Quote:
Originally Posted by YankeePride
This is where I disagree with you and many purists.
I don't know when it was assumed that the Hall of Fame is the Hall of the Greatest Players Ever.
All I see is Fame. The Hall has memorabillia from games no one could really care about when you think about it. I believe Schilling's bloody sock is in there. Really? Is that more worthy than Tim Raines career? Lets be serious.
It's the Hall of Fame. If you are someone most people can sit back and say, "That player was great for baseball" then you deserve to be in the Hall in my book.
Right now 70% of the people that have voted agree. That's overwhelming to me and justifies his position.
I see that Jamie compared Rice to Luis Gonzalez. Again, the difference is Rice was a great player of his time while Gonzalez is considered a player that had a few jumpout years but was never considered at the top of his position during his playing years.
In my opinion, that puts Rice in the Hall because everyone knows he was a great player in his time. Gonzalez was never considered a great player.
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I agree with YankeePride.
I was 11 when the first nationally published Bill James Baseball Abstract came out. It had a profound impact on how I view baseball performance. I believe in sabermetric baseball analysis. If the question is "which player produced the most runs in year x or over the course of their careers", then I'm happy to use just about any modern metric and accept the results accordingly.
But I draw a line when it comes to the Hall of Fame. It's easy now in hindsight to say so and so's VORP or WARP3 was better than Jim Rice's. So if Rice gets voted in then so should so and so. I don't agree with this. Jim Rice, rightly or wrongly, was
famous. He had 6 top 5 MVP finishes. 8 All Star Games. And was
the most feared slugger in the AL for the better part of a decade.
Modern statistical analysis says that maybe he wasn't quite the stud that people viewed him to be at the time. But you can't change the fact that he was viewed in that regard. Guys like Moises Alou, Joe Carter and Luis Gonzalez were never thought of this way (well maybe Luis was in his fluke year). In fact those three guys combined have a grand total of 5 top five MVP finishes.
And after all of this, I'm not necessarily advocating Jim Rice for the Hall. I'm just pointing out that the people who watched Rice then thought of him as a HoF-type player (and I'm old enough to remember the hype). So I'd be fine with his induction without using the if he's in then ______ and _____ should be in, too.