Yeah, so the timing is weird (no Hall vote for another 10 months, and no induction ceremony for five), but sometimes inspiration overrides practicality. A brief discussion among staff regarding the size of the Hall of Fame — in fact emanating from a comment about it being laughable that Bulls coach Billy Donovan is in the Basketball Hall of Fame — led to this point-counterpoint from Brian O’Neill and David James. It’s not our “Discussion” topic today, but feel free to weigh in on whether you are big-Hall or small-Hall, down in the comments.
A Big Hall, for a Weird Sport in a Dumb and Beautiful World
A co-worker, one who delightfully brings in the newspaper every day, came up to last week and, obit page open, said, “This guy who just died pitched three complete games in the 1968 World Series.” Before he even finished, my synapses fired and I said, confidently, “Yeah, Denny McClain.”
No! Shit! It was Mickey Lolich, I realized before the words were even out of my mouth. McClain is the other Tigers pitcher from 1968, the guy who somehow won 30 games that year. The same year Bob Gibson had a 1.12 ERA, the lowest in the live-ball era. The same Gibson who Lolich outdueled in that unmatched Fall Classic in that most terrible of American years. But of course, only Gibson is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
If you’re reading this, you might say, “Of course, that makes sense. Gibson is one of the greatest pitchers of all-time, the other two are journeymen who had a bafflingly great year, or just a legendary series. Gibson is immortal; Lolich left baseball and ran a donut shop.”
But that gets to the heart of the “Big Hall” argument, where it’s OK that players who aren’t obvious Olympians make the Hall of Fame. There are many who understandably think that degrades the Hall, cheapens the accomplishments of the best of the best, and perhaps that it makes it seem like being great is somehow easy. Or at least achievable, even for a guy like Harold Baines.
That’s understandable. But it also misunderstands what the Hall is, and maybe is even slightly off-kilter with the madness of baseball (I say this knowing full well that David James, below, understands the game at a level I do not and never will).
Let’s start with the Hall of Fame. We tend to use that phrase as synecdoche for an incredible career. “Is X a Hall-of-Famer?” is, when we ask it, about greatness. It’s tangible and stat-based, but not concrete. We ask if this player is mythical. The actual Hall, however, isn’t mythical. It is essentially a private club where a small clique of self-selected misanthropes bring their biases and blind spots to decide something that pretends to be a public good. The veteran and old-timer committees expand that, but it also falls more often than not into cliquish or piqued cronyism.
It isn’t pure. It isn’t an objective signifier of greatness, as you know when thinking about your favorite player who isn’t in the Hall. And there is no real way to make it so. Expanding voting to, say, the public would be just as dumb, as you’d have idiots like me thinking, “Hell yeah, Ron Karkovice should be a Hall-of-Famer, I loved that guy!” And going the other direction — a set of numbers that someone has to achieve, be it dingers or wins or WAR or or whatever — is a bit of autonomic drudgery.
And baseball, which gives us the great gift of numbers, so many wonderful numbers, is still anything but drudgery. It’s weird and unpredictable and maddeningly difficult and anyone who excels at it is doing something that is nearly impossible.
Let’s look at Lolich again.
He was a very good pitcher. Career WAR of 47, comps to Jim Bunning and Billy Pierce and Vida Blue, with peaks in the Bert Blyleven zone. Longevity and still that begat 2,800 strikeouts. By most accounts, not a Hall-of-Famer. Good career, cool story, but not immortal.
Says who, though? Some mustard-stained sportswriter? Deciding one man’s legacy?
But think of a slightly bigger Hall. Think about a Hall that recognizes where good verges into great, where a guy who had a solid career doing something nearly impossible, who in one improbable fall where the country was falling apart gave people a positive reason to disbelieve reality, in the same way that Shohei Ohtani did for us last year.
That’s not nothing. Feeling the improbable is why we love sports even if we know it makes no sense in a world run by depraved maniacs. If there was a bigger Hall, there’d be more to celebrate. There’d be more people to marvel at, even if you marvel at them less than god’s chosen destroyer, Bob Gibson.
Having Lolich as a Hall-of-Famer wouldn’t take anything away from Gibson. It would show him to be a great among greats. Remind us that most people can barely throw a baseball and Lolich could do it better than 99% of anyone else and that 1% is Bob Gibson, and isn’t that cool? Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that baseball?
Raising Hall standards doesn’t mean raising the standard for greatness: The 1968 World Series hero should be memorialized by the Tigers, not the Hall
I think of the Big Hall-Small Hall debate as a spectrum. One end says “Great Career” and the other says “Great Stretch.” At the Career end are the Babe Ruths, Tom Seavers and Jackie Robinsons who put up MVP-caliber numbers for 10-plus years. The other extreme is for the flash-in-the-pan types like Yermín Mercedes or Joe Hall (ifyky.) In the middle of that spectrum is everyone else.
