Veeck and Miller Deserve Spots in the Hall of Fame

Each baseball season at this time, the Hall of Fame ballot comes. It’s the warm spot next to the fireplace of the mind. Of the new candidates, Joe Morgan and Jim Palmer jump off the page.

Morgan might have been the greatest second baseman of all time; I didn’t see Rogers Hornsby. Palmer won 20 games eight times in a nine-season span.

They need no argument.

And I would vote for Bill Veeck and Marvin Miller. They provided some of the most modern and farsighted thinking the game ever had, whatever the troglodytes say. If baseball has greater popularity today than ever, they deserve some credit. There’s no place for them on the ballot, for former players only.

Back in the dark ages, Veeck understood that the game was a game and that it was entertainment. He understood that management can’t guarantee a winning game for the fan, but it is obligated to make going to the game fun.

He put together a winner in Cleveland with the Indians and pressed the New York Yankees for a lot of years. His 1948 attendance in Cleveland of 2,620,627 is still the most remarkable ever.

Miller’s efforts overturned the indecent reserve system. The new structure is less than perfect, largely because owners still haven’t learned to evaluate players.

If the players had any sense of debt, they would agitate for Miller’s place, but memories fade with each paycheck.

Veeck and Miller belong.

Essentially, players are selected by vote of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, which this year deals with players who were active between 1970 and 1984, or by the veterans committee, which has no time restrictions -- and, by now, no real place.

In the beginning, when selections had to cover the half-century before the founding of the Hall of Fame, the veterans committee had a significant role. The mechanics of the veterans committee should be changed to something more appropriate than crony-ism. Charlie Gehringer, Ted Williams and Stan Musial are strong members of the committee, and in recent years it selected old teammates and buddies Rick Ferrell, Bobby Doerr and Red Schoendienst. They had been passed over by the Baseball Writers Association of America for 15 years.

At the same time, the august veterans didn’t see that Phil Rizzuto belongs -- even though Williams has said that if the Boston Red Sox had had him at shortstop, they would have dominated the era instead of the Yankees.

Replace the veterans committee with a group that could measure the worth of Miller and Veeck.

The greatest difficulty in selecting players is to honor the concept that the Hall of Fame is for great players -- standards set by the likes of Morgan and Palmer -- and not for very good players or players who managed to play a long time.

There are four players on the list of first-timers who played the requisite 10 years but didn’t average 100 games a season. Longevity isn’t enough.

One spring, Pete Rose looked into the clubhouse of players he was managing and noted: “Some of them will have Hall of Fame months, and some of them may even have Hall of Fame seasons, but how many players have Hall of Fame careers?”

Few. Fewer than are now in the Hall of Fame.

It would be unreasonable to measure new candidates by a new and vastly higher standard. It wouldn’t serve to vote out those players who don’t meet standards that should have been applied in the first place, but it’s a thought. There is this self-deception with offense, particularly the home run. The Hall is not an all-star ballot, but there should be an understanding that you can have a whole lot of Harmon Killebrews but won’t win. As Casey Stengel explained, “If you don’t have a catcher, you’ll have a lot of passed balls.” Stengel said a lot of things.

Morgan hit for average, he hit for power, he fielded, he ran, he played smart and he played arrogant. He is third in all-time walks, seventh in stolen bases. In 1976 he drove in 111 runs, scored 113, batted .320, hit 27 homers and stole 60 bases. That was a landmark for a great player. Palmer constantly played The Bickersons with his manager. He said Earl Weaver didn’t understand pitching and Weaver responded that Palmer didn’t even understand Jim Palmer. Together they got a job done: Palmer was the best pitcher on the best team of his time. He threw a high fastball that looked as if it were bouncing over something on the way to the plate. He won 20 games eight times, which only five other pitchers have accomplished. Six times he pitched more than 295 innings. In 1975 he was 23-11, pitched 10 shutouts and had a 2.09 earned run average for 323 innings. He never ever -- in 3,948 innings pitched -- gave up a home run with the bases full.

My No. 3 is Orlando Cepeda. He hit a ton. He won with the San Francisco Giants, and when he was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals, they won. And he went to the Atlanta Braves and they won. That’s a pretty good measure of a man. He has paid his debt on a drug charge. No. 4 is Thurman Munson. He hit .300 and had 100 RBI for three successive years, which nobody had done since Al Rosen two decades before. His death after 11 seasons isn’t reason to elect him, but he was a terrific player. He was the best catcher in the American League, and you remember what Stengel said about catchers.

No. 5 is Bill Mazeroski. He won’t get in because he didn’t hit enough and too many voters think his homer to beat the Yankees in 1960 was the only thing he ever did. He was a very tough out, an incomparable middle man on the double play, and he led his position in chances fielded more often than anybody at any position ever.

No. 6 is Curt Flood. He hit .300 six times, and other than Willie Mays you couldn’t find a better centerfielder.

No. 7 is Ferguson Jenkins. He won 20 seven times, six in a row, and he didn’t pitch for the best teams. He led the American League in complete games once and the National League three times. You could build a pitching staff around him. No. 8 is Gaylord Perry. He pitched nearly 1,000 more innings than any other candidate this year and won 20 five times with mediocre teams. They always had umpires to decide right and wrong when he pitched, and they didn’t say he couldn’t throw whatever it was that he threw.

No. 9 is Maury Wills. He brought the stolen base back from the archives and made it a total offensive weapon so Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale could win all those games. He is the ancestor of Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson.

No. 10 is Sparky Lyle. He’s the 10th man. He has to be judged by a separate standard since the Hall has no exclusive relief pitcher. Nobody wins without somebody who can get the last out.