With Frank Thomas gaining entry and Jim Thome rightfully donning the Cleveland "C," I figured the next White Sox plaque in the Hall of Fame would appear whenever Minnie Minoso finally gets a veterans committee that understands his worth.
I was wrong.
Harold Baines is going to Cooperstown.
The Hall of Fame announced that Baines and Lee Smith were the first two members of the Class of 2019, gaining entry via the Today's Game Era Committee. Baines described himself as "very shocked," and he's not alone. While Baines was a very good DH for a very long time, this came out of nowhere.
Unlike Smith -- who held baseball's save record for a good long while, if nothing else -- or Jack Morris and Alan Trammell the year before, Baines did not receive considerable support while on the ballot.
While the other three hung around for the entirety of their eligibility, Baines fell off the ballot after five years. It's not like Baines was a backlog victim, either, because he didn't receive a lot of votes even before the turn-of-the-century stars joined the field, whereas Smith saw his support drop 15 percent or more. Here's where they topped out in the BBWAA voting:
- Morris: 67.7 percent
- Smith: 50.6 percent
- Trammell: 40.9 percent
- Baines: 6.1 percent
So yeah, Baines sticks out like a sore knee here.
Baines' case didn't play well with voters because he really didn't have anything resembling a true peak. He only topped a leaderboard in one category in one season (slugging percentage in 1984) during his 22-year career, which explains why he only had two top-10 MVP finishes.
He also fell short of the traditional milestones, compiling 2,866 hits and 384 home runs. The Hall of Fame markers on his Baseball-Refererence.com page show he was well short of Hall of Fame standards, especially since he didn't provide much defensive value to supplement his offensive statistics.
Another way to put it -- for his entire career, Baines finished at just 1.8 Wins Above Average. Among the 158 other Hall of Fame position players, only Tommy McCarthy and Lloyd Waner finished with lower totals. McCarthy, a 19th-century infielder, hovered around average for his career, getting swept into the Hall of Fame courtesy of the overgenerous Old Timers Committee in the mid-1940s. Waner actually finished in the red (-2.1 WAA), and gained entry mostly because he was the brother of legitimate Hall of Famer Paul Waner, and both had tremendous nicknames (Little Poison and Big Poison).
The case for Baines was that it's hard to be as good as he was for as long as he was, DHing or not. He's 46th all-time in hits, and the 45 above him are, will be or would've been Hall of Famers if not for off-field misdeeds and miscalculations. He posted an above-average OPS in every season from 1981 through 1999, and had a reputation for being one of baseball's clutchest hitters. Perhaps he would have hit a milestone if he didn't lose time to two different work stoppages:
It wasn't enough for the writers, and it might not have been enough for a lot of other committees. Fortunately, he had a couple of friends on this particular 16-person panel:
Looking at the list of voters, Tony La Russa is another obvious ally, and Pat Gillick had Baines on his Baltimore Orioles roster in the mid-1990s, but I don't see any natural inroads through the rest of the panel. But considering Reinsdorf awkwardly retired Baines' number after the Sox traded him to Texas in 1989, there's no doubt he had strong feelings for fuel.
However it happened, Baines will head into Cooperstown next summer, giving the Hall of Fame another plaque with a Sox cap on it. From there, the only question is whether it'll be S-O-X cap or the Einhorn "E," and the over/under for the length of his speech.
