Giving great teams their due
The best players are in the Hall of Fame, so why aren’t the best clubs?
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. 6, team honors.
Eric Davis had a nice career — 17 seasons, 1,430 hits, .269 batting average — though it wasn’t sufficiently impressive to pave his way to the Hall of Fame. He received only three votes in the hall’s 2007 election and dropped off the ballot.
Yet Davis eagerly awaited the voting results five years later, and he was excited to learn of Barry Larkin’s induction. The two had been teammates on Cincinnati’s 1990 world champions, with Davis supplying the power (a team-leading 86 runs batted in) and Larkin the consistency (185 hits and a .301 average).
Davis knew that every World Series titlist between 1903 and 1993 was represented (as of 2012) by a player, manager, or executive in Cooperstown, with the sole exception of the 1990 Reds. It pleased him that Larkin would be filling the gap.
“By him going to the Hall of Fame,” Davis said happily, “it’s like we made the Hall of Fame.”
Which begs the question: Baseball is a team game, so why does the hall confine itself to individual honorees?
Basketball’s shrine, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, has followed a different path from the start. Its inaugural class of 1959 comprised 15 individuals and two teams.
The latter were the First Team, an informal name for the 18 students who played the first basketball game in 1891 under the tutelage of James Naismith, the sport’s inventor; and the Original Celtics, the first successful professional club, which traveled the country during the 1920s and 1930s. Another 10 teams were welcomed to the basketball hall between 1961 and 2022.
This is an example that baseball would do well to emulate. Thousands upon thousands of the tourists who flock to Cooperstown wear the hats and jerseys of their favorite clubs. They’re drawn to the hall by the outstanding players honored within, but their excitement would be magnified if baseball’s greatest teams were honored, too.
Basketball’s hall has admitted an unusual array of teams, including early barnstormers (the All-American Red Heads and Buffalo Germans), noteworthy college squads (Immaculata, Tennessee A&I, Texas Western), a pair of U.S. Olympic teams (1960 and 1992), and the incomparable Harlem Globetrotters.
Yet it has opted, for whatever reason, not to include the standout clubs of recent generations. Bill Russell and John Wooden are honored as individuals, but their respective dynasties, the Boston Celtics and UCLA Bruins, have not been inducted.
I suggest a different approach for Cooperstown. Rule 6 prohibits the induction of a player based on accomplishments confined to a single season, and the same restriction should apply to teams. The Hall of Fame, under my system, will honor ballclubs that have sustained a level of excellence for at least three consecutive years.
Teams will be chosen in a separate annual election, though the procedure will be similar to that for individuals. The proposed screening subcommittee will assemble a list of 10 nominated clubs, and it will distribute ballots and supporting material to the Selection Committee in mid-January. The same four-point scale will be used, with an average score of 3.00 as the threshold for induction. Results will be announced in late February.
It’s tempting to say that the hall should add a third wing for teams, though that seems a step too far. I doubt there’s sufficient room or money for such an expansion project in Cooperstown. So let’s add the inducted teams to the contributors’ wing for now, and we’ll see what happens in the future.
I have assembled my own list of 30 possibilities for team honors, based on a formula that I devised to grade every big-league club between 1871 and 2020. It compared each team’s regular-season statistics to the norms for its particular league and year in four categories:
Winning percentage (30 percent)
Run differential per game (30 percent)
Bases per outs (batters, 20 percent)
Earned-run average (pitchers, 20 percent)
I used standard deviations and z-scores, weighting the four factors according to the percentages above. There’s no need to delve into the specifics, but it’s important to understand what the results mean. My formula assigned a relative score to each team, indicating the degree to which it was better or worse than the average club of its time. I used those scores to compile top-to-bottom ratings of 3,236 big-league squads over 150 seasons.
Thirty franchises ranked among the top 324 clubs of all time — the very highest 10 percent — for at least three years in a row. Those are the teams that are listed at the bottom of this story.
I don’t present these ratings as the final word on this subject — not in the least — but I do believe they offer a reasonable glimpse at the clubs that might be worthy of induction. If you want further information about these outstanding teams, check the summaries in my book.
Some of these 30 clubs were truly dominant, while others fell a tiny bit short. But they have two qualities in common: They all played excellent ball for a protracted period, and they all deserve to be included in the Hall of Fame discussion.
Keep in mind that my statistical analysis for the book stopped after the 2020 season, perhaps putting an early end to the streaks for the final two teams on the list.
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Clubs worthy of Hall of Fame consideration
1873-1875 Boston Red Stockings
1880-1882 Chicago White Stockings
1885-1888 St. Louis Browns
1891-1893 Boston Beaneaters
1894-1898 Baltimore Orioles
1909-1911 Philadelphia Athletics
1911-1913 New York Giants
1923-1925 Kansas City Monarchs
1928-1931 Philadelphia Athletics
1934-1939 New York Yankees
1937-1941 Kansas City Monarchs
1937-1943 Homestead Grays
1941-1943 New York Yankees
1942-1944 St. Louis Cardinals
1951-1953 New York Yankees
1956-1958 Milwaukee Braves
1956-1958 New York Yankees
1960-1963 New York Yankees
1969-1971 Baltimore Orioles
1971-1975 Oakland Athletics
1972-1976 Cincinnati Reds
1986-1988 New York Mets
1988-1990 Oakland Athletics
1990-1992 Pittsburgh Pirates
1991-1993 Atlanta Braves
1994-1996 Cleveland Indians
1995-1999 Atlanta Braves
1997-1999 New York Yankees
2017-2019 Houston Astros
2017-2020 Los Angeles Dodgers
Baseball’s Best (and Worst) 2023 Yearbook
A complete rundown of 2022 stats — and a look ahead at the season to come