Tag Archives: Fred McGriff

Two modest stars enter Cooperstown

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Fred McGriff, Scott Rolen

Fred McGriff and Scott Rolen proudly displayed their Hall of Fame plaques after Sunday’s induction ceremony.

When the Yankees’ (shall we say) mercurial then-owner, George Steinbrenner, faced likely suspension over his campaign to smear his Hall of Fame right fielder Dave Winfield, George F. Will pondered whether then-commissioner Fay Vincent should marshal enough consensus to force Steinbrenner to sell the team. Will even imagined vetting a jury to empanel hearing a court case over it.

“Here is a pretty judicial pickle,” Will wrote parenthetically. “Imagine trying to assemble an impartial jury of New Yorkers to hear Steinbrenner’s case. ‘Tell the court, Mr. Prospective Juror, do you have any strong opinions about the owner who masterminded the trade of Fred McGriff from the Yankees to the Blue Jays in exchange for a couple of no-names? Stop snarling, Prospective Juror’.”

Come Sunday afternoon, that same Fred McGriff stood on the Cooperstown stage accepting his Hall of Fame plaque. Elected to the Hall by the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, the Crime Dog didn’t exactly keep the Yankees high on his gratitude list, though the trade that might have had a prospective New York juror snarling could have been called the trade that launched him to where he now stood.

“I’d like to welcome everyone here from Atlanta to San Diego, Toronto, my hometown of Tampa Bay and everywhere in between. Thank you for showing up,” said the tall first baseman who became baseball’s first and so far only man to hit 30+ home runs in a season for five different teams. (And, the first Hall of Famer whose plaque mentions OPS.)

It is awesome to be here accepting this honor. What a blessing from the man upstairs. Beautiful weather. You can’t beat it. I’m so grateful to be going into the Baseball Hall of Fame alongside a guy like Scott Rolen who played the game the right way. A true professional. I want to thank the many living legends sitting behind me. I’m humbled and honored to be standing in front of you. And now to be part of this fraternity alongside you—just some great individuals behind me.

In one way, no player ever had a later-in-life baptism of fire to equal McGriff’s. It wasn’t enough that his career tended to be buried beneath the ramped-up batting stats of both the era of actual/alleged performance-enhancing substances (McGriff was never a suspect) and new ballparks that over-embraced hitting. No. He had to play his first game for the Braves under, shall we say, fiery conditions, after his fire-sale trade from the Padres:

I was nursing an injury when the trade happened. So I drove to Atlanta, I left Tampa at noon. I didn’t expect to play. But when I got to the ballpark, there is my name in the lineup. I was sweating. But I believe the man upstairs bought me some time when a food heat lamp caught on fire.

 

The start of the game was delayed two hours, long enough for me to get some more treatment. And I felt a little bit better. I started the game. And I tied it up in the sixth inning with the home run. The next day, I hit two home runs. And that Braves team caught on fire. We ended up catching the Giants after being ten games out of first place at the time to trade, and we won the division.

Two years later, McGriff and those relentless Braves teams of the 1990s won their only World Series rings. The Crime Dog did splendidly for a fellow who’d been cut from his high school baseball team once upon a time.

Both McGriff and Rolen had reason to wonder if they might ever get to Cooperstown as other than paying guests. Rolen may have thought about it just a little bit less.

“At no point in my lifetime did it ever occurred to me that I’d be standing on this stage,” the third baseman with a live bat and an Electrolux way at third said early, nodding to the Baseball Writers Association of America who elected him in January. “But I’m glad it occurred to you, because this is unbelievably special.”

(Asked whether Rolen could play shortstop, his one-time Phillies manager Terry Francona replied, referring to his broad range at third, “He’s playing it!”)

A two-sport star in his native Indiana, before beginning his baseball career, Rolen remembered learing something from his father after a particularly trying basketball mini-camp. “After day one, I told Dad that I had a minor problem . . . that I need advice with. And his answer (was), ‘OK’.”

“Well, Dad. I can’t handle the ball. I can’t shoot. I’m completely out of basketball shape. And everybody in the entire gym, including the coach, is better than me.’ And his answer?”

“OK.”

“What do you mean, ‘OK?’”

“Well, what are you going to do, Scotty?”

“Well, that’s what I’m asking you, Dad.”

“Well, how the hell do I know? You say you can’t dribble. You can’t shoot. You’re out of shape. And you’re completely overmatched. You told me what you can’t do? What can you do?”

“I guess I can rebound.”

“OK.”

“I can play defense.”

“OK.”

“I can dive for loose balls. Doesn’t appear that the guys are playing too hard up here. I could outhustle, outwork and beat everybody up and down the floor.”

“OK.”

And then here came the words of wisdom: “Well, do that then.”

It turns out that, “Well, do that then,” carried me into the minor leagues and gave me a simple mindset that I would never allow myself to be unprepared or outworked. “Well, do that then” put me onto this stage today.

