The big news in baseball Monday was the announcement that Rickey Henderson (a sure thing) and Jim Rice (still controversial after all these years) were elected to the Hall of Fame.
For me, the real debate is why Andre Dawson didn’t make it. And why he eventually should.
Dawson, in my book, was every bit the player Rice was. Not because Dawson was such a class act and a gentleman (true on both counts) or good to the media (irrelevant), but because he played the game the right way and at a high level for a long time.
Plus, he was beloved by teammates and managers, who knew he made them better.
Chicago Cubs teammate Ryne Sandberg said it well during his induction speech at the Hall of Fame in 2005.
“No player in baseball history worked harder, suffered more or did it better than Andre Dawson,” Sandberg said. “He’s the best I’ve ever seen. I watched him win an MVP for a last-place team in 1987 (with the Cubs), and it was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen in baseball. He did it the right way, the natural way, and he did it in the field and on the bases and in every way, and I hope he will stand up here someday.”
Die-hard seamheads — those who base everything on raw numbers and often fail to consider the beauty, emotion and nuances of the game — discount Dawson because of one statistic: his lifetime .323 on-base percentage.
“It’s no indication of the big picture,” Dawson recently told Fox Sports baseball writer Ken Rosen- thal. “There was a time when I was voted by my peers as the best player in the game. You’re talking about a four- or five-tool player, not just one aspect of the game. I played both offense and defense. Some players are in the Hall of Fame just because of what they did defensively.”
“The Hawk” doesn’t need to prop himself up. His raw numbers spell excellence: 438 homers, 314 stolen bases, 2,774 hits and eight Gold Gloves.
He was National League rookie of the year in 1977 and 10 years later won the NL MVP. He was an eight- time all-star.
And — oh, yes — those 438 homers came before steroids tainted our national pastime and cast suspicion over an entire era.
Dawson received 67 percent of the vote from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, less than the 75 percent he needed to be selected. That means he came up 44 votes short of election. Here’s hoping “The Hawk” doesn’t have to wait 15 years, as Rice did, to get his slice of immortality.
