Extending the Hall of Fame’s reach
Why shouldn’t scouts, statisticians, agents, and even groundskeepers be inducted?
My new book, Cooperstown at the Crossroads, offers a nine-point plan to reinvigorate the National Baseball Hall of Fame. (The book is now available from Niawanda Books.) I’m going into detail about each of my nine proposals on successive Fridays in this newsletter. Today — Point No. 4, a broader reach.
The Hall of Fame exhibited an early willingness to induct men who had made diverse contributions to baseball’s development. This open spirit reached full flower in 1938, when the Centennial Commission honored Alexander Cartwright and Henry Chadwick for achievements beyond the playing field.
Cartwright was hailed as the “father of modern baseball” for codifying the game’s rules in 1845 and spreading the gospel of baseball to the West Coast and Hawaii, a resumé that might have been padded just a touch. “The fullness of his contribution to the game’s origins remains one of baseball’s greatest mysteries,” wrote historian Monica Nucciarone.
Yet Cartwright retains the distinction of being one of the first two inductees not celebrated for a career as a player, manager, or league president. The other was his 1938 classmate, Chadwick, a journalist who was credited with creating the box score and compiling baseball’s first rulebook.
The Centennial Commission made an additional pair of esoteric choices in 1939, tapping Al Spalding for being an “organizational genius” and Candy Cummings for inventing the curveball.
Spalding probably deserved induction for his success as a pitcher, though the commission seemed to be equally impressed with the eponymous sporting-goods firm he founded after his playing days. Cummings never would have made it to Cooperstown without his innovation. Other pitchers claimed to have devised the curve, but the Sporting News settled the dispute. “The preponderance of proof would seem to be in Cummings’s favor,” it ruled.
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The Hall of Fame thereafter refrained from making such unusual choices. Cartwright remains the only honoree enshrined as a founding father, Chadwick the only journalist, Spalding the only entrepreneur, Cummings the only pitch inventor. Every inductee after 1939 was voted into the hall because of his or her record as a player, manager, executive, or umpire.
That doesn’t mean the hall has been totally oblivious to contributions of other sorts. Its first postwar attempt to broaden its scope was unveiled in 1946. The idea behind the Honor Rolls of Baseball, according to author Ken Smith, was to salute “representatives from important departments other than actual play.”
The four Honor Rolls included five managers, 11 umpires, 11 executives, and 12 sportswriters, none of whom had qualified for the main gallery. These 39 men weren’t classified as members of the hall, but were placed on a somewhat lower level. (Nine have since been inducted.) The Honor Rolls were widely ridiculed — the Sporting News dubbed them the “Array of Almosts” — and completely ignored. Nothing was ever said of them again.
The Honor Rolls were important in only one regard. They constituted the hall’s first systematic attempt to honor journalists. Two subsequent efforts were more successful — creation of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for sportswriters (now known as the BBWAA Career Excellence Award) in 1962 and the Ford C. Frick Award for Broadcasting Excellence in 1978. Seventy-three writers and 46 broadcasters have received these annual prizes as of 2022.
Winners of these awards, just like the men listed on 1946’s Honor Rolls, are technically not members of the hall. But they sit on the platform and make speeches at the induction ceremony, just as the honored players do, and they’re treated as equals by many of those players. Peter Gammons, who won the Spink Award in 2004, was rendered virtually speechless when Willie Mays asked him to sign a baseball at that summer’s ceremony.
“I’m not a Hall of Fame player,” Gammons reminded him.
“You’re one of us,” Mays replied, “and if you don’t sign, I’ll kick you in the behind.” Gammons quickly scrawled his signature on a ball.
If the great Willie Mays, the oldest living Hall of Famer, believes that the 119 honored writers and broadcasters are full members of Cooperstown’s exclusive club, who are we to disagree? So let’s make their elevation official.
And let’s not stop there. It’s time to widen the array of occupations represented on the Hall of Fame ballot. The proposed screening subcommittee, of course, will draw candidates from the usual fields — players, managers, executives, and umpires — but it will also consider writers, broadcasters, scouts, statistical analysts, groundskeepers, agents, and doctors, among other professions.
This expansion — this broadening of the hall’s scope — will open the doors to deserving honorees who previously had little or no hope of induction. Let me offer a few suggestions. This isn’t a comprehensive list by any stretch of the imagination, just a hint of the various types of contributors who could be included on the Selection Committee’s ballot:
Clyde Sukeforth was the scout who advised Branch Rickey that Jackie Robinson would be the ideal trailblazer to integrate the major leagues. “I consider your role, next to Mr. Rickey’s and my wife’s — yes, bigger than any other person with whom I came in contact,” Robinson later wrote to Sukeforth. The latter, for good measure, was also the scout who discovered Roberto Clemente for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Allan Roth served as the Dodgers’ statistician from 1947 to 1964, but he is better described as baseball’s first sabermetrician, even though the term didn’t exist in his heyday. Roth invented the save as a statistical category in 1951, and he devised an eight-part equation in 1954 to measure a player’s full worth, a precursor of wins above replacement. Rickey called the formula “the most constructive thing to come into baseball in my memory.”
Bill James advanced Roth’s work exponentially. It was James who brought statistical analysis into baseball’s mainstream, and it was he who coined “sabermetrics” to name the burgeoning field he inspired. Time included James on its 2006 list of 100 people who were transforming the world, and author Jamie Malanowski later hailed him as “the man who has had the greatest influence on baseball in the last 40 years.”
George Toma became known as the “Sultan of Sod” for his stellar work as the head groundskeeper for the Athletics and Royals in Kansas City, always finding ways to give the home team an edge. “He does his damage with a set of gardening tools, not with a bat,” the New York Times said in 1976. Toma grew to be so famous in his field — pun fully intended — that the National Football League recruited him to prepare the playing surface for each year’s Super Bowl.
Many current owners hate Scott Boras, though his clients dearly love him. Both sides can agree on only one thing: Boras is the most powerful agent in today’s game, probably the most powerful ever. He negotiated 13 contracts in excess of $100 million in 2020 alone, according to a Forbes study, and he secured a total of $3.2 billion for his clients during that 12-month period.
A Hall of Fame case can be made for pitcher Tommy John, based partly on his 288 victories over 26 seasons, and partly on the groundbreaking surgery that carries his name. But what about Frank Jobe, the doctor who devised the operation that has saved hundreds of pitching careers? Jobe seems to be a logical candidate for Cooperstown, though he always insisted that his patient’s courage was the most important component of the story. “So it’s Tommy John surgery,” the doctor once said. “And I like the way it sounds, don’t you?”
You get the idea. There are dozens of worthy contenders out there in what we might call nontraditional fields. The Selection Committee will have the responsibility of adding these newcomers to the mix, ensuring that the Hall of Fame salutes greatness in all aspects of baseball.
It’s essential that these additions be made as efficiently as possible. My proposals will greatly increase the hall’s membership, an expansion that could easily overwhelm visitors. If there are 500 or 600 plaques, their sheer volume and diversity might prove to be intimidating. If fans can’t easily locate their favorite players, why should they even bother going to Cooperstown?
The solution is to divide the inductees into two separate wings. The 268 members honored for their on-field performances will be given their own gallery, known (naturally) as the players’ wing. These stars attract most of the hall’s tourist traffic, so it makes perfect sense to assemble their plaques in a single hall.
The others will be placed in the contributors’ wing, which will initially contain 10 umpires, 22 managers, 40 pioneers/executive, 46 broadcasters, and 73 writers — a total of 191 honorees. Representatives of the other fields cited above will also be welcomed to this gallery.