Wednesday, November 30, 2011

A Very Tired Hall of Fame Debate

The old Put-Gil-Hodges-in-the-Hall-of-Fame Debate has been raging in recent days on the SABR-L listserv. This is a debate that should be packed away with all of the batting practice baseballs and never be discussed again. It rekindles ONLY because of the New York-centric influence among many baseball writers, and ONLY because Hodges played on one of baseball's iconic teams, the Boys of Summer Era Brooklyn Dodgers. Oh, and Hodges also managed the New York Mets when they won their improbable World Series championship in 1969. I grant you that that was no small feat, but there are a lot of managers who have won one World Series, so that in and of itself does not make you Hall of Fame worthy.

But back to Gil Hodges the player. Here are his stats over 18 seasons and 2,071 games:

HR 370
RBI 1,274
BA .273
OPS .846

Now, consider these stats of a player who played in relatively the same era as Hodges, only fewer season, 14, and games, 1,841:

HR 364
RBI 1,159
BA .266
OPS .848

The player in question? Rocky Colovito. How many people are on the bandwagon pushing for HIM to get into the Hall of Fame?

By the way, I take no credit for coming up with the Colovito comparison. One of the posters on SABR-L did that. There are as many people debating against Hodges for the Hall as there are for him. My point is, why even argue it at all?

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