Fame and Cooperstown

By James Floto

"But now fate catches me. Let me not sink into the dust inactive and inglorious, but first complete the great things, of which future time shall hear." - Odysseus, 29, 332-4

Here we will focus on the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. The Hall of Fame, where the greatest ballplayers, managers, announcers, umpires, broadcasters and executives in Major League baseball history are ensconced. The Hall of Fame, which assures that Babe Ruth and Willie Mays will not "sink into the dust inactive and inglorious." The Hall of Fame, which was created to honor those who have "completed great things" in baseball.

Why is it, though, that we are so fascinated by fame? What is it about stardom that moves us so much? What is fame, and how does one become famous?

As we can see from The Odyssey, the Greeks were not shy about their desire to live on in memory. Odysseus wanted to be well known not only in his own time and place, but also to be one "...of whom the future will hear." The future Alexander the Great winced every time his father, Phillip of Macedonia, won a battle, because he feared there would be no conquests left for him, no fame for him to garner.

So the craving for notoriety is nothing new. While some people are driven by the desire for power, money, or sex - all of which can be roads to fame in themselves -- others simply want to be well known. This thirst for recognition is echoed in the young Ted Williams' winsome remark that "I just want to walk down the street and have people say, 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.'" That's how the poor kid from San Diego wanted to be remembered.

With its long history and extensive media coverage baseball gives fame to its excellent players, whether they wish for it like Williams or not. It also etches in our memory those like the Chicago Black Sox whose deeds were not so glorious.

Fame is thus an integral part of our game. We still discuss Babe Ruth and the heroes of our childhood. This leaves unanswered, though, the question, Why do the rest of us care?

Is it envy? No doubt that's part of it. Most of us bumble our way through our Joe Schmoe lives, knowing our family and friends but wondering what it would be like to be on the Wheaties box. Sitting on the couch, champing cheese puffs, having just finished paying the bills, we watch Roger Clemens face off with Pedro Martinez and wonder, "What would that be like?" Most of us will dream about it and never know--as do millions of others.

There is another aspect of fame that comes to mind, too. That is that we vicariously share in the stardom of the great players. Though we may not be stars, most of us work hard, take pride in our work and strive - to be the best at what we do. We see our baseball heroes as mirror images --albeit shining more brightly-- of our own goals. Baseball stars have accomplished their great goals and motivate us to do the same. We cheer them partly because we understand how hard it is---and we certainly know how it feels to fail seven times out of ten.

What is this somewhat elusive quality, fame? As we said, the Black Sox are famous, too, but for all the wrong reasons. So there is fame, what you might call raw fame, and then there are qualities of fame. Bill Buckner had a near Hall of Fame career, but he is recalled almost solely for the "wickets play" on Mookie Wilson's ground ball, not for his .289 career average, his 2,715 hits or 1980 batting championship. And then there are the Ty Cobbs and Albert Belles, who are respected for their great abilities but are not particularly well liked.

Nevertheless, the true baseball fan (a word shortened from 'fanatic,' after all) tends to agree with our Paul Wysard, who writes, "I am a 66-year-old sentimentalist to whom almost every Big League ballplayer is a special person." Even though there are qualities of fame, we look at the man in his baseball uniform on the field of the baseball cathedral as special, perhaps a little above us, whether he is third string catcher for the Devil Rays or winning pitcher for a World Series champion.

How, then, does that tiny minority make it to Cooperstown? The empirical answer is that they are elected by a select group, either by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) who select those off the ballot with 75% or more of them voting yes, or by the 15-member Veteran's Committee (soon to be replaced by all players), the so-called "backdoor method" of entry to the Hall.

Fine, but how do players achieve that level of greatness and fame (by no means necessarily the same thing) that grants them entry into the hallowed halls of Cooperstown? As we have seen, there are various qualities of fame. There are also various degrees of fame.

*Performance: The difference between a .238 career hitting second string outfielder and Sunny Jim Bottomley (a .310 career hitting HOFer) may just be a matter of degree, but it is pronounced. In any era there are a few players who float to the top year after year. They are rare performers and that's one reason they are in Cooperstown.

*Star Quality: Charley Gerhinger, the Mechanical Man, may not have had charisma in the sense that Jimmie Foxx did, but he still had a certain quality to him, which said that he knew and the fans knew that here was a special player.

*Endurance: You have to play at least 10 seasons to be considered for the Hall and with only a few exceptions, Hall of Famers play at least 15 years and an inordinate number over 20 seasons. Hall of Famer or not, you have to have an on-going value to be out on that big league diamond for two decades, so all 20-year veterans are by definition extraordinary. But there are a lot of two decade stars who aren't in the Hall, so endurance, while critical, is no guarantee of entering Cooperstown.

*Exposure: The amount of attention an individual receives clearly has an impact on his celebrity. Old-time greats like Wally Berger or Bob Johnson would be familiar names had they played in New York or Chicago. Today, Vladimir Guerrero is one of the three or four best hitters in the game, but he is not well known outside of Montreal. Conversely, a lot of Yankees would not be nearly as well known had they not played in the Big Apple.

