I have championed Ron Santo for the Hall of Fame forever and a day now. It's an utter travesty this guy isn't enshrined alongside the game's very best. Pull up his numbers and Brooks Robinson's numbers to check for yourself.
Santo played roughly 600 fewer games than Robinson and topped Brooks in:
And please, before you even get into the Gold Gloves, Robinson's ranking on defense was largely due to a few plays in one World Series when it comes to the general public's knowledge. Look at the joke-votes in this year's Gold Gloves and tell me that is something you can really count on as being definitive in ranking players.
They also need to make the voting public, let us see which living Hall of Famers voted for him and see those that didn't. About five years ago, Reggie Jackson didn't even bother to mail his ballot in and justified it while sitting atop his pious horse that it wasn't worth his time.
Santo played roughly 600 fewer games than Robinson and topped Brooks in:
- Homers, 342 - 268
- AVG, .277 - .267
- OB%, .362 - .322
- SLG, .464 - .401
And please, before you even get into the Gold Gloves, Robinson's ranking on defense was largely due to a few plays in one World Series when it comes to the general public's knowledge. Look at the joke-votes in this year's Gold Gloves and tell me that is something you can really count on as being definitive in ranking players.
They also need to make the voting public, let us see which living Hall of Famers voted for him and see those that didn't. About five years ago, Reggie Jackson didn't even bother to mail his ballot in and justified it while sitting atop his pious horse that it wasn't worth his time.
LAS VEGAS -- Ron Santo, who fell nine votes short of election by the Veterans Committee to the Baseball Hall of Fame, said the process needs to change after the committee failed to elect a new member for the fourth straight time.
The Veterans Committee, a 64-member panel made up exclusively of all living Hall of Fame players, votes every other year on players from 1943 and after. Santo, who spent 14 of his 15 seasons with the Chicago Cubs and is a longtime broadcaster for the team, led the voting with 39 votes, or 61 percent. But needed to be on 75 percent of the ballots to be voted into the hall.
''It's a travesty,'' Santo said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. ''When I saw nobody got in again, I go, 'Whoa, this is wrong.' They can't keep going the way they're going. They've got to put a [different] committee out there.''
"It'll be eight years now that they've voted and not let anybody in. And personally, I feel like there's a lot of guys that should've been in, not just me," Santo said, according to the Chicago Tribune.
However, Hall of Fame chairwoman Jane Forbes Clark noted that the goal of the two-stage veterans' process is not to elect someone every time they vote, according to the Sun-Times.
''The process was not redesigned with the goal of necessarily electing someone, but to give everyone on the ballot a very fair chance of earning election through a ballot of their peers,'' Clark said, according to the report.
Santo was an All-Star nine times. He finished his career with 342 home runs, 1,331 RBIs, a .277 lifetime batting average and five Gold Gloves.
While the post-1943 committee did not elect anyone to the hall, a smaller panel of just 12 members voting on players from 1942 and before did add a member to Cooperstown: New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians second baseman Joe Gordon.
The Veterans Committee, a 64-member panel made up exclusively of all living Hall of Fame players, votes every other year on players from 1943 and after. Santo, who spent 14 of his 15 seasons with the Chicago Cubs and is a longtime broadcaster for the team, led the voting with 39 votes, or 61 percent. But needed to be on 75 percent of the ballots to be voted into the hall.
''It's a travesty,'' Santo said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. ''When I saw nobody got in again, I go, 'Whoa, this is wrong.' They can't keep going the way they're going. They've got to put a [different] committee out there.''
"It'll be eight years now that they've voted and not let anybody in. And personally, I feel like there's a lot of guys that should've been in, not just me," Santo said, according to the Chicago Tribune.
However, Hall of Fame chairwoman Jane Forbes Clark noted that the goal of the two-stage veterans' process is not to elect someone every time they vote, according to the Sun-Times.
''The process was not redesigned with the goal of necessarily electing someone, but to give everyone on the ballot a very fair chance of earning election through a ballot of their peers,'' Clark said, according to the report.
Santo was an All-Star nine times. He finished his career with 342 home runs, 1,331 RBIs, a .277 lifetime batting average and five Gold Gloves.
While the post-1943 committee did not elect anyone to the hall, a smaller panel of just 12 members voting on players from 1942 and before did add a member to Cooperstown: New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians second baseman Joe Gordon.