Posted on 01/04/2005 11:42:36 AM PST by IndyTiger
Not an icon to me, I grew up in NYC and I'm over 50. My feeling is if you ain't a Yankee, you ain't in the Majors. :-}
Musta been hard watching your team drop three straight to those minor-leaguers from Boston >:^)
It was brutal, more brutal than you can know. Both my sons in law are diehard Red Sox Fans. But I came though it OK. :-}
Yes, he is. Between TV and in person, I saw him play almost every game he ever played. He was the best 3b--both offensively and defensively--in the National League during the time he played. (Brooksie was the best in the AL at that time.) All time at 3b, I rate Santo behind only Schmidt, Robinson, Brett, Mathews, and maybe Traynor (possibly Boggs, too, but maybe not). Santo's offensive numbers won't look as good next to today's inflated numbers, but he played at the time of the least offense since the Dead Ball Era.
There is no one I want to see inducted more than Ron Santo. Along with Ernie Banks and Billy Williams, Ronnie was one of the "Big Three" of "my" Cubs (the '60s and early '70s). The whole city of Chicago is very emotionally tied to Ron Santo, for a lot of reasons.
That's certainly a consideration, but I'd say that has an awful lot to do with the positions they played. There are fewer third basemen in the Hall of Fame than any other position, and the careers of most catchers are usually so short that the offensive numbers of even the good ones are often borderline marginal.
Gwynn wasn't one of the best outfielders of all time for one simple reason: there are tons of great ones in almost every era -- including (arguably) six of the ten greatest players of all-time: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Hank Aaron, and Ted Williams. Tell me how well the sixth-best catcher or sixth-best third baseman of all time stack up against those guys!
Lack of both power and speed mark Tony down for an outfielder.
He definitely didn't have much power, but he was not a slow man until the end of his career (much like Babe Ruth, when you think about it). He won five Gold Gloves and stole 319 bases in his career -- which is three more Gold Gloves and about 120 stolen bases than the "immortal" Pete Rose had in a longer career (he also hit 35 points higher than Rose for his career, for what that's worth).
Gwynn's only real problem was that he spent his entire career in San Diego.
Guidry is working somewhere in the Yankee farm system as a director of scouting or something like that. For all his faults, George Steinbrenner takes very good care of his former players -- even the ones who didn't get along with him very well. Guidry had some kind of financial crisis after he retired and was damn near broke, from what I heard (his agent and financial advisor was convicted on all kinds of fraud and embezzlement charges over this).
Dave Kingman was a chronic malcontent who wore out his welcome with every team he played for. If he had played long enough to reach 500 home runs, he would certainly have been the worst player in baseball history ever to reach that milestone.
If you were selecting your starting shortstop based only on his fielding ability, would you rather have Cal Ripkin Jr. or Ozzie Smith on your team?
I can guarantee you that no more than five of those 100 people would select Cal Ripkin, and after they came down off their crack high they'd wonder what the hell they were thinking.
That more than anything else was the reason I've never been to a baseball game since 1994 -- and I was never even a San Diego fan.
My prediction is that you'll see a few current Yankees pull that off, though -- Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, and Mariano Rivera are three that immediately come to mind.
Ozzie. In a heartbeat. And I've been rooting against the Cards since I was old enough to sit up and watch a game ;)
This was primarily a function of the fact that he played most of his games on artificial turf -- where a ground ball gets to the outfield much faster than it does on grass.
There was one year back in the 1980s in which both Cardinals on the left side of the infield (Smith and Terry Pendleton, I think) won Gold Gloves. Someone went back over that season and watched all their games just to see how well they played together, and they found that the number of ground-ball hits to left field against the Cards that year was astonishingly low.
You're right. I stand corrected. I didn't realize Gwynn had stolen that many bases. I had forgotten that in his early years Tony was quite a base stealer--56 one year and 40 another!
BTW, he wasn't totally without power--135 HR. And his .459 SLG is not too shabby. Still, I wouldn't rank him in my top dozen OF of all time, maybe not the top 15 or 20.
As to Rose, I am not one who thinks of him as "immortal." Even apart from his off-the-field problems, I would not put him in the top 15-20 at any of his several positions.
For all the talk about how Rose is such a "lock" for the Hall of Fame, I can honestly say that I don't consider him even one of the 100 best ballplayers of all time. If anything, I've always considered him one of the most overrated players in all of professional sports!
BTW, the guy from the Big Red Machine who deserves a little more consideration than he's gotten thus far is Davey Concepcion. He and Trammell are the only shortstops currently on the ballot, and they probably won't get in, but they should place a little higher than they've been getting.
Rose often gets credit for playing a number of different positions, but the reality is that he didn't play any of them exceptionally well from a defensive standpoint.
I agree. I mentioned his many positions not to give him credit, but just the opposite, to show he wasn't that great at any of them. And I saw him play many, many times--both in person and on TV--from the beginning of his career to the end.
You're overlooking the fact that Rose had 10 years with 200+ hits, and another 5 with 185+. That's surefire HOF material. I also don't think your argument about longevity holds much water, because even if cut Rose's numbers off when he turned 40, he's still at 3500+ hits. Regarding longevity, it's not as if Rose hung around by his fingernails to achieve an immortal number, like Don Sutton did. Rose's numbers are HOF quality. Don Sutton, on the other hand, is the worst modern-era HOF player. A joke, really.
Tony Gwynn was also the starting point guard for his college basketball team. Trying imaging that one in your head.
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