Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Warren Newson wrote:
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.
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.
Warren Newson wrote:
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.
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.
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-neilA 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?
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
what an idiot. Abreu couldn't tie Gwynn's shoes on his best day
