There have been a number of questions on this blog and a lot of discussion on the various sports talk shows about the Hall of Fame selection process and, more specifically: How Jim Rice can be a Hall of Famer in his 15th try when he wasn't in the first 14? Thought I'd chime in, because it's a question HOF voters deal with every year.
I guess the best way to handle Rice (right) is to put his candidacy into a broader perspective. When he became eligible for the Hall 15 years ago, we lived in an entirely different baseball world. Rice's cumulative numbers were considered borderline -- even though the steroid era was just getting underway -- which probably explains why he didn't make it on the early ballots, and the landscape quickly turned hard against him.
The home run glut of the late 1990s and early 2000s dwarfed his power numbers. He hit 382 home runs in his 14-year career. There was a six-year period since then during which Sammy Sosa hit 332 and the 500-homer standard gave way to 600 as the benchmark for the modern slugger.
Of course, we all know now why that happened, and no one from the previous generation of big hitters should be penalized for the sins of the steroid scandal, which brings us to one of the first pre-steroid sluggers to get his numbers evaluated in their proper context. It's possible he even benefitted from the post-steroid sensitivity.
I still feel Rice was a borderline candidate -- and his 76 percent vote total probably confirms that -- but he was the scariest hitter in the game for a 10-year period, so I'm glad he finally got in.
Don't know if that answers the core question. If he is a Hall of Famer now, it's fair to ask why he wasn't a Hall of Famer on the first ballot. But the voting procedure was designed so that it's possible to see a bigger picture through the prism of history. Overall, I think the Baseball Writers Association of America has done a fantastic job over the years watching the gate at Cooperstown, and I've got no problem with the way this particular situation was handled by my fellow baseball writers.
Full disclosure: Of course, I'm probably prejudiced, since I was the national president of the BBWAA a couple of years ago.
Associated Press photo