*Endurance: Each generation must renew their acquaintance with players. As time passes, many names, even of Hall of Famers, begin to fade. But the Hall of Famer clearly has a better chance than the non-HOFer of being remembered over the decades.

THE HALL OF FAME
It sounds redundant to say the Baseball Hall of Fame is the home for famous ballplayers. However, there is a genuine concern that Cooperstown has become more the Hall of Big Numbers than the Hall of Fame. More than one player has lingered long after his best years are but a memory in the effort to win 250-300 games, accumulate 2500-3000 hits, or aim for 500 home runs.

Roger Maris did not put up big career numbers: a modest .260 average, 275 homers (100 of which were hit in his two MVP seasons), 826 runs scored and 851 RBI. Does he belong in the Hall? By contemporary standards, clearly not. Yet in the early '60s he was as well known as any player not named Mays or Mantle and even today his is a very well known name. I am not saying he should necessarily be in, but he is clearly a very famous baseball player and Fame is the name of the institution, after all.

Maris was no ball of fire as an interviewee but there was no concealing the fact that he hit more homers in a season than the Babe, expansion schedule or not. It was a time that Kennedy and a younger generation were moving into power in politics, the Steve McQueens were replacing the Jimmy Stewarts as in-demand actors--and that a Roger Maris could hit more homers than Babe Ruth. Maybe another aspect of fame is the associations we have with it.

Ironically, the Maris episode just demonstrated how permanence of the game, because Maris never was in contention for taking away the awe people felt for the Babe and his prodigious, nearly super-human, power. No one ever has, no one ever will. He remains at the top of all Hall of Famers, the Bambino, the King, the Number One Ace Honcho. He is number one in the Hall of Fame.

Following the Babe, you have your most elite players. There are a fair amount of players who have Hall of Fame seasons or half a Hall of Fame career; there are those you have to argue about and then there are those about whom there is no doubt they form top echelon of Cooperstown. Here we find Cobb, Cy Young, Tris Speaker, Grover Alexander, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Rogers Hornsby, Frankie Frisch, Lou Gehrig, Foxx, DiMaggio, Williams, Musial, Satchel Paige, Feller, Spahn, Jackie Robinson, Mays, Mantle, Aaron, Clemente, Banks, Frank Robinson, Koufax, Marichal, Gibson, Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, Yaz. Guys you don't have to think about twice; these are straight up Hall of Famers.

Then comes the next tier, which includes players who are almost at the elite level (Zach Wheat, Goose Goslin, Charley Gehringer, Whitey Ford, Al Kaline, Willie McCovey, Eddie Mathews, Billy Williams, Robin Yount, and Kirby Puckett, for example), followed by marginals, players who probably belong but whose inclusion can be argued.

And that brings us to another question. Just who is the Hall for? It is a conservative operation and change comes slowly. But I don't have a whole lot of faith in the BBWAA--I know of enough writers who didn't know or care enough to be worth a damn. I like the new Vets committee, with the players, rather than a small number of retirees, selecting the vets.

As far as the first and second tier, it already exists. For instance, 39% of those in the Hall were voted in by BBWAA, while the rest were "Wile E. Coyoted" in. As for the vast majority of those selected by the Veterans Committee, most are interchangeable with The Diamond Angle's Stars In Their Time Hall of Fame inductees.

How about all the attempts, by the likes of Bill James and James Vail and others, to create an objective way of selecting Hall of Famers? Even here, we find that one man's objectively is another's subjectivity. Look at James' Black Ink or Win Shares, Hobsams' HEX score, and Vail's method. They are all well thought out, reasonable-and end up with vastly different results.

Knowledgeable fans rave about the Black Ink Test--but James selected the categories for inclusion and how many points they were worth. Change the categories, tinker with the number of points and you have a whole new ballgame.

James is probably the most knowledgeable and certainly the most entertaining of the Hall of Fame historians, but even he often misses the forest for the trees. Of Cecil Fielder he says, "He was a big fat guy who hit a bunch of homers for a few years." Probably tired one Friday night after pouring over statistics all week. I can say with equal conviction, "Cecil electrified the baseball world when he returned from Japan and hit 50 homers when no one was hitting that many. He almost single-handedly revived North American interest in Japanese baseball. Within a few years of his return from Japan, first Japanese pitchers arrived, then Ichiro started showing up, enriching our game. Part of the credit was due to Cecil finding himself in Japan. He hit 319 homers and drove in 1008 runs in 13 years. Not good enough for Cooperstown but he was a great player for a half decade. Just ask AL pitchers of that era how badly they wanted to face him. He also did a lot for inner city kids, getting them involved with baseball. He eventually ate himself out of the game, but he was one of many wonderful gentle giant first basemen, from Jimmie Foxx to Frank Howard to Mark McGwire.

The time will never come when we all agree on who should be in the Hall and the methods of selection for it. The Hall of Fame will endure as long as the game does and we will continue to love it and idolize the vast majority of those with plaques on the walls of Cooperstown.