Posted By:
jeff sDavid,
You're right - he probably will be voted in, and it will probably take a few rounds of the veterans committee to make it happen. And then our children and grandchildren (if they turn out to be obsessed with baseball history and arcana such as this) will argue about him just like we argue about Ralph Kiner and--so it appears--Ed Walsh and Freddie Lindstrom and the like.
It is interesting, though, to consider -- because of a variety of factors, like injuries, increased free-agency (which results in normally productive players like Mo Vaughn having off-years when they face a new crop of pitchers), and even more sophisticated scouting suggest that more and more players will be more like Belle/Kiner/Koufax and less like Schmidt/Yaz/Matty. Even with rare exceptions like Maddux and Clemens and Bonds and probably A-Rod, dominant players do not stay truly dominant for very long, which suggests to me that future HOF voters will have to compare lots of people like Belle (maybe Curt Schilling will fit into this mold, too) for what one might call the "Nellie Fox" slot in to the HOF through the veterans committee.
(Something tells me one of those really long HOF-standards argument threads has begun <g>)