Why is hall of fame in cooperstown

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Or Simmons from Jorge Posada? What about all the other players who hover on or near the same performance tier? It might really come down to what Bob Dylan called a simple twist of fate -- a thing that either did or did not happen.

These players remind us that so often, context is king. Each of these players were as good as many of those who made it to Cooperstown. And with one little narrative tweak to their story, perhaps that's where they would be today.

Either way, their underlying abilities remain the same. Their Hall destiny is not determined by ability, but how we perceive that ability. Say what you will about Dave Kingman, the lumbering slugger from the s and 80s, but the man had presence. It wasn't always a welcome presence. During the prime of his career, he had a season in which he was traded three times. But he was 6-foot-6, nicknamed "Kong" and had a penchant for hitting distinctively long home runs.

Kingman wound up with career homers and for a time after his retirement, that was the most homers ever hit by a non-Hall of Famer. If Kong's game had been embroidered with a good mix of secondary skills and a reputation for solid intangibles, those dingers would have been enough for Hall of Fame consideration.

But Kingman had no secondary skills. As for his intangible qualities, let's just say they didn't help his case. When he retired after the season -- in which he hit 35 homers with a sub-. But what if the circumstances of his career changed just a little? Say he came up with the Boston Red Sox and was able to endear himself just enough to the organization to spend his entire career with Fenway Park as his home ballpark. Kingman did play at Fenway during his career as a road player.

Here's what he did: 20 games including 18 starts, 1. The thing about split statistics such as that is that they can fool you into extrapolating too much from too little. Those numbers don't really say much, if anything, about Kingman as a player. He just happened to hit well over a few games in a venue that was conducive to his swing. Had he played for the BoSox full time, he would not have averaged 93 homers per plate appearances as he did during that small sample.

Still, there is little doubt that he would have hit more homers if he had played his career in Boston, likely as a career DH. He was a righty-hitting, dead-pull, flyball hitter with tremendous raw power and Boston has that tantalizing tall green fence in left field.

The context conversion tool at Baseball Reference estimates that Kingman would have hit home runs had he played his career for the Red Sox in a league environment equivalent to That might undersell what he would have done.

Also: Kingman played about three-quarters of his career in the National League. He was a good athlete -- he could run well enough when he wanted to, and he threw well enough that he had been a star pitcher at USC during his college days. Nevertheless, by all accounts his defense was somewhere between indifferent to abominable.

But if Kingman had been in the AL, starting in his lackluster defense could have been removed from the equation as a full-time DH. He could have remained there for years, mostly unchallenged, until Carl Yastrzemski reached his latter seasons. Still, with DH as an option, Kingman could have logged more games. Thus it seems almost certain that in this what-if scenario, Kingman would have hit more than homers.

Dave Schoenfield ranked the 28 actual members of the home run club just the other day , when Miguel Cabrera joined it. With modern analytics applied to Kingman's career, he would no doubt rank last on such a list and he wouldn't be close to No. The thing is that when Kingman retired and when he first appeared on the Hall ballot, voters did not know about modern analytics. They would have seen him play and had the same misgivings about his strikeouts and low batting average as before.

As a DH, his flailing and loafing in the field would have been a lesser factor than it was. And they would know that he was one of the few players ever to reach that magical homer milestone.

During and after Kingman's career, certain milestones like homers, 3, hits and pitching wins were considered all but an automatic punch card for Cooperstown. So with this admittedly major tweak to his career context, it's at least possible that Kong would have gotten a lot more Hall support.

Really, it's hard to imagine that he'd have gotten in under any circumstance. But if Kong had reached homers, some would have made his case. Leaving out a player who hit that milestone would have then been an unprecedented omission. Player A:. Who you got? It's not an easy call. You need more info, right? The difference venue context is nil, as both played for the Red Sox their whole careers, except for one season Evans spent with Baltimore to close it out.

Evans played longer, giving him more chances to compile counting numbers, but from a percentage standpoint, they were close. Neither was or is a slam-dunk Hall of Famer. Evans lasted three years, dropping off after slipping to 3.

Rice has an edge in OPS, but it's close. It's instructive to consider the slash categories separately:. Rice was a more aggressive swinger who hit as many as 46 homers in a season, which he did in when he was named AL MVP. To help sell the idea, the foundation advanced the idea that U. Civil War hero Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown. Today, with approximately , visitors per year, the Hall of Fame continues to be the hub of all things baseball.

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