This offseason, leading right up to the 2021 Baseball Hall of Fame announcement, we’re counting down the 100 greatest eligible players not in the Hall of Fame and ranking them in the order in which I would vote them in. Each player will receive a Hall of Fame plaque based on the pithy ones that the Hall used to use back at the start. We’ll do these 10 at a time until we get to the Top 30. Here’s Nos. 90-81.
90. Frank Oliver Howard
Los Angeles—Washington—Texas—Detroit, 1958-1973
Hondo was one of the great sluggers in the history of baseball. He was a giant of a man and despite playing in an era dominated by pitchers and playing his home games in cavernous ballparks, he hit more home runs than any player in baseball from 1967-71.
Frank Howard had several nicknames. The Washington Monument. The Capital Punisher. But the main one was Hondo, which he picked up after his Rookie of the Year season; he reminded his teammates of a John Wayne character with the same name. Howard was 6-foot-7, 255 pounds and was an All-American basketball player at Ohio State; he was good enough to drafted by the NBA’s Philadelphia Warriors. But he chose baseball and hit 80 home runs his first two minor-league seasons and then won Rookie of the Year. At that point, people thought Hondo might challenge Babe Ruth’s home run record.
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Two things happened, though. Well, three things happened if you count Roger Maris actually breaking Ruth’s record in 1961. But with Howard, the two things that happened were 1) He struck out so much that the Dodgers lost faith and platooned him before dealing him to Washington and 2) The 1960s turned out to be the worst decade for offense since the end of Deadball.
We will come back to this theme plenty in this series — some of the best hitters not in the Hall of Fame are overlooked because their numbers were suppressed by the 1960s conditions, the high mounds, the enormous strike zones, etc. One way to sort of see through all that is to neutralize the hitters’ numbers, which is to say to mathematically try to put the player in a neutral run-scoring environment.
If you neutralize Howard’s numbers, you come up with him hitting .287/.368/.522 with 410 home runs, and he would have had two 50-homer seasons. He might have an MVP award. His Hall of Fame case would look significantly better. But that’s the thing: Howard’s Hall of Fame case demands looking deeper into his dominance as a hitter while still overlooking his deficiencies as a defensive player, and the voters have not shown an eagerness to do that. He only got six Hall of Fame votes his one year on the ballot.
89. Albert (Al) Oliver
Pittsburgh—Texas—Montreal—San Francisco—Philadelphia—Los Angeles—Toronto, 1968-1985
A pure hitting machine, he hit .303 over his 18-year-career with 2,743 hits and more than 500 doubles. Spent years as one of the cogs of Pittsburgh’s famous Lumber Company. Led the league in batting average, hits, doubles and RBIs in 1982. Outspoken and fierce.
Let’s assume for a moment that 3,000 hits is an automatic ticket to the Hall of Fame. I don’t know that it is true, though everybody with 3,000 hits is in the Hall of Fame unless they have an off-the-field strike against them (steroids, gambling). But let’s say it’s true. In 1983, a 36-year-old Al Oliver hit .300 with a league-leading 38 doubles as he made the All-Star team. At season’s end, he was just 454 hits shy of 3,000.
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A year later, he hit .301 for two teams but only managed to get in 119 games. That pushed his hit total up to 2,676, just 324 hits shy of 3,000. He was turning 38 but was still not only a good but a very good hitter. You would have bet on him getting to 3,000.
But then his career took an ugly turn. He only managed to get into 96 games at age 38, and he hit just .252. And even though he was a force in the playoffs for Toronto (hitting .375 in the five-game series and inspiring Royals manager Dick Howser to design a special pitching plan to blunt his impact) there were no offers for him going forward. Years later, an arbitrator would rule that the owners colluded against Oliver and awarded him a cash settlement for lost wages in 1986. But what the arbitrator could not offer him were the at-bats. He finished 257 hits shy of 3,000.
88. Willie Larry Randolph
Pittsburgh—New York Yankees—Los Angeles—Oakland—Milwaukee—New York Mets, 1975-1992
A steady presence in the Bronx Zoo, he played excellent second-base defense, handled the bat about as well as anyone of his time, worked his way on base with regularity and was an elite base runner. Overshadowed by bigger personalities, but he was at the heart of the Yankees’ success of the 1970s.
I’m about to oversimplify things to an absurd degree, but here goes: You can mostly tell who was overrated and who was underrated in the 1960s and 1970s (and well into the 1980s) simply by looking at the player’s walk rate. In those decades, absolutely nobody cared about walks. Nobody. Announcers never talked about them. Sportswriters never wrote about them. They didn’t count in batting average, which was pretty much the only offensive stat that mattered. Walks weren’t even listed on the back of baseball cards until 1981, and there’s no doubt in my mind they were added reluctantly.