Having an opinion on the Baseball Hall of Fame means drawing your line, your personal threshold along that spectrum where you believe longevity and greatness combine to create a Hall-of-Famer. I have commissioned the artist rendition below for $750:
I’ll be the first to admit that the Hall has contradictions. Freddie Lindstrom is in the Hall of Fame with a career 28.5 bWAR and one really good lobbyist in former Hall of Fame Veteran’s Committee member Frankie Frisch. Mickey Lolich, by any measure, is better than Freddie Lindstrom. There’s an injustice somewhere.
But adding Lolich doesn’t rectify it. The real answer is to retract Lindstrom, alongside a handful of other clear nepotism cases from over the years.
I don’t want to throw mud, though. I want to celebrate Lolich, who passed away on February 4. Mainly, I want to celebrate his 1968 World Series because this is fucking insane: Lolich went 3-0, throwing three complete games and a Series ERA of 1.67. Here they are, in all their splendor:
Game 2: After Bob Gibson outdueled 31-game winner Denny McLain in Game 1, Lolich dog-walked the Cardinals lineup for nine dominant innings. Final line: CG, 6 H, 1 ER, 2 BB, 9 SO. He also hit a home run, just ’cuz.
Game 5: The Cards won Games 3 and 4, putting them ahead, 3-1, in the series. Lolich gave up three runs in the top of the first because he was searching for ways to challenge himself. His interest now sufficiently piqued, Lolich locked down the Cardinals lineup the rest of the way. Just want to stress, by the way, that these Cardinals boasted Lou Brock, Orlando Cepeda, Roger Maris and Curt Flood. Final line: CG, 9 H, 3 ER, 1 BB, 8 SO. He also went 1-for-4 and scored a run! (Lolich was a career .110 hitter, FYI. Like Gucci Mane after him, Lolich was shining for no apparent reason.)
Game 7: The Tigers matched up Lolich against Gibson for the winner-take-all game. We’re in the year 1968, mind you. When I say “Bob Gibson was pitching,” that means Bob Gibson was pitching. That’s 1.12 ERA Bob Gibson, the guy who strained so hard while he threw, he pissed blood after his starts as a matter of routine. That Bob Gibson.
Gibson and Lolich gave up four combined baserunners in the first five innings. Gibson blinked in the seventh, giving up three runs. Lolich never stumbled until the 27th out, when he gave up a solo home run to Mike Shannon. He got the final out via Tim McCarver, who then became a broadcaster and sought his revenge on baseball.
I’m going to give Lolich credit for a gentlemen’s shutout because this is my half of the article. Here’s the “official” line: CG, 5 H, 1 ER, 3 BB, 4 SO, and a Game 7 victory over Bob Gibson!
Here’s one thing about the Baseball Hall of Fame we never discuss: It’s a pain in the ass to get to. The closest city you can fly into is Albany, 90 minutes west of Cooperstown via I-88. If I’m going to go through the effort I want to learn about the undisputed greats: Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Josh Gibson. Mickey Lolich is 148th in bWAR all-time among starting pitchers; he shouldn’t make the cut on anyone’s first visit.
I want to end by stressing this, however: When I say somebody doesn’t meet my threshold for the Hall of Fame, I don’t do it with my nose in the air. In fact, do you know who should celebrate Lolich? The Detroit Tigers! He’s the franchise leader in both strikeouts (306 ahead of Verlander) and shutouts (39, five more than deadball-era great George Mullen.)
I had assumed Lolich was enshrined in the Comerica Park Walk of Fame, but he’s not! And that is the real miscarriage. Lolich’s greatness may not transcend the Tigers, but he is a pillar of the team’s history, just as much as fellow ’68 Tigers Al Kaline, Norm Cash and baseball’s final 30-game winner, Denny McClain.
If Mark Buehrle never makes the Hall of Fame, in contrast, he’ll always have a statue in center field of Sox Park. He’ll have dozens of fans every game day posing with his statue, celebrating the impact he had on generations of Sox fans. And he didn’t even get screwed around, like the Hall infamously did with the posthumous honors for Dick Allen and Ron Santo. In fact, Buerhle got to pose for the damn statue himself! Buehrle doesn’t need the Hall of Fame to validate any of that.
And while a Sox fan may understandably never fly to Albany, or a Tigers fan may never drive I-80 east of Niagara, they’re both far more likely to make the journey to catch their favorite team play a ball game at home, where their core baseball memories are made.