Vic Harris, Negro League, Eric Shellac discussed on Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
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Semi pro teams. But that's what he had available to him at the time, and he made a career out of it. He was absolutely famous. So I think that while he may not have been on the quality of some of the other candidates we could be looking at, like, if he had been a major Negro league player from the very start. But I think what he did is still very much hall worthy. I think Vic Harris is he missed by two votes. I think he's just kind of an obvious one. The more you look at it because as a manager, he now is the top major league manager outside the Hall of Fame and winning percentage penance playoff appearances and all that. Plus, he was a very good player. So I think that if you look at his stats through Eric shellac ME's, they have him as about a 40 war player. So which is a solid player if you had a very, very good Hall of Fame managerial career on top of that. Tubby scales is another one. He had like a 20 year Negro major league career at second base with a 147 OPS plus. These are really good players that we have outside the hall still. And then home run Johnson played started in the 1890s actually with bud Fowler on the page fence giants, and just had a very long career. I see him as a very similar player to Alan tremel or is a great hitter for shortstop good defender long career, also played some second base later in his career. And cannonball dick reading, I think, was one of the very best pitchers outside of smoky Joe Williams before the Negro national league was founded. So I think they were all tremendous candidates. I think there's still many, many more that haven't been considered yet on this ballot. My favorite four, I keep mentioning or dick lundy, John beckwith, those two, I was shocked to not see on the ballot to be completely honest because they actually have a lot of momentum. Oscar heavy Johnson, though, is another one that I really like. And one was an interesting short career player who started his career playing in the military in Hawaii, but then came over and was an absolutely amazing shortstop for the monarchs for a few years before, unfortunately his career was cut short when he was shot. That's Adobe more. Just a lot of great players, a lot of great stories. So yeah, there will be many, many more interesting ballots to come out of the Negro league candidates as well. And I think we've got a couple dozen Hall of Famers here still. Yeah, and I know rap Dixon gets mentioned a lot. He has a bunch of boosters. I'm sure that we will get into all of them and maybe others next week with 42 for 21. And just looking at even the non Negro leagues players on the early baseball era ballot, there's still some kind of confounding results there like ally Reynolds getting 6 votes and Bill dalin getting fewer than three, which is kind of confounding perplexing incredibly Reynolds has been on the ballot a billion times, right? And he's still getting some level of support, but seemingly he has had his hearing and it's hard to see how he still has significantly more support than that one does if you look at the stats at least. I think that ballot had 9 Hall of Famers. No offense to ally Reynolds, but I think there are non Hall of Famers on there. What would you do about this process, not just opening it up to more candidates and also having more frequent voting, but just mathematically speaking, it's so hard to get anyone elected and you alluded to this earlier, which I really didn't appreciate until Joe pes natsuki pointed it out several times, but you really have to have all the stars aligned or some kind of collusion among the voters. If you actually want to get people elected and I don't know whether that's intentional because they think it's a feature, not a bug, that they don't want too many players to get on from these ballots because they figure if they're on there, maybe they're bordering candidates to begin with or something or whether they just didn't really realize the implication of you only have this many votes to go around. And so it's just really, really hard to get a lot of players in. So it seems like even if you were to say it's every ten years and you have the same number of players on the ballot, there must be some sort of process improvement that you could come up with. Could it not just be a yes, no vote on everyone? I mean, could it not just work the way the ppw a ballot does or more like that where if 75% of people say yes, then it's a Hall of Famer? Yeah, I don't think.