The man who won a World Series ring as a key element of the 2006 Cardinals finished by doing something he’d done from the moment his parents first made the trek to see him play a major league game. He tipped his cap to them. Then, it was a Phillies cap. Sunday, it was a Hall of Fame cap. The number ten third baseman of all time never forgot.

“This is baseball’s biggest honor,” McGriff said. “This is like icing on a cake. You see, my goal was simply to make it to the big leagues. And I exceeded every expectation that I could ever imagine and then some. It is a great feeling getting recognized for your hard work.”

“I’m grateful for this grand gesture,” said Rolen, one of only four third basemen ever to hit 300+ home runs, steal 100+ bases, and hit 500+ doubles. (The others: Hall of Famers George Brett and Chipper Jones, plus Hall of Famer in waiting Adrián Beltré.) “I have an overwhelming respect and intend to represent these (Hall of Famers) behind me and this legendary Hall with the integrity on which it was built.”

McGriff and Rolen have something else in common aside from forging a new friendship. McGriff got the last laugh on a capricious Yankee owner who thought he could afford to lose the Crime Dog’s budding self. Rolen got the last laugh on a Phillies regime that allowed him to be viewed unfairly as indifferent while also letting him take unfair abuse when he challenged their willingness to build and sustain winning teams.

McGriff’s Hall plaque shows him wearing a blank cap atop his smiling, mustachoed face, and it reposes next to Negro Leagues legend/longtime Cubs coach/scout/baseball’s arguable finest ambassador, Buck O’Neil. Rolen’s plaque reposes next to Red Sox/postseason legend David Ortiz, showing him in a Cardinals cap, looking as determined as he was holding third base down almost two decades, resembling if anyone music legend Neil Young.

Both Rolen and McGriff heeded when their bodies began telling them it was time to go. Thus, one particular Young lyric stands forward, when thinking of them compared to those greats who, in Thomas Boswell’s words, “torture their teams, their fans, and themselves, playing for years past their prime, for the checks and the cheers”:

It’s better to burn out/than to fade away.

Despite McGriff’s bald pate and Rolen’s thinning one, they both look as though they could still play nine innings in a tough pennant race. But they spared us and themselves the tortuous long fade away. McGriff and Rolen finally stood on the Cooperstown podium Sunday, inspiring and accepting cheers at least as edifying as those incurred by a timely hit, a long home run, a tough play at first, an impossible play at third.

The Crime Dog gets the Cooperstown bite

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Fred McGriff

Strange circumstances or no, Fred McGriff is now a Hall of Famer.

I have absolutely no complaint about Fred McGriff’s election to the Hall of Fame. I’d been on the fence about him for a long enough time, and said so in other places, but I knew one thing above all: the Crime Dog had a borderline Hall case, isn’t the worst first baseman or the worst player overall to get a Cooperstown plaque, and would be an honourable selection in his own right if he made it.

He made it Sunday, courtesy of the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee.

If you use my Real Batting Average metric (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances), McGriff’s .594 falls smack dab in the middle of the pack of Hall of Fame first basemen who played in the post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball era. It also gives him a 28 point edge over the last first baseman elected to the hall by an Era Committee:

First Base PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Fred McGriff 10174 4458 1305 171 71 39 .594
Gil Hodges 8104 3422 943 109 90* 25 .566

Actually, I knew one other thing above all about McGriff. If he wasn’t part of the absolute worst trade in Yankee history, he was at least part of the worst trade they made in the 1980s. They traded McGriff (then a minor leaguer) plus infielder Dave Collins, relief pitcher Mike Morgan, and cash, to the Blue Jays, for infielder Tom Dodd and relief pitcher Dale Murray. The best days of a modest career were behind Collins; Morgan was on the way to a respectable 22-season career as a hard-luck starter turned valued reliever.

For McGriff, it was a case of hiding in plain sight. Steinbrenner made Tampa his home; McGriff hailed from Tampa. Yet Steinbrenner was absolutely unaware McGriff even existed. The Boss and the rest of the American League would learn soon enough. Once he became a Toronto regular, the Crime Dog bit the league for an average 35 homers per 162 games in Blue Jays silks—including the league’s home run championship in 1989.

Fair play requires us to acknowledge that, even if Steinbrenner was aware of McGriff, the Crime Dog-to-be (fabled nicknaming broadcaster Chris Berman hung that on him in due course) was blocked at first base by some guy named Mattingly. And it took McGriff a few more years to be fully major league ready, which would have been fine except that patience was never a Steinbrenner virtue.

Like his Hall of Famer contemporary Mike Schmidt, McGriff didn’t just hit home runs, he hit conversation pieces. He didn’t exactly look the part; he was movie-star handsome and not  musclebound, though his Blue Jays teammate Lloyd Moseby once said, “I wish I could get Freddie to lift weights. The only things he lifts are candy bars.” But he didn’t look like a man who needed multiple Milky Way fixes, either.

McGriff’s problem was that he became one of the game’s premier power hitters in an era when a lot of others actually or allegedly used actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances. (Burning question still: if Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa—plus pitching great Roger Clemens—must remain persona non grata in Cooperstown, how do you justify electing their chief enabler, then-commissioner Bud Selig?)

