Thursday 1/25/24
I ran stairs, but it's so warm out that I think I'll go back and do a bit more. Quickly, though:
I keep seeing people say that the baseball Hall of Fame is too big, it's for the greats of the greats, and someone like Adrian Beltre shouldn't be there, let alone get in with 95% of the vote!
I don't think people understand what an all-time great in a sport is.
Baseball has been around for, what, a century and a half? That's a decent chunk of time. Wouldn't you say that if you're one of the ten best players in all of that time at your position that you're one of the all-time greats of the game?
That seems pretty logical, doesn't it? And if you're one of the top ten players at your position that you should be in the Hall of Fame? It's 150 years. And you're one of the ten best at that position you played!
So let's go through third basemen.
Mike Schmidt
Eddie Matthews
Wade Boggs
George Brett
Those are the four best, right? Then who? Chipper Jones? Brooks Robinson? We'll call all of these players the six best third basemen in baseball history.
Then who? Home Run Baker? Pie Traynor? It's not George Kell. Ron Santo? Not really. Isn't hard to argue that Beltre was better than Baker and Traynor, which would make him the seventh best third baseman in baseball history. But there's no way he's not in the top ten.
How does that not make you an all-time great?! That's nuts. These people who say, "It's for the best of the best" would have like four third basemen--and probably the same amount of second basemen--in the Hall of Fame. It isn't rational.
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