Cooperstown Confidential by Zev Chafets

1898 and 1945, and asked them to talk about their lives and times. The old-timers reminisced about their teammates and rivals in mostly warm-hearted but refreshingly realistic terms. Here, for example, is Sam Crawford on player-manager relations at the turn of the twentieth century: “Those old Baltimore Orioles didn’t pay any more attention to Ned Hanlon, their manager, than they did to the batboy . . . He was a bench manager in civilian clothes. When things would get a little tough in a game he would sit there on the bench and wring his hands and start telling some of the old-timers what to do. They’d look at him and say, ‘For Christ’s sake, just keep quiet and leave us alone. We’ll win this ball-game if you only shut up.’ ”
    Fans, used to the formulaic writing of the sports pages and the corny, sanitized anecdotes of team announcers, were charmed by the sound of authentic voices from the past. Suddenly a cast of forgotten players came to life. In the next five years, four—outfielders Goose Goslin and Harry Hooper and pitchers Stan Coveleski and Rube Marquard—were tapped by the Hall’s Veterans Committee. Goslin probably should have been there already; he hit a lifetime .317—impressive even in an era of high averages. Hooper, though, hit only .281 in an era of even higher averages. He was a fine fielder, but so were a lot of guys who didn’t get into Cooperstown. Stan Coveleski had a distinguished career as a spitball pitcher for the Cleveland Indians and was a plausible if not obvious choice; but Marquard, who bounced from team to team and won only 201 games in eighteen seasons, was not.
    In 1967, the Veterans Committee dynamic changed again when Frankie Frisch joined. In his prime, in the 1920s and ’30s, Frisch had been a superstar for the Giants and Cards. He was a Gold Glove second baseman with remarkable range, an aggressive baserunner, a lifetime .316 batter, and a natural leader, whose teams won eight pennants. Frisch, known as the Fordham Flash in honor of his Jesuit alma mater, was better educated than most baseball people; he was also opinionated, articulate, and persuasive, and he very quickly became the dominant personality on the committee. Frisch thought modern players paled in comparison with the studs he had played with and against. And in 1971, Bill Terry, who had been Frisch’s teammate with the Giants, was added to the committee and seconded Frisch’s picks. Together they engineered a player dump of old teammates—pitcher Jesse Haines, shortstops Travis Jackson and Dave Bancroft, outfielders Chick Hafey and Ross Youngs, first basemen Jim Bottomley and George Kelly, and third baseman Fred Lindstrom—for the Hall. Many of these guys had no business on the same wall with Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson.
    Nobody made this clearer than Bill James. In his 1995 classic Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? James called the Frisch and Terry choices “simply appalling” and “absurd.”
    “The selection of this group of eight men . . . is the absolute nadir of the Veterans Committee’s performance . . . The selections of Hafey, Kelly, Haines, Lindstrom and Ross Youngs are just absurd, absolutely beyond any logical defense.”
    James dubbed George Kelly “the worst player in the Hall of Fame.” “George Kelly was a good ballplayer,” he wrote. “So were Chris Chambliss, Bill Buckner, George McQuinn and Eddie Robinson. He wasn’t a Hall of Famer on the best day of his life.”
    Nobody else in the baseball world could make this sort of ex-cathedra pronouncement and be taken seriously. But nobody, at least since Henry Chadwick, has known as much about the game of baseball.
    Bill James never played pro ball. He never coached or managed, never reported on the game for a newspaper or broadcast one on the radio. He was just a fan and an amateur student of the sport. In 1975, he was in his mid-twenties, working as a night watchman in a Kansas bean factory, when he started mimeographing a