David Cone- at first glance you think that David Cone simply doesnt have the career numbers to make the hall of fame. When you look at his career though he was an outstanding pitcher with some credentials. He won 20 games twice, won a Cy Young, 5 times was in the top 5 in Cy Young voting, pitched a perfect game, was a good playoff pitcher and was generally considered a top pitcher of his time. However like many of his peers like Orel Hershiser and Doc Gooden they just dont measure up to the other starting pitchers in the Hall of Fame. The only close measure is Dazzy Vance who amazingly enough didn't start pitching full time until he was 31 years old. Though he as a very good pitcher Cone simply didn't do enough compared to the standard set by other Hall of Fame pitchers.
Andre Dawson- I am amazed at the amount of people that support Jim Rice yet dont support Dawson. Dawson was clearly not only the better player (by a large margin) he had a better career. Dawson was one of the few players in baseball history to be able to transform his game as he aged from one that depended on speed to one that stressed power as his legs gave way. He won a rookie of the year award, won a MVP award, was 2nd in the voting two other times, won 8 gold gloves, stole over 300 bases, won 4 silver slugger awards, hit 438 HR's, 500 2b's , almost 100 3bs (98), had 2774 hits, 1373 runs, 1591 rbis's, and his numbers match up very nicely with hall of Famers, Billy Williams, Al Kaline, Tony Perez, Dave Winfield and Ernie Banks.
Another penalized by spending his best years in Montreal. In my mind he belongs.
Ron Gant- Not Hall of Fame material
Mark Grace- Nice career, no Hall of fame for him
Rickey Henderson- Not only the greatest leadoff hitter in modern baseball history, there is no one even close. Should be unanimous but some moron will leave him off.
Tommy John- Though John has similar numbers to Blyleven he has a couple of advantages that should be counted against him in that comaprison. Number one he started pitching in the mid 60's where the advantages for pitchers were many. He also played for mostly winning teams which led to a better record than his other stats indicate. He was a really good pitcher in the mid 70' to 1980 but was pretty ordinary the rest of his career. Not for me.
|