I got to know a former member of the Astros front office quite well. The front office had to decide whether they wanted to protect Abreu or Richard Hidalgo in the expansion draft. They protected Hidalgo because of his pure power. Hidalgo hit 44 bombs as a 25 year old so it looked like the right decision. Hidalgo has a fine career but never approached his numbers from that 25 year old season. Abreu will likely end up in the HoF one way or another.

I’ll say this about the Astros farm system in the mid to late 1990s - it was one hell of a juggernaut,the following guys all were developed by Houston:

Billy Wagner - 1995
Abreu - 1996
Hidalgo - 1997
Berkman - 1999
Johan Santana - 2000
Oswalt - 2001

Other than Hidalgo, all of those guys are legit superstar players.

Yeah that’s a nice run of draft picks.

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If you’re going to redefine pitching for Beuhrle to get in then Schilling is an automatic ( and should be in regardless ) . Abreu, Hall of Very Good.

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

Deal

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And if we’re going with best of the era they played in, Dave Parker needs to be in too and should be in regardless

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

Put Buehrle in and you can add any scrub you like.

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That door has already been opened when they included Baines

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

There are worse guys than Buehrle already in. Jim Kaat is pretty much the same guy as Buehrle.

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The Court will accord substantial deference to the government's immigration policies, particularly those that implicate matters of national security.

Kaat got in after years and years of reflection. Buehrle will too, I guess. Good comp. They are the same.

The Cobra was a scrub in your book? You must be joking.

The cocaine issue keeps him out. As it did for Raines for years.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

FIFY

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

Definitely not a scrub.

More saying that I don’t care who gets in if Buehrle also gets in.

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The problem with Buehrle is there are too many guys that are very similar or even better who nobody ever discusses. I could never say Buehrle was better than Billy Pierce or Jimmy Key.

On the other hand, we could have a long discussion on what "better" means when it comes to these players. On the surface saying Buehrle or Jimmy Key is better than Ryan or Blyleven seems ridiculous, but is it really? I mean Ryan and Blyleven are special guys that had pitches you don't see from anyone else, but I consider them less than great as pitchers.

And then there's the question of a guy like Contreras. No way could I ever say Buerhle is better than he is or deserves the HOF more. Contreras was the best pitcher in baseball for a full year and a half. I doubt Buehrle was ever in the top ten at any given time. And we never even saw Contreras at his best. He was already old when he got to the big leagues because of things beyond his control. His comp would be Satchel Paige.

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The Court will accord substantial deference to the government's immigration policies, particularly those that implicate matters of national security.

I like to keep things simple when it comes to Hall of Fame admission. To get in you either have to hit one of the milestones or have a 5 to 7 year period of dominance. Bueherle, Contreras, and Key don't qualify under either set of admission standards. However, Ryan and Blyleven do. When you stray too far from that approach you end up in a place where you can justify admitting anyone who was a starting caliber player for a dozen plus years.

At the end of the day, we're talking about putting a plaque in a museum, so I guess it doesn't really matter, but if you want to recognize the best of the best I think you have to hold tightly to the standards.

Well, Contreras is like a Negro League player. He was prevented from playing. And when you finally got to see him, when he was old and likely less than his best, he was utterly dominating for a couple years and then stayed around beyond that. Again, his comp is Satchel Paige.

I don't think Buehrle or Key should be in. Billy Pierce is closer.

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The Court will accord substantial deference to the government's immigration policies, particularly those that implicate matters of national security.

But the start of his MLB career was not exactly dominating. As I'm sure you remember, the Sox got him from the Yankees for an Esteban Loiaza that was very quickly regressing back to mediocrity.

He was instrumental in 2005 and, for that reason, will always have my admiration. He also had a massive set of hands. I remember them showing him using his splitter grip on softballs. However, even when you take into account the fact that he was prevented from playing at his peak, he's just not a Hall of Famer.

Is Satchel Paige a Hall of Famer? His big league career is not better than Contreras's.

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The Court will accord substantial deference to the government's immigration policies, particularly those that implicate matters of national security.

Let's not kid ourselves. We know why Paige is in the hall of Fame.

Because he was a great fucking pitcher. The fact that he doesn't have HOF numbers wasn't his fault. Same thing with Contreras.

