Hall of Fame candidacy[edit]
Maris has not been elected to the Hall of Fame.
Sportswriter Greg Hansen criticized baseball writers in the St. Petersburg Independent in 1977 for excluding Maris from the Baseball Hall of Fame by him only receiving 72 votes that year, writing that there were many Hall of Fame outfielders who had never won two MVP awards and that no one else had ever hit 61 home runs in a season ... "To show you what an injustice this is to the man, Maris finished just a notch ahead of Harvey Kuenn, for crying out loud."'[25] Hansen wrote that Maris had resented the media's intrusion on his privacy; he said that Maris's tense relationship with the media had affected the voting.[25] Hansen also wrote, Maris had commented to him by phone after the voting and said to him that he knew he would never get inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, "I'll leave the Hall of Fame to the geniuses that vote on it. I will never get in. I have always known that. I will not argue with you about why or why not I should be elected."[25]
In 2011, George Vecsey of The New York Times called Maris "a terrific player for a few brief years."[26] He wrote that while Maris had two seasons where he played at Hall of Fame caliber, and while Maris played in an era that was not influenced by performance-enhancing substances, he did not believe that Maris had career statistics worthy of induction.[26]
The Baseball Hall of Fame established a Golden Era Committee (replaced the Veterans Committee) in 2010 to vote on the possible Hall of Fame induction of previously overlooked candidates who were active in baseball between 1947 and 1972. Beginning in 2011, this committee votes every three years on ten candidates from the era selected by the Baseball Writers' Association of America's (BBWAA) Historical Overview Committee. Maris did not appear on Golden Era Committee ballot in 2011 and 2014 (one former player was voted to the Hall of Fame in 2011 and no one was voted to the Hall of Fame by the committee in 2014, for the 2015 induction).[27][28]
|