was labor peace, and the various clubs around baseball were fat with cash. Even the dregs of the sport looked upon the upcoming season with hope.

And yet, a dark day found its way into the lives of true baseball fans nonetheless.

The Veterans' Committee had spoken.

Ron Santo wouldn't be getting the call. Again.

I will not re-hash yet again the details of the Veterans Committee's idiotic balloting system. I've killed enough brain cells on that one, thank you very much. But I would like to spend a few moments today in debunking one foolish myth put forth by several BBWAA members after this year's VC voting results were announced.

That is, of course, the ridiculous notion that the Committee's failure to elect anyone, far from being an indictment of the system, was actually an affirmation of the quality of work the BBWAA has collectively put forth in past elections. Rather than try to explain their twisted logic, I will let one of the purveyors of this tale tell it in his own words:

"The purpose of the Veterans Committee is not to elect players but to correct oversights that might have been committed in the 15 years a player was under consideration for enshrinement by veteran members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Instead of a slight to any former player, the Veterans Committee not electing any players would seem to mean the BBWAA voters did their job and elected those who belong.

Truly, who better to decide the merits of a player possibly overlooked for Hall of Fame induction than the men who played against him or with him and who are in the Hall of Fame?"

Those, ladies and gentlemen, are the words of Tracy Ringolsby, the man whose Hall of Fame voting practices I pilloried in my last post. He threw a few other nuggets into that column as well, including the claim that he respects any process that requires 75% of the voters to agree. Sadly, he omits to discuss whether or not his stance on that matter would change if the voters in question were clearly unqualified to vote in the first place.

Ringolsby was not the only BBWAA member to express this view. He was joined by

Hal Bodley, Mike Bauman and various other crotchety old farts who happily trumpeted the result as affirmation of their own worth and voting aptitude. They nearly soiled themselves in their various efforts to write the first BBWAA version of Sally Field’s infamous “You really like me!” speech.

All of this self-congratulation made me slightly ill, particularly since I didn’t find a single column by a BBWAA member that stated the obvious alternate conclusion, namely that the continued exclusion of Ron Santo from the Hall of Fame is proof positive that the BBWAA is a failure as a voting body.

I’ll get into Santo’s qualifications in a minute, but first let’s state the obvious. Once all non-voters are considered, people like historians, sabermetricians, the general public, etc., the overwhelming majority of baseball fans consider Ron Santo to be a Hall of Famer, yet he isn’t because two extremely small, non-representative groups don’t agree with that view and happen to be the parties who control admission. That simply has to be somewhat embarrassing for the sport, doesn’t it? When the sport’s most hallowed honor is denied to someone that the majority of fans and baseball researchers feel is qualified, it lessens the meaning of the award. Why bother having it if it isn’t awarded to the people who deserve it?

Without getting into all of the performance metrics that prove, to anyone with a rational brain in their head, that Santo is abundantly qualified for induction, let me instead make just a couple of comparisons that illustrate how foolishly inconsistent the BBWAA’s stance is in this case.

When Ron Santo first appeared on the ballot in 1980, here is how he ranked among all Hall-eligible third basemen in the history of the sport:

Games: 2nd
Hits: 5th
Home Runs: 2nd
RBI: 2nd
Runs: 7th
Extra-Base Hits: 2nd
OPS: 2nd
Runs Created: 2nd
Slugging: 2nd
Total Bases: 2nd
Walks: 4th

Now, combine that with his 5 Gold Gloves, and it’s really, really difficult to make a case for leaving Santo out of the Hall of Fame. But let’s say, just for a moment, that the BBWAA was correct in passing him over. Let’s say that the standards should be so high that someone who ranked in similar fashion to Santo at his position should be kept out of the Hall. In that case, I wish some BBWAA member would tell me why Jimmie Foxx was elected:

Foxx’s ranks at 1st base in 1980 (Santo’s first year on the ballot):
Games: 5th
Hits: 5th
Home Runs: 2nd
RBI: 2nd
Runs: 2nd
Extra-Base Hits: 2nd
OPS: 2nd
Runs Created: 3rd
Slugging: 2nd
Total Bases: 2nd
Walks: 3rd

Hmmm. Looks pretty much the same, doesn’t it? In other words, Ron Santo ranked among third baseman almost exactly the same as Jimmie Foxx ranked among Hall-eligible first basemen.

