To this day, it's hard for me to believe that neither Strawberry nor Doc Gooden made the Hall. Of course, as it worked out there were good reasons they didn't, but I'll bet you could have gotten most Mets fans circa 1985 to give you 100-to-1 odds that at least one of them would have a Hall of Fame career.

I agree that Eric Davis had the most talent of the players on the list above-- by the way, he's another one who could have challenged Dawson for that '87 MVP, he was outstanding that year-- and that nobody there actually deserves election. I'm sympathetic to Charlie Hough, though. There was just something unreal about him, the way he kept pitching forever with his knuckleball slop. Maybe if he hadn't spent all those years as a reliever...

My point, I guess, is that I can see voting for Hough provided I knew that he'd never get in, just as a tribute to a player I liked. I'm sure the votes for Eisenreich and Segui and everybody worked on a similar principle-- sportswriters making some statement or other, trusting the system to keep them out.

Huh. I don't actually want to oust people from the present Hall of Fame, but maybe there's something to be said for the proposal made by Bill Simmons in his recent book on basketball-- basically he wanted to reform the Basketball Hall of Fame with five progressive "levels." (He also mentioned where some baseball players would rank, and gave credit to Bill James for having a similar idea.) For baseball, a Level One guy might be Luis Aparacio or somebody, while Willie Mays and Babe Ruth would be up on Level Five.

Of course, nothing like that is likely to happen, but probably anybody in this thread could construct a better (or at least more coherent) Hall of Fame roster from scratch using that method than the current Hall, given all the screwy voting patterns that have held over the years...

Last Edited By: rjb182 01/11/10 12:41 AM. Edited 1 times.