Hall of Fame Comps

One of my favorite current sportswriters - strike that, far and away my favorite current sportswriter - is Joe Posnanski, who is now blogging at SI.com. This is a great piece, long but fun, and well worth the read. He's absolutely right - Hall of Fame comps make for interesting discussion. (He's also right that Dwight Evans was a better player than Jim Rice...)

Joe Posnanski - Hall of Fame Comps

One fairly useless (but enjoyable) thing to play is the “If THIS guy in the Hall of Fame then THIS guy should be in the Hall of Fame” game.

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The reason this is fairly useless (but enjoyable) is that nobody really believes the Hall of Fame line is drawn at the most controversial choices. Nobody wants a Hall of Fame that includes every single player who was ever as good as or better than George Kelly or Herb Pennock. Then, suddenly, you find yourself arguing why Danny Darwin is not in the Hall of Fame, and nobody really wants to have THAT argument (except maybe Danny Darwin, I don’t know).

The opposite is true, too… if the Hall of Fame standard was Willie Mays and Walter Johnson as some want it to be, then there would be something like nine people in the Hall of Fame, and we would be arguing about whether or not, say, Bob Gibson belongs, or Rogers Hornsby.

As I say, it's a great read, as Joe's blog posts pretty much always are...