7 replies to this topic

[KBwsb]

During the hot-stove season, I've taken to reading about baseball history. One topic that is always hotly-debated is whether or not the 3 Cub infielders from our most recent championship team deserve to be in the Hall of Fame.

On the one hand, you have many folk (including some from this very site) who say "They got into the HOF strictly because of a stupid poem by Franklin Adams. It's an embarrassment to the Cubs and to major-league baseball." This side of the debate has much to draw on: all three had short careers, and all three put up batting numbers that seem WAY short of HOF standards.

On the other hand...well, it's a complex issue, but here's what baseball historian and best-seller author Bill James had to say on the subject (after mountains of research):


"Franklin Adams may have been a little bit wrong to center the defensive excellence of the team in their ability to turn the double play, but he was just writing a little poem; he never expected it to be such a big deal. He was putting in words what was in the air: that this was the greatest defensive infield that anybody had ever seen. And in fact it was.
I know that not everybody agrees with this. I know that there are other people who have looked at this issue and reached a different conclusion. I’ve looked at the issue myself at other times, not knowing as much as I do now, and reached a different conclusion. I’ll have to leave it up to you to weigh this analysis against the others. But it is my opinion that Joe Tinker was very possibly the greatest defensive shortstop in the history of baseball, and that he is a well-deserving Hall of Famer."

[Kid]

What did Bill James say about the Red Sox' interest in Cesar Izturis?

[BT]

During the hot-stove season, I've taken to reading about baseball history. One topic that is always hotly-debated is whether or not the 3 Cub infielders from our most recent championship team deserve to be in the Hall of Fame.

On the one hand, you have many folk (including some from this very site) who say "They got into the HOF strictly because of a stupid poem by Franklin Adams. It's an embarrassment to the Cubs and to major-league baseball." This side of the debate has much to draw on: all three had short careers, and all three put up batting numbers that seem WAY short of HOF standards.

On the other hand...well, it's a complex issue, but here's what baseball historian and best-seller author Bill James had to say on the subject (after mountains of research):


"Franklin Adams may have been a little bit wrong to center the defensive excellence of the team in their ability to turn the double play, but he was just writing a little poem; he never expected it to be such a big deal. He was putting in words what was in the air: that this was the greatest defensive infield that anybody had ever seen. And in fact it was.
I know that not everybody agrees with this. I know that there are other people who have looked at this issue and reached a different conclusion. I’ve looked at the issue myself at other times, not knowing as much as I do now, and reached a different conclusion. I’ll have to leave it up to you to weigh this analysis against the others. But it is my opinion that Joe Tinker was very possibly the greatest defensive shortstop in the history of baseball, and that he is a well-deserving Hall of Famer."

I guess I was always under the assumption that the argument that the only reason all three of them made it was because of the poem, but I thought at least a couple may have had legitimate cases.

[veryzer]

It's my belief that none of them deserve to be in the Hall Of Fame. In fact, I'm of the belief that they all be pulled from the Hall of fame.

[leonardsipes]

Who should be in the hall of fame as well.

[KBwsb]

I posted this on another thread, but thought it'd be appropriate here:

...here's some quick-and-dirty links, concentrating on their all-around play; keep in mind that deadball-era batting stats tend to skew absurdly low:

http://www.baseball-...ef_career.shtml (Tinker. By almost any measure, one of the 5 greatest fielders in the history of this sport)

http://www.baseball-...chancfr01.shtml (Chance. And he played a little ball, too)

http://www.baseball-...s/jaws_2B.shtml (Evers. In my mind, the weakest HOF case of the three, although he was the most famous of the three, and his career numbers compare favorably with all of the lower-wrung 2nd basemen in the Hall)

http://www.fangraphs...ost=0&players=0 (Bonus: check out #131 and #132)

[1060Ivy]

Ran across the following article on Johnny Evers in recent Sports Illustrated.

Article is written by a relative attempting to get to know the guy behind the Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance poem.

Regarding their Hall of Fame status the article includes the following:

'"From that moment on," Bill James writes in his 1994 book, Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame, "the argument that the Hall of Fame should be only for the greatest of the great was irretrievably lost." On Tinker, Evers and Chance, James writes, "They stand out as being among the least qualified players in the Hall of Fame." James compares Evers to pre-1900 second baseman Bid McPhee and concludes that McPhee, who was not yet in the Hall, was a better player. James does not say unequivocally that Evers does not belong, but that is the undertone of his argument. He spends more time on Tinker, who he says "was a fine player, and is not the worst player in the Hall of Fame." (In a long Baseball America feature in 1913, dozens of experts concluded that Evers was the best second baseman in the National League. Sabermetrician Jay Jaffe's JAWS system rates Evers the 16th best of the 19 second basemen in the Hall.'

http://www.sportsillustratedeverywhere.com/issues/protected/com.timeinc.si.web.inapp.12032012/tinker-to-evers-to-chance-to-me-19655.html

[KBwsb]

Yeah, that's exactly what Bill James was referring to, in the text that I quoted him on in the first post on this thread....that he used to think they weren't HOFers (back in '94), but now he does (the article I quoted from was written in the past 3-4 years.)

IIRC, the way he came to this new conclusion was that he spent a whole lot of time trying to figure out how the Cubs of the Frank Chance era won so many games. It simply didn't make inherent sense that they won more games than the Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig Yankees, or the Big Red Machine, or the Jeter Yanks, or ANY dynasty in the history of baseball. They won more games in one season than any team, 2 seasons, 3 seasons, 4, 5, all the way up to 15 years...no team in history won more.

Why? They weren't a great hitting team. They weren't that speedy on the bases. Their pitching was good, but every year, they'd trade for a slew of lousy new pitchers from other teams, who'd instantly become fantastic, and then immediately would fall back to mediocrity when traded away again to another team.

James (and others) finally concluded that those Cubs won all those games with infield defense. Tinker, Evers, Chance (and to a far lesser extent, their 3rd baseman, Harry Steidfeldt) were like having an infield defense of Ozzie Smith at short, Ryno at 2nd, and, (I don't know, who's a great-fielding 1st baseman)...Mark Grace? Keith Hernandez?. Something like that. And in the dead-ball era, that was huge.