Willie Randolph walked a lot. Who knew? At the time, we saw him as a .275 or .280 hitter who would steal you some bases now and again. Don’t get me wrong, that was good for a second baseman in those days and he made six All-Star teams. But we didn’t even notice that he walked almost twice as often as he struck out and that his outstanding .383 on-base percentage from 1978-87 was better than, among others, Don Mattingly, Pete Rose, Jim Rice, Al Oliver, Eddie Murray and others with much higher batting averages than Randolph.
When you combine his high on-base percentage with some really great defense and base running, you find that Randolph’s career WAR is in the 64- or 65-wins range, which is Hall of Fame level stuff. It is in the general range of clear-cut Hall of Famers like Robbie Alomar, Craig Biggio and Ryne Sandberg and well above numerous others like Nellie Fox, Red Schoendienst, Bobby Doerr and Bill Mazeroski.
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A quick note here: I am good friends with Frank White, the All-Star second baseman for Kansas City who is a contemporary of Randolph and has his own Hall of Fame case, one very similar to Mazeroski. White was the best defensive second baseman of his time (eight Gold Gloves) and offered some power and speed on offense. There is a strong movement in Kansas City to put White in the Hall of Fame, one I can get behind. But Randolph’s offensive advantages make him the better candidate.
87. William Lance Berkman
Houston—New York Yankees—St. Louis—Texas, 1999-2013
Slugging outfielder and first baseman who, in his prime, hit the ball about as hard as anybody of his hard-hitting era. Twice led the league in doubles and finished top five in the MVP balloting four times. Big Puma was a beloved figure, particularly in his hometown of Houston, and he coached high school baseball after his career ended.
Berkman spent much of his career as a third wheel behind Hall of Famers Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio, but he was better than either of them every single year from 2001 until they each retired. That doesn’t make him a Hall of Famer — Bagwell and Biggio were both well into the decline phase of their careers when Berkman emerged — but it’s just kind of interesting.
Berkman is another of the many players on this list who simply faded too quickly at the end of his career to impress enough Hall of Fame voters. Through age 33, he was hitting .299/.412/.555 and had posted 46 or so WAR. Three more good years get him into the Hall of Fame. But he only had one more good year, 2011 for St. Louis, when he hit .301 with 31 homers and was named comeback player of the year.
86. Paul Aloysius Hines
Chicago Cubs—Providence—Washington—Indianapolis—Pittsburgh—Boston, 1872-1891
Perhaps the most complete player of the 1870s, he became the first player in National League history to win the Triple Crown in 1878 and, that same year, the first to pull off an unassisted triple play. He was also an outstanding center fielder. Befriended future president William McKinley after his playing days.
Again, it’s hard to say what to do with these ancient ballplayers — Hines spent the bulk of his career playing baseball that would be almost unrecognizable to modern eyes. Underhand pitching. Fielding without gloves. Hines had a great batting eye and yet in 1879, he walked only one time in 262 plate appearances. Why? Because it took nine balls to walk a batter that year. Still, Hines has been overlooked as one of the great players of the 19th century.
85. Ronald Ames Guidry
New York Yankees, 1975-1988
Louisiana Lightning won more than 65 percent of his games as the ace for the Bronx Zoo Yankees of the 1970s. In 1978, he went 25-3 with a league-leading 1.74 ERA, one of the great pitching seasons in baseball history. “Ron Guidry,” his teammate Willie Randolph said, “pound for pound was the fiercest competitor I ever played with.”
Ron Guidry has always had Hall of Fame supporters who like to compare him to another Yankees legend, Whitey Ford. The idea, I think, is that they were both left-handed aces for great New York teams and they both had relatively short careers and won a very high percentage of games. It’s not a perfect comparison; Ford’s career was somewhat short but it was longer and better overall than Guidry. Then again, Guidry in ’77 and ’78 was probably better than Ford at his best.
Guidry only won 170 games in his career which all but disqualified him in the minds of many Hall of Fame voters. But from 1977-85, Guidry was markedly better than many pitchers currently in the Hall of Fame.
84. Walter Anton (Wally) Berger
Boston Braves—New York Giants—Cincinnati—Philadelphia Phillies, 1930-1940
Had one of the greatest rookie seasons in baseball history in 1930 for the Boston Braves, hitting .310 with 38 home runs and 119 RBIs and was the biggest baseball star in Boston in the years before Ted Williams arrived. Career was shortened by shoulder injury, but he was a lifetime .300 hitter and one of the game’s premier sluggers in the 1930s.
Wally Berger is another of those players robbed by circumstances. It took him way too long to get to the big leagues and he had the back end of his career taken away by injuries. There are some players who are just unlucky that way. Berger dominated the minor leagues for three full seasons before finally being given his chance to play for a poor Braves team. At 24, he was an instant sensation, hitting .310/.375/.614 with 38 homers. This was before they gave out Rookie of the Year Awards. He finished third in the MVP voting in 1933 and hit what would become known as the $10,000 home run.