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The Court will accord substantial deference to the government's immigration policies, particularly those that implicate matters of national security.

Why do you think he's in?

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

He's in because of his historical significance. Contreras doesn't enjoy the same historical significance.

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I think that's selling the Negro League players short. And that's one problem with declaring the Negro Leagues "major" and combining the stats. If that's your position, Paige isn't a Hall of Famer. But of course he did stuff that isn't in those official box scores that resulted in his official record. He was a great pitcher. So was Contreras.

Jackie Robinson was historically significant. He was also a great player. But if he had only hit .200 he would have been a Hall of Famer. That's not Paige.

Paige is a guy like Contreras. Everyone knows how good these guys were in their prime and they were prevented from showing it in the majors. Paige by the color line and Contreras by Castro.

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The Court will accord substantial deference to the government's immigration policies, particularly those that implicate matters of national security.

You're right, if Paige wasn't a great pitcher, I don't think he gets in. However, if he wasn't one of the first group of players to cross over, I also don't think he gets in on his MLB accomplishments alone. Paige is inescapably both of those things. His candidacy is based on both of those things and if you alter one, he probably doesn't get in.

Also, the Negro League is a special and unique case. Castro holding Contreras back just does not have the same historical significance as Paige being held back by MLB's own racist policies. People who know far more about baseball than I do have also reached the same conclusion. There was plenty of coverage of Paige in Ken Burns' original Baseball documentary. I don't think Contreras was even mentioned in The 10th Inning.

Of course, that's correct. But it doesn't have anything to do with the specific player deserving to be in the HOF. I don't think there's an argument that Paige being denied opportunity is different than Contreras being denied opportunity. This isn't a case like Sadaharu Oh who could have come to play in the big leagues but clearly wasn't good enough. Cuban baseball during the time Contreras played was analogous to the Negro Leagues, i.e. the overall quality and depth wasn't on par with the majors, but the top players would have been superstars wherever they played, and that's been shown to be the truth. You couldn't say the same for the Japanese leagues in the time of Oh, for example.

Contreras should be spoken of alongside Maddux, Randy Johnson, Pedro, and Clemens. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see him at his best. When we finally got the chance he dominated the AL for a year and a half. And let's not talk about him being "bad" with the Yankees. He was 15-7 with an ERA around 4.20. That's an impressive performance for a guy who was almost 40 years old. And then came his run with the White Sox.

When he was in his prime in 1999 he got a chance to face a powerhouse Orioles lineup and pitched 8 shutout innings with 10 strikeouts. That was just a glimpse of who the guy was. We don't know exactly how old he is but I have heard Orlando Hernandez talk about how he couldn't believe that a guy he idolized when he broke into the Cuban leagues was listed as younger than he was when they got to the U.S. And I would add that the success of an also past-his-prime Hernandez in the big leagues is just more proof of the quality of Cuban baseball at that time.



I don't think that's a great argument. Ken Burns obviously wanted to push the narrative that the Negro Leagues were the equal of the major leagues. If you came from Mars and knew nothing about Earth or baseball at all and watched that documentary, you'd come away thinking it was about the Negro Leagues and New York City.

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The Court will accord substantial deference to the government's immigration policies, particularly those that implicate matters of national security.

Since we're debating why Paige made it into the Hall of Fame, I figured I would actually go and see if there had been any reporting on the issue, and I found a handful of sites, discussing the selection, but that this one had the best summary:

https://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2021/ ... uck-o-neil

A couple interesting points:

1. Kuhn, however, played a role in inclusion of Negro Leagues players in the Hall of Fame. Those who argued against the inclusion of Negro League players pointed to the rule that a player needed 10 years of major league service time and trotted out the old argument of denigrating the record keeping of Negro Leagues statistics. Kuhn later wrote in his autobiography:

These arguments were much too technical under the circumstances. Through no fault of their own, the black players had been barred from the majors until 1947. Had they not been barred, there would have been great major league players, and certainly Hall of Famers, among them. What applied after 1947 would have obviously applied before. This was precisely the kind of situation that required the bending of the rules.

