MLB Hall of Fame welcomes Andre Dawson

Andre Dawson was voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame on Wednesday, the only player who earned the required 75 percent of the vote to get in.  Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven fell just short with 73.7 and 74.2 percent respectively.  Dawson, who spent his career with four different teams, the Montreal Expos, Chicago Cubs, Boston Red Sox and the Florida Marlins will likely go into the hall as an Expo, though that's still not known yet.  The Hall of Fame now chooses which team the players go in as ever since Dave Winfield was offered money and jobs by the San Diego Padres and New York Yankees to choose their cap for his enshrinement.  Dawson spent the majority of his career in Montreal but gained perhaps his greatest fame as a member of the Cubs.


Cub fans everywhere love and respect Dawson for his time with the team as well as for how he came to be a Cub.  Desperate to get away from the artificial turf of Montreal's Olympic Stadium Dawson gave the Cubs a blank contract before the 1987 season and told them to fill in the amount.  The Cubs paid Dawson $700,000 that year, a more than 30% pay cut from his 1986 salary, yet Dawson went on to win his only MVP that year, hitting .287/.328/.568 with an OPS of .896.  He hit 49 home runs and drove in 137 RBI's, numbers too big for the MVP voters to pass up even though his OPS and OBP were generally lacking for an MVP candidate.  In those days statistics like OPS weren't available and OBP wasn't valued as it is now.  There were players in 1987 who had superior average stats to Dawson yet his league leading number of home runs and RBI's carried the day. 


Dawson went on the spend six years with the Cubs after spending 11 in Montreal (where he won the Rookie of the Year award in 1977).  He finished up his career with two years in Boston and then two more in Florida where he suffered from injuries and compiled only 307 at-bats.  For his career he ended up with 438 home runs, 1591 RBI's and 2774 hits while hitting .274 with an on-base percentage of .323, slugging percentage of .482 and an ops of .806.  He won 8 gold gloves, one MVP, Rookie of the Year and was an 8-time all-star.


Bert Blyleven missed the cut in his 13th year on the ballot and has two more chances of getting into the hall.  Given how his vote total has increased from year to year it's almost a given that he'll get voted in next year, and if not he surely will the year after, his last chance.  Alomar was considered a great candidate to get in on his first try given that he's one of the better second baseman to ever play the game.  Voters didn't make him a first ballot hall of famer likely due to an ugly incident in 1996 when he spit in the face of umpire John Hirschbeck.


It's my opinion that the biggest injustice in the voting this year isn't that Blyleven or Alomar have to wait at least another year.  They'll get in eventually.  To me the vote total of Jack Morris is the biggest disappointment in that it's still going up.  Jack Morris won a lot of games and pitched some classic playoff games yet for all his apparent fame wasn't really a great pitcher.  His career ERA+, a measure of how much better a pitchers era is compared to league average, was only 105, meaning Morris's era was only 5% better than a league average pitcher throughout his career.  That to me doesn't sound like a hall of famer and it doesn't raise the standards for the hall.  In fact, if Morris is eventually voted in he'll go in with the highest career era of any pitcher in the hall, by a lot.  People like to point out that Morris won more games than anyone else in the 1980's, to which I reply, who won the most games from 1981-1991, or 1977-1987?  See, wining the most games in the 1980's is completely meaningless and arbitrary.  Unless voters are willing to vote in players who won the most games for every ten-year period than they shouldn't vote Morris in just because he happened to win more for a certain 10-year period than anyone else.  It's meaningless.


There are other injustices in the voting this year, Edgar Martinez only received 36.2% of the vote, Tim Raines only got 30.4% and Fred McGriff only 21.5%.  It's quite likely that Martinez will eventually get in though it's starting to look like Raines is going to have a tough time even though he's clearly one of the great hitters and base stealers of  his era and perhaps the second best leadoff man of all time behind Rickey Henderson.  It's also a shame that Alan Trammell only got 22.4% of the vote and it's pretty clear now that not enough writers think of him as a hall of famer even though he's perhaps one of the ten best shortstops of all time.



In all it's not a bad year.  At least Andre Dawson is safely in the hall where he belongs.  Even though some other players have to wait and others have vote totals they don't deserve, one way or the other, at least the voters finally got it right for Andre Dawson.  Now if only Ron Santo would get in with the veterans vote next year all the Cubs who are eligible and good enough will be in.