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We should pause for a moment to explain that home run. The Boston Braves were routinely terrible in the 1920s and 1930s … but in 1933, somewhat out of nowhere, they had a chance to work their way into the “first division.” That was a thing in ’33, finishing in the top four in an eight-team league was kind of a big deal. People cared about stuff like that. The Braves needed to win their last game against Philadelphia to get into the first division, and Berger returned for the big game — he had missed two weeks with pneumonia. He told his manager he only had one at-bat in him, and he was inserted as a pinch-hitter with the bases loaded and the Braves down 1-0. He crushed a grand slam. Boston won.
So why was it a $10,000 homer? Because that was roughly the bonus the players got. Not individually. About ten grand was split among the players, a few hundred bucks for each. You gotta love 1930s baseball.
Anyway, Berger was a big deal. He was third in the league in homers and RBIs in ’34, led the league in homers and RBIs in ’35, and a year after that he was traded to the Giants where he played for two pennant winners (Sadly, he went hitless in his seven World Series games appearances, 0-for-18). At age 34, his shoulder was injured so badly he was released and was done with baseball.
83. Dwight Eugene (Doc) Gooden
New York Mets—New York Yankees—Cleveland—Houston—Tampa Bay, 1984-2000
Doctor K, as he was called, was one of the great young pitchers ever. He mixed a fastball that jumped over bats with a regal curve that people called “Lord Charles.” In his second season, he went 24-4 with a 1.53 ERA; maybe the best pitching season in the 50 years post-expansion. Picture of pure power on the mound.
We all know the ending — the drugs, the injuries, the off-field problems, the efforts to put his life back together. We know why he’s not in the Hall of Fame. But I’d say this: I can only think of a handful of pitchers in the Hall that I would take over the 1984-85 version of Dwight Gooden. He was a right-handed Sandy Koufax, and if he’d managed even one more legendary year after 1985, he might be in Cooperstown even with his many personal issues.
Alas, Gooden would only have a smattering of very good and good and OK seasons, but after age 23, he simply wasn’t that pitcher anymore.
I asked Gooden’s old teammate Ron Darling what he thinks about Doc’s Hall of Fame case. Darling didn’t feel it proper to get involved but he did say this: “I never saw a pitcher like him, and I don’t think I ever will again.”
82. Elston Gene Howard
New York Yankees—Boston, 1955-1968
The first African American to play for the New York Yankees, he was both a pioneer and a perennial All-Star. The 1963 American League MVP was perhaps the most admired player of his day.
There are so many ways you can reshape Elston Howard’s career so that he would be a no-doubt, slam-dunk Hall of Famer. He began his career in the Negro Leagues rather than in the minors. He was drafted into the Army during the Korean War and lost two years. He starred in Triple-A ball for two seasons while the Yankees delayed and lingered before finally bringing up their first Black player.
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As such, Howard was already 26 years old when he finally got his chance — he had been ready for the majors for several years. And at the start, he couldn’t even play his natural position as catcher because the Yankees already had a decent one named Yogi Berra. Howard didn’t actually start catching full-time until he was 31.
From age 31-35, Howard hit .297, slugged .478, made the All-Star team every year, won two Gold Gloves and an MVP Award. Working backward, it’s easy to imagine just how great a young Elston Howard would have been as an everyday catcher. Then again, his impact on the game as the first African American to break through for the New York Yankees is enormous and worthy of Hall of Fame consideration.
81. Orel Leonard Hershiser IV
Los Angeles—Cleveland—San Francisco—New York Mets, 1983-2000
This Bulldog almost single-handedly carried the 1988 Los Angeles Dodgers to the pennant and World Series title. That year, he set the major-league record with 59 1/3 consecutive scoreless innings. In the postseason, he went 3-0 with a save and swept both the NLCS and World Series MVPs. Cerebral pitcher won 204 games in his career.
Hershiser actually had a decent first year on the Hall of Fame ballot in 2006. He got 58 votes — 11.2 percent of the vote — and that’s not a bad starting point. He had a good case — he had some legendary achievements, he was so good in the postseason, and everybody likes him. One of my favorite baseball stories is the one Pedro Martínez tells about the day he got sent to the minors by the Dodgers. He was literally pulled off the bus. As he stood there stewing and near tears, Hershiser walked off the bus and handed Martínez a signed baseball. On it, he had written: “You’re a true big leaguer, I’ll see you soon. Orel.”
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Hershiser’s character.
But Hershiser’s Hall of Fame momentum was short-lived. In his second year, Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr. came on the ballot — also Mark McGwire as the first salvo in the Hall’s great PED war — and the voters quickly lost interest in Bulldog. He fell off the ballot. That’s a shame; he deserved more consideration than that, I think. The writers so often will quote the Character Clause when explaining why they do not vote for someone, but we so rarely seem to use the clause as an opportunity to vote for a terrific player like Hershiser who so beautifully represented the game.
(Photos of Al Oliver: Focus on Sport / Getty Images; Dwight Gooden: Ronald C. Modra / Getty Images and Orel Hershiser: Robert Riger / Getty Images)
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