I wrote a book last year about the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Cooperstown at the Crossroads applauded the hall’s outstanding honorees — dozens and dozens of them — and bemoaned its occasional clunkers.
My final chapter offered a nine-point plan to reinvigorate the Hall of Fame. I recommended several major adjustments to the hall’s election process and its physical layout, though I stopped short of advocating the removal of any of its 342 plaques.
“Every player, manager, executive, and umpire who was admitted to the Hall of Fame was assured of permanent enshrinement,” I wrote. “There is no provision in the hall’s rules for the reconsideration of past election results or the removal of members. The accolade was intended to be perpetual. How could such a promise be broken?”
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Others have not been so circumspect.
John Leo, a syndicated newspaper columnist, wrote a great article for the New York Times in 1988. He suggested that the Hall of Fame should follow the lead of art museums that “deaccession” — a polite word for “unload” — paintings and sculptures they no longer want. Leo put it this way: “Who wouldn’t like to deaccession players like Sunny Jim Bottomley, Zack Wheat, Jesse Haines, Chick Hafey, or George Kell, who was mistakenly accessioned a few years ago by the perennially woeful Committee on Veterans?”
He had a point. It's commonly agreed that several unworthy candidates have made their way to Cooperstown since the hall’s first election in 1936. Leo was willing to share his nominees, and yes, despite my sentiments above, I have a few of my own.
I intend to examine a few of these borderline immortals over the Fridays to come, and I propose to start with the weakest of them all, Tommy McCarthy.
I developed a 100-point indicator, which I call a quality score (QS), to assess the relative merits of the hall’s current and prospective honorees. A player with a QS equal to or greater than 60 points is virtually certain of election to the Hall of Fame. Anybody between 45 and 59 points has a good likelihood of making it to Cooperstown, while a candidate between 30 and 44 points has a marginal chance.
And if a player has a score lower than 30 points? He might make it, though the odds are heavily stacked against him.
Tommy McCarthy, an outfielder for several clubs during the late 1800s, has the distinction of possessing the lowest QS among all 270 players in the hall. (The other 72 honorees were chosen for excellence off the field.)
McCarthy was undeniably fast — stealing as many as 93 bases in a season — though he otherwise failed to distinguish himself. The QS for his entire career amounted to one point on the scale of 100. A single point!
Maury Wills topped McCarthy’s thievery on two occasions, memorably peaking at 104 stolen bases in 1962. His QS of 13 points was low, though clearly better than McCarthy’s one measly point. Yet Wills never received more than 41 percent of the votes in any Hall of Fame election, far below the necessary 75 percent.
So why was McCarthy enshrined and Wills repudiated?
Cynics have long pinned the blame on chauvinism. McCarthy was elected in 1946, not by the nation’s baseball writers (the usual route for top-flight players), but by a small panel known as the Old-Timers Committee.
The committee’s most powerful member, Connie Mack, had been born Cornelius McGillicuddy. It was perhaps no coincidence that the hall’s classes of 1945 and 1946 abounded with Irish surnames: Bresnahan, Collins, Delahanty, Duffy, Kelly, McGinnity, O’Rourke, Walsh, and yes, McCarthy. “The new immortals sounded like a roll call at a meeting of the Ancient Order of Hibernians,” author Zev Chafets complained.
McCarthy’s plaque in Cooperstown credits him with 109 steals in a single season — a number now known to be inflated — and heralds him as a “pioneer in trapping fly balls in the outfield.” That’s a mighty thin foundation for any Hall of Fame resumé.
If Cooperstown ever considers deaccessioning some of its plaques, Tommy McCarthy would be as good a starting place as any.
HOF box score: Tommy McCarthy
Career: 1884-1896
Teams: Boston (National League), Boston (Union Association), Brooklyn (NL), Philadelphia (NL), St. Louis (American Association)
Primary positions: RF, LF
Career stats: G 1,273, HR 44, RBI 732, BA .292
League leader: PA twice, AB once, SB once
Quality score: 1 point (poor)
Selected to HOF: 1946
Selected by: Old-Timers Committee