Best players eligible for HOF, not yet in?

I'll state the obvious, Trout? He's already exceeded Puckett right?

 

And Cabrera's just some scrub, and not maybe the most dominant American League hitter of his era, right? Seriously? That's your example? Of course there are other guys with better numbers. But dismissing Rose's as somehow pedestrian is silly. But just for fun, let's say all of Rose's hits were singles. He still had 42-fucking-hundred of them.

 

the anonymous "Jane Doe" claims in a sworn testimony that she and Rose had a sexual relationship going back to even before she was 16
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Not to belabor the point of his pantheon-level scumminess, but that ain't legal.

 

None of that would surprise me. He's dirty amongst dirtbags. I'm certainly not a fan of Rose, the person. Take away all the gambling, and even the alleged tryst, and he's still a piece of shit. But a piece of shit with 4,200 hits.

 

Dude, are you trolling here? You must be. Rose had 10 freaking seasons of more than 200 hits, which is the most all-time (tied with Ichiro). He finished in the top 5 in MVP voting 5 times over a 9-season stretch and won it once and lost a close race to Bob Gibson in 1968. He led the league in getting on base (the goal, usually) 9 freaking times.

You need help finding his B-R- page? It's right here: Pete Rose Stats | Baseball-Reference.com

Just look at this for a snapshot:



You have to huffing paint to try to belittle his work between the lines. He's a pantheon-level all-time great. Arguing against his greatness is a waste of your time.

 

And it's not just the number of hits/walks - at his peak, and not during the "I'm catching Cobb no matter how much it hurts my team" phase, Rose was not simply a singles hitter. From '74 through '80, he only had once season with fewer than 40 doubles (he had 38 that year). He twice finished in the top ten in the NL in slugging. He's second all-time in doubles (746), and only 92 of those came during his last six seasons. The guy was indestructible; he missed 19 games between 1969 and 1982.

I would want to clean myself off immediately afterwards if I was ever anywhere near him in case the sleaze might possibly rub off, but the guy was a heck of a baseball player in his prime.

 

I too was never a big "Charlie Hustle" fan (he was in the NL "West" hence a rival) but I was reading a book on the 1975 WS and very late in Gm. 6 Rose turned to Sparky and said something along the lines of "This is awesome" or "isn't this awesome?". That's a baseball player and I loved that. The guy made the AS game as an OF, 3B, 2B and 1B, and was not some punch and judy hitter like Enzo Hernandez (600 ABs, 20 rbis.)

 

Those are all good questions. In the end, it comes down to MLB deciding long ago that betting on baseball while playing or managing is the worst possible offense. You can certainly make an argument that PED use, doctored baseballs, corked bats and stolen signals all eat away at the integrity of the game, too. Maybe baseball should treat all of those more harshly.

Ultimately, I think it is bad for baseball that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Pete Rose aren't in the Hall of Fame. Their greatness as players is unquestioned. I think the Hall is incomplete without those three, but I at least get why Rose isn't there.

 

I'll take Richard's best game in a game 7 over Santana's best game in a game 7.

Richard was unhittable.

 

Santana's best game was a no-hitter. I'll take that.

 

And that no-hitter against the Cardinals was the tipping point in his career.

 

Al Oliver was a good player for a long time, but if everyone as good as he was is inducted, the Hall's going to need to build a few more wings. BR has him tied for 422nd in career WAR. He had good batting averages, which is certainly valuable, but his power wasn't great (22 HR max) and he rarely walked (only over 44 BB once), so most of his value came from hitting singles and doubles. He played CF for several years but was below average defensively, though his bat certainly was good for a CF. Otherwise he was a 1B/DH/LF, and not that good defensively at those positions either. He was a bad percentage base stealer and hit into a bunch of DPs. I remembered him as a feared clutch hitter, but I can't find evidence of it in his numbers, and he hit .228 in the postseason. He had one year in which he led the league in several categories, but only one other year in which he led his league in anything important (doubles and GIDP). For me, his career is closer to Nick Markakis's than to a Hall of Famer's - not that Markakis has had a bad career, but I doubt many people think of him as a HOFer.

Hadn't seen anyone say Phil Niekro doctored balls. Is there reason to think he did other than that his knuckler moved a lot and his brother Joe was caught with a nail file or an emery board near the end of his career? Don Sutton, on the other hand...I remember reading in the early 1980s that NBC wanted to do a segment on throwing altered balls and had plans to have Sutton (still an active pitcher at the time) show them how it was done, with his face blocked out and the video somehow reversed so he would appear to be a lefthander.

Just to be argumentative, that .395 OBP in 1985 was 8th in the majors that year. That's about the only thing Rose did well that year, but it's a pretty important thing. BR has him 64th in career WAR in a very long career, fwiw.