Maris Fails to Impress This Veteran

The Mark McGwire spotlight, of course, has also illuminated the career of Roger Maris, creating new interest. Enough to prompt the veteran’s committee of the Hall of Fame to take a harder look at his credentials?

“I doubt that,” committee member Leonard Koppett said from his Bay Area home. “All the attention Maris has received recently would have greater impact if the 400 baseball writers or the public was voting.

“At this point, there’s not one member of the 15-man committee who hasn’t been focused on Maris for 30 years, and I don’t think the attention now will change any of those opinions, whatever they may be.

“I don’t mean to say that Maris will never be elected or voted on by the committee, but I don’t think it will be any different now than it was before. We’re more insulated from outside influences. We’re all 70 years old and have our opinions. We lived through the Maris era. What is there we don’t know?”

An eligible player needs to receive 75% of the votes cast to be elected by the Baseball Writers Assn. of America. He can remain on the ballot for 15 years providing he receives 5% each year.

The most votes Maris received was 184--or 43%--in 1988, his final year of eligibility. The veterans committee can only consider players who received 100 votes in any election before 1991 or 60% of the votes in any election since 1991. A three-year wait is required between a player’s last year of eligibility on the regular ballot and the first year that he can be considered by the veteran’s committee.

Maris has been eligible every year since 1992, but is yet to be voted on by the veterans committee, which can elect only one player each year and has a backlog. Koppett, a distinguished author/reporter who covered Maris with the New York Yankees and has been inducted into the Hall of Fame himself, said he couldn’t speak for other committee members but doesn’t think Maris’ career credentials are worthy of his inclusion--despite the 61 home runs of 1961 and the two most-valuable-player awards.

Maris hit .260 with 275 home runs and 851 runs batted in--modest totals compared to most outfielders in the Hall of Fame.

“Based on my personal standards, I don’t think he had a Hall of Fame career,” Koppett said. “I look at a career in totality, not a single season high point. He was on the ballot 15 times, and the majority of voters agreed with me. The most recent comparison I can make [with Maris’ career] is to Don Mattingly. If Mattingly had continued to produce seasons comparable to his first five, he would be an automatic Hall of Fame player, but he didn’t. Maris hurt his wrist in 1963 and was never the same. That was unfortunate, but his numbers aren’t there.”

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Baseball people simply shook their heads when the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays committed $35 million for five years to Wilson Alvarez and $22.5 million for four years to Roberto Hernandez. The shaking continues. Alvarez is 6-13 with a 4.54 earned-run average and Hernandez is 2-6 with a 4.39 ERA and nine blown saves in 33 chances.

In addition, there isn’t anything that Alvarez hasn’t complained about, from the lack of offensive and defensive support to being yanked from games too soon to insulting the coaching staff by saying he has recently begun to turn it around because he has stopped listening to them.

“They were putting a lot of things in my head,” Alvarez said. “I want to do it the way I’ve been doing it the last few years.”

Neither the Chicago White Sox nor San Francisco Giants felt that way was good enough to offer him what the Devil Rays did.