2. In 1970, Kuhn arranged a meeting between him and Ford C. Frick and Charlie Kerr, the current Hall of Fame president. Joining Kuhn were also Charley Segar, Joe Reichler, Monte Irvin, Dick Young, and Jack Lang. According to Kuhn, the meeting was heated with Frick and Kerr adamantly opposing the inclusion of Negro League players, but Kuhn had harsher words for Dick Young who had a reputation for being abrasive and was supposedly rude to Frick.

After that meeting, it was clear that Kuhn didn’t have the votes on the board of directors, so he looked for a compromise. In 1971, he created a panel of Negro League experts to decide the greatest players of the Negro Leagues who would then be enshrined in a separate display at the Hall of Fame.

This separate-but-equal enshrinement was predictably unpopular, but Kuhn insisted he was playing five-dimensional chess. “I knew that the furor would be heard by [Hall of Fame] board of directors and that the public outcry would be hard to resist,” he wrote.

Intentional or not, the board eventually ceded and allowed the committee full power to induct Negro Leaguers. After Paige in 1971, Gibson and Buck Leonard followed the next year. The committee continued to induct Monte Irvin, Cool Papa Bell, Judy Johnson, Oscar Charleston, Martín Dihigo, and Pop Lloyd.

I think the first point supports my argument. The rules had to bent because black players were "barred," and they weren't barred by just anyone, they were "barred" by MLB itself. That's why I don't think you can take the Paige admission process and apply it to just anyone. In some sense, MLB was bending the rules to get in Paige and other deserving ball players to atone for its own sins. MLB didn't really commit any sins vis a vis Contreras.

The second point actually supports your argument. The committee that ultimately selected Paige was tasked with finding "the greatest players of the Negro Leagues who would then be enshrined in a separate display at the Hall of Fame." Therefore, it doesn't look like Paige's selection was too heavily influenced by his MLB performance, but was instead a recognition of his performance as a Negro Leaguer. However, as argued above, I don't think you can use that precedent to get Contreras admitted.

Finally, Contreras was bad in 2004, his first full MLB season. He pitched 170 innings and put up a 5.50 ERA and a 84 ERA+. Further, his career MLB ERA is 4.57 and his career MLB ERA+ is 100. Therefore, his total body of MLB work is mediocre at best. The only way he gets in would be based solely on his performance in Cuba, and if the MLB is going to give full faith and credit to Cuban stats, what about Korean stats or Japanese stats? Sure, Korea and Japan weren't ruled by Castro, but there could be players in those countries who have been prevented from coming over by teams that refused to allow them to leave. Should those stats be counted as well?

Is it the baseball hall of fame or the US baseball hall of fame?

Toni Kukoc was inducted and it was deserved. Sadaharu Oh, perhaps? And yes, Cuban players, such as Contreras.

Obviously true, but again, I don't believe the enshrinement of great Negro Leaguers is strictly a salve for MLB's guilt. If it is, that's a disservice to those great players. Those guys deserve to be there and so does Contreras. This is the key:



Contreras was also prevented from playing in the majors through no fault of his own and he would have been a great major league player- in fact he was a great major league player in 2005-06 at an advanced age and well past his prime.



In Contreras's first season he went 7-2 with a 3.30 ERA for the Yankees. Yeah, he had a mediocre season in 2004, but if we want to go through the career of every Hall of Fame pitcher, we're going to find a 170 inning stretch that was less than great.

Again, I already addressed the Japanese leagues during the time of Oh. Clearly the quality of play in Japan has improved since then. It's still not close to being on the same level as Cuban baseball at its best. And Korea would be less than that.

And I'm not advocating for the inclusion of any stats. If anything, including the stats of the Negro Leaguers has only served to diminish them. If all Contreras had were Cuban stats, I wouldn't be making this argument. It's the fact that you could see how great he was in the majors at an age when he was past his prime along with everything he did in Cuba and the way he was regarded there. And I would make the same argument for Paige. It isn't just his 90-49 official Negro League record that makes him HOF-worthy either.

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The Court will accord substantial deference to the government's immigration policies, particularly those that implicate matters of national security.

It must be noted that no less of a baseball icon than John McGraw had a running list of Negro Leaguers he wanted to sign from the late 1910s. Or how Veeck got denied permission to buy the Phillies because it was well known that he was planning on stocking them with members of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.