This is not an isolated case. For instance, here’s a second baseman with similar credentials:

Charlie Gehringer’s ranks at 2nd base in 1980 (Santo’s first year on the ballot):
Games: 4th
Hits: 5th
Home Runs: 5th
RBI: 3rd
Runs: 2nd
Extra-Base Hits: 2nd
OPS: 2nd
Runs Created: 4th
Slugging: 2nd
Total Bases: 4th
Walks: 2nd

If anything, Gehringer’s ranks among his peers were actually a touch worse than Santo’s. Then there’s a certain shortstop…

Joe Cronin’s ranks at shortstops in 1980 (Santo’s first year on the ballot):
Games: 10th
Hits: 8th
Home Runs: 2nd
RBI: 3rd
Runs: 11th
Extra-Base Hits: 2nd
OPS: 2nd
Runs Created: 5th
Slugging: 1st
Total Bases: 3rd
Walks: 5th

…whose ranks were clearly worse than Santo’s. Or how about one of the greatest center fielders ever?

Tris Speaker’s ranks at center field in 1980 (Santo’s first year on the ballot):
Games: 3rd
Hits: 2nd
Home Runs: (Too low to mention, Dead Ball Era and all)
RBI: 3rd
Runs: 3rd
Extra-Base Hits: 3rd
OPS: 6th
Runs Created: 3rd
Slugging: 9th
Total Bases: 3rd
Walks: 3rd

I guess what I’m trying to say is this; If Tris Speaker had been on the BBWAA’s ballot in 1980 instead of Ron Santo, would Speaker have been elected? Or how about Foxx, or Cronin or Gehringer? These are the types of very fair questions the BBWAA has set itself up for by failing to elect Ron Santo, because Santo clearly stood among his peers at his position in the same light as Speaker stood among center fielders, or Foxx among first baseman, etc. Santo was, arguably, the second-best third baseman to have played the sport up to that point (with Eddie Mathews clearly having been the best). And yet, for some really, really stupid reason, the BBWAA not only didn’t elect him, but they gave him so few votes that he was dropped from the ballot.

That begs the kinds of question I just asked, plus another; Is third base somehow less important that first base? Of course not. In fact, it’s demonstrably more important given the defensive skills necessary to play there. And yet the BBWAA happily inducted Jimmie Foxx as soon as their early glut of great players was cleared enough for him, and Foxx clearly didn’t stand any better among his peers at first than Santo did among his peers at third.

On top of that, the BBWAA voted in lesser lights as well, men who clearly had no claim to being the second- or third- of tenth-best player at their position. I mean, was Willie Stargell considered one of the top three or four left fielders in the history of the sport when he was elected in 1988? That would be a hard argument to make, considering that Ted Williams and Al Simmons and Stan Musial and Billy Williams had already been elected by the BBWAA and Ed Delahanty was already enshrined as well, having never appeared on a BBWAA ballot.

Or how about Al Kaline? Was he one of the five greatest right fielders ever when he was elected on the first ballot the same year Santo first appeared, 1980? Of course not. Babe Ruth, Mel Ott, Paul Waner, Harry Heilman and Roberto Clemente were all already elected by the writers and were all arguably better, and that doesn’t even get into clearly better players like Sam Crawford who was a Veterans’ Committee selection, or Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson, who were retired at the time and just awaiting first-ballot induction.

And when we turn to Santo’s own position, third base, we find an utterly ridiculous voting pattern. Did you know that in 1980, when Ron Santo first appeared on the BBWAA ballot, they had elected the grand total of TWO third basemen to the Hall of Fame? Eddie Mathews, who clearly deserved it, and Pie Traynor, who is questionable at best. And, by 1980, the BBWAA should have known that. All they had to do was compare Traynor, who played in a prolific period for all hitters, to Santo, who played in a prolific period for all pitchers.

Pie Traynor’s ranks at third base in 1980 (Santo’s first year on the ballot):
Games: 8th
Hits: 2nd
Home Runs: (Too low to mention)
RBI: 4th
Runs: 6th
Extra-Base Hits: T-6th
OPS: 9th
Runs Created: 9th
Slugging: 10th
Total Bases: 5th
Walks: (Nowhere near the top-25)

It’s painfully obvious that Ron Santo was the better baseball player. He completely outclassed one of the only two third basemen who had been elected by the BBWAA at the time he came up for a vote, this was clear even using the most common statistics of the day, and yet he not only wasn’t elected, but was dropped from the ballot and remains on the outside looking in to this day.

The BBWAA needs to face the fact that omitting Santo will always be one of the voters’ dumbest acts. The current Veterans Committee, which, by the admission of at least one of its members, Mike Schmidt, is motivated to keep membership exclusive, has in no way validated this mistake, whether Ringolsby and his minions want to admit it or not. They can go on claiming anything they want, but that won’t make it so.

The fact is that the baseball writers effectively decided to keep the third base equivalent of Jimmie Foxx or Tris Speaker out of the Hall of Fame, and now some of them are desperately grasping at any possible excuse to make that act look like anything other than what it actually is.

A mistake.