Index
Created in April 2022, the Classic Baseball Era Committee debuts to deliberate eight candidates for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. All eight candidates' careers began before 1980. Two are associated with the Negro Leagues, assimilated into Major League Baseball in December 2020, while the other six are some very familiar names indeed, and it is highly likely that at least one of them will be announced by the committee on December 8, 2024, for formal induction in July 2025.
The six non-Negro Leagues candidates are practically near-contemporaries whose playing careers span the 1950s through the 1980s: Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant. The two Negro Leagues candidates are John Donaldson and Vic Harris, with Donaldson, whose tenure in the officially-recognized Negro Leagues lasted for the first half of the 1920s, also considered a manager and a pioneer of sorts; by contrast, Harris's playing and managing career spanned virtually the entire Negro Leagues period from 1920 to 1948.
Of the eight candidates, only Garvey, John, and Parker are still living; Tiant died on October 8, 2024, at age 83. The six non-Negro Leagues candidates have all been evaluated several times by previous iterations of the veterans committee, and all six certainly have been perched on the threshold of the Hall of Fame since they were first eligible. Indeed, their era and the previous ones have been well-scrutinized for decades.
Is this the year Dick Allen enters the Baseball Hall of Fame? The slugger, along with five other Major League players, has been up for consideration many times previously.
Thus the reorganization of the veterans committees in 2022 to concentrate on baseball's more recent decades, and it does seem that the six non-Negro League candidates had been selected to emphasize this more recent period. The earlier periods largely have been picked clean, if not over-picked, to tell from marginal inductees Tommy McCarthy and Rube Marquard, to name just two, although cases can still be made for those such as Bobby Mathews and Bill Dahlen.
What makes it difficult to compare players across different eras is that the quality of play improves over time. Driving that improvement is an expanding talent pool that embraces players who had been previously excluded. Expanding the talent pool minimizes talent dispersion, in which relatively few excellent players compete against many average or even mediocre players, and it maximizes talent compression, in which many excellent players compete against equally excellent players.
The result of talent compression is a reduction in variance: extremes are flattened into a much smaller variance range. For example, from 1921 to 1925, Rogers Hornsby's batting average over those five years was .402, a jaw-dropping number inconceivable today. Other than his own extraordinary ability, Hornsby's otherworldly offensive prowess rested on the advent of the live-ball era, which began in the early 1920s, and on talent dispersion.
The primary cause of talent dispersion was segregated baseball, when African-Americans were forced to create separate—but hardly equal—major leagues, few if any Latin American players entered the Major Leagues (although a few such as Lefty Gomez and Al Lopez had legacy Spanish surnames), and players from other non-European (read: non-white) countries were nonexistent.
However, talent dispersion cuts both ways. Comedian Chris Rock once joked that Babe Ruth hit 714 affirmative-action home runs, meaning that "the Sultan of Swat" never faced any elite non-white pitchers in the Major Leagues. By the very same token, the great hitters in segregated black baseball never faced any elite white pitchers in the Negro Leagues. And just as the pool of potential white Hall of Fame candidates from the segregated era may be exhausted, so too may be the pool of potential black candidates.
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