If he’d played with the same skill set and statistics in a career beginning a decade sooner than it did, he’d have been a Hall slam dunk—regardless of not quite reaching the 500 home run plateau. In the age of the Bondses, McGwires, and Sosas, the Crime Dog didn’t look that ferocious. But even without that age’s taint, he didn’t look like the guy who did what he did, a guy who could hit a wet T-shirt and send it into the seats.

He merely had the second-most elegant home run swing I ever saw. (Darryl Strawberry’s was numero uno.) He really did look as I saw him described once, a man who looked as though conducting a symphony orchestra (as he was about to ring down the final crashes of The 1812 Overture) after he swung and a smooth neon dance figure during his swing.

The looks weren’t everything, of course. Had it not been for the 1994 owners-provoked players’ strike, McGriff probably would have finished his career with somewhere around 503 home runs. (He averaged 32 per 162 games lifetime and had 37 when the ’94 strike launched. It’s not unrealistic to think he might have had at least ten more in him.)

McGriff’s second problem was that, if he was an executioner at the plate, he was a sieve at first base. He finished his career -32 defensive runs below his league average. Like Gary Sheffield in the outfield, McGriff at first base torpedoed his own value with his defense. His 52.6 wins above replacement-level player (WAR) should have been better but his -17.2 defensive WAR put paid to that.

He also had a third problem, enunciated best by Cooperstown Cred writer Chris Bodig: “McGriff had an aw-shucks level of humility throughout his playing days. Because he played for six different teams, the Crime Dog never had a passionate following of one city’s fan base, which might have contributed to his lackluster results in the Hall of Fame voting.”

I suspect these factors played larger into McGriff finally being elected to the Hall than a lot of his partisans (he has more than you might think) might care to admit:

1) The election of Harold Baines by the 2019 Today’s Game Committee. Baines had no Hall case other than his career length. (He didn’t even have a single signature moment to hoist him above his contemporaries.) But he did have . . .

2) A Today’s Game Committee packed with men who played with, managed, or oversaw Baines on a few teams: Jerry Reinsdorf, who became the White Sox’s owner when Baines was first settling in with the team and re-acquired Baines twice more to come; Tony La Russa, the Hall of Fame manager who managed Baines with the White Sox and the Athletics; and, Pat Gillick, who was the Orioles’ general manager when Baines played there.

3) McGriff had the same benefit on this year’s Contemporary Baseball Era Committee: three Hall of Fame Braves teammates (Tom Glavine, Chipper Jones, Greg Maddux, though Jones took ill and couldn’t be part of the vote); a Blue Jays executive (Paul Beeston) during McGriff’s years there; a brief Blue Jays teammate turned executive (Ken Williams).

That’s dangerously close to the kind of cronyism that sent the ancient Veterans Committee into disrepute over the years Hall of Famers Frankie Frisch and Bill Terry oversaw the committee, hell bent on getting as many of their old cronies from the Giants and the Cardinals into Cooperstown as they could get away with, regardless of their actual Hall credentials.

“Baines’ election is simply not a great day for the institution, or for anyone bringing an analytical, merit-based approach to it while reckoning with its objective standards,” wrote The Cooperstown Casebook author Jay Jaffe upon Baines’s election. “The precedent it sets is nearly unmanageable, if future committees are to take seriously candidates of his level. Why battle over Dale Murphy or Fred McGriff if Harold Baines is the standard?”

McGriff had fifty times the Hall case Baines lacked. Murphy’s Hall case was torpedoed by knee injuries that shifted what should have been a natural decline phase into sad overdrive. Don Mattingly’s was torpedoed by his back. If all you needed was character, those two would have been Hall locks otherwise, long before they arrived and departed on this Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot.

But another entrant on that ballot, Curt Schilling, torpedoed himself. He got seven out of the needed twelve committee votes despite being a no-questions-asked Hall of Fame-level  pitcher. His ability to miss bats (he has the highest strikeout-to-walk ratio in the game’s history), his dominance when the heat was truly on, and his postseason resume live up to his well-known thirst for wanting the ball in the highest heat. He was the very essence of a big-game pitcher, and he has three World Series rings to show for it.

But a guy who applauded lynching journalists and became too much of a disinformation retriever wasn’t exactly going to keep friends among the voting writers. A guy who fumed publicly when several such voters sought to rescind their votes for him was pretty much asking, as he did in a letter to the Hall, for just what he didn’t get from the Contemporary Committee, enough of whom couldn’t suffer that kind of fool gladly:

I will not participate in the final year of voting. I am requesting to be removed from the ballot. I’ll defer to the veterans committee and men whose opinions actually matter and who are in a position to actually judge a player.

Whoops.

But if the Committee had to elect only one man, it doesn’t sully the Hall further by electing McGriff. He was a genuinely great hitter. If I was on the fence about him on the borderline as long as I was, it won’t deny me pleasure in seeing him at the Cooperstown podium in due course. Maybe he’ll even wolf a candy bar down before he speaks.