Baseball's Hall of Fame committee handed down more sentences this week, and here's the latest:
Tony Perez finally was pardoned for having too many teammates in the Hall ahead of him. Steve Garvey's still being punished for his mating habits. Carlton Fisk is in, after only two tries, but Jim Rice is still on the outs for failing to give good quotes. Dave Parker is out for being fat, loud and obnoxious. And Jack Morris is being ignored for being a grouch.What a way to run a Hall of Fame. For the record, the Baseball Writers Association of America has been assigned the task of voting for Hall of Famers. This year 499 writers turned in ballots, but six of them were blank. Maybe that should tell us something.
Like a lot of people, you probably think their vote is based on statistics. Like a lot of people, you're wrong. The decision is based on some complicated formula that considers statistics, political correctness and media cooperation.
Go figure. Fisk was named to the Hall in only his second year of eligibility, but Dave Parker wasn't, and he's been waiting four years for a call from the Hall. Look at the numbers, and there's no comparison. Gary Carter played 19 years, Parker played 19 years. Fisk batted .269, Parker .290. Fisk had 1,330 RBIs, Parker 1,493. Carter won a World Series ring; Parker won two rings, plus two batting titles and one MVP award.
"There's got to be some other reason than what's there," Parker once said. "I've won everything there is to win in baseball . . . People in the Hall of Fame couldn't shake a stick at my numbers. It's got to be something other than production. Maybe it's the fact that I'm controversial."
Maybe it's because he is remembered, as one writer once noted, as a loud-mouthed, overbearing, underachieving braggart who had a drug problem that caused his career to fade prematurely.
Maybe he'll make the Hall after he serving his sentence, just as Orlando Cepeda did. After finishing a certain Hall-of-Fame career in 1974, Cepeda was sent to jail for 10 months for possession of marijuana. For some reason this cast doubt on his accomplishments as a player.
Hall of Fame voters ignored him so long that he was dropped from the ballot because his 15 years of eligibility passed. Then last March the other half of the Hall of Fame selection committee came to the rescue and decided all was forgiven. The veterans committee, composed of former major leaguers, voted him into the Hall, 25 years after he retired.
So how do you think Rice feels about this? He's got better numbers than Cepeda. Rice played 16 years, Cepeda played 16 years. Rice had a career average of .298, Cepeda .297. Rice won one MVP award; Cepeda won one MVP award. Rice hit 382 homers; Cepeda hit 379. Rice had 1,451 RBIs and a slugging percentage of .502; Cepeda had 1,365 RBIs and a slugging percentage of .502.
Frank Robinson, a Hall of Famer himself, once said the best way to compare careers for Hall of Fame consideration is to examine the players' 12 best years and average them. It's no contest between Rice (.302, 29 homers, 107 RBIs, 92 runs) and Perez (.285, 25, 102, 81).
But Cepeda is in, and Rice is out. The widely reported speculation, as one newspaper recently put it, is that Rice's "lack of cooperation with the media" has hurt his cause. Rice was notoriously moody with the media. Now the media gets the last laugh.
Rice has been waiting seven years for the Hall call, but there's hope. Perez had to wait nine years to get into the Hall, largely for one reason: Three of his teammates were inducted into the Hall, and that seemed enough for one team.
Meanwhile, Garvey failed to make the Hall for the ninth time, despite having numbers that are comparable to Perez's. Garvey played 19 seasons, Perez 22. Garvey won the league MVP award and finished in the top 10 of the MVP balloting four times; Perez was never an MVP and finished in the top 10 four times. Garvey had a career batting average of .294, Perez .279. Garvey had six 200-hit seasons, Perez had seven 100-plus RBI seasons. Garvey had 2,599 hits, Perez had 2,732 (while playing three more years).
But Perez was known as an extremely nice man among writers. Garvey became known as a schmuck. After being portrayed in the media as the all-American straight arrow, Garvey was caught having an affair with his secretary, and that was just the tip of the iceberg in his sordid love life. The media apparently holds this against him. These days he's doing infomercials, and that can't help, either.
Remarkably, Jack Morris, the winningest pitcher of the 1980s, virtually carried three different teams to World Series titles -- the '84 Tigers, '91 Twins and '92 Blue Jays -- but he's still not in the Hall. He retired in 1995 after 17 years in the majors. He was also known as moody, grouchy and unapproachable. He made life miserable for writers. Now they're returning the favor.
Also on the outs: Burt Blyleven, who won 287 games in 22 years, sported a 3.31 ERA and had 3,701 strikeouts, third most in history. No one knows what he did wrong.