Who's the New Santo?

By Bill


For pretty much as long as I've been aware of these things, there have been two guys who were, clearly and beyond all reasonable dispute, by far the most worthy eligible players not in the Hall of Fame: Bert Blyleven and Ron Santo. Now, of course, thanks in some part to a big push by the stathead crowd, they're both in.

So now what? Rob Neyer tackled that question yesterday. Kind of. I'm not entirely sure what he conclusion he comes to, though; he asks the question much more than he answers it. And I guess (as Rob hints) the question of "who should the next cause be" isn't that interesting right now. We're in kind of a transitional period where nothing we do matters much anyway; in a couple years, it's going to be all about Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and so forth, and I'm going to hate every bleeding second of it.

I guess the question I'm interested in is: if you could throw all your support behind one candidate and wake people up to his cause, who would it be? Or, if you prefer, a slightly different but closely related question: who is getting ripped off most royally? I've said that Scott Rolen "is set up to take over for Santo as the new most egregious snub," and Kenny Lofton and Jim Edmonds will have a strong claim to that title, too, but they're not eligible yet, so technically, we don't know that they're going to get jobbed (even though they totally are). So we'll just consider candidates that already have been considered and (more or less) rejected. 


Here's a chart of what I think are the ten best candidates:

Spare a thought for the poor, neglected third baseman

By Bill


One of Bill James' books -- I think it was one of the Historical Baseball Abstracts, but I'm not positive -- talks about a sudden shift in the way baseball people perceived the third base position. In the game's early-ish days, third base was looked at as a defense-first position, a lot more like second base is now -- and if anything, second was the more offense-minded position of the two.

James (or one of his assistants; something tells me it was Jim Baker) credited the eventual perception shift on the little-remembered Harlond Clift, a star of the terrible Browns teams of the 1930s and 1940s. Clift's offensive numbers don't look like much today, but he really was the first power-hitting third baseman. Two 3Bs between the beginning of time and 1940 hit more than thirty homers in a season: one was Mel Ott, only barely a third baseman (and for only that one season), and the other was Clift. There were ten seasons by third basemen in that span where even twenty homers were hit: one was Ott; one was Ned Williamson, who took advantage of a rule change and a ridiculous ballpark to hit a record 27 of them in 1884; and four of the remaining eight were by Clift. And Clift, in his twenties, was a complete hitter, keeping his average near .300 and drawing plenty of walks. Clift really was a relevation; you can look back through history from now and see Alex Rodriguez and Mike Schmidt and George Brett and Eddie Mathews and Chipper Jones and Evan Longoria, and Clift doesn't look like much. Looking back from 1940, though, there was pretty much only Clift. So then came Mathews et al., and Clift had kicked off this big change in the way people looked at the position; it was another second base, and suddenly became another first base. Post-Clift, your third baseman was supposed to be one of the anchors of your offense.

Here's the punchline, though: I think that shift in the way third base was perceived was wrong. Or, at least, much, much too drastic.