I must agree that HOF arguments are a lot of fun...and frustrating all at the same time.
Let's face it, there are multiple camps on the subject:
1. Sheer numbers that the player puts up...this can work for or against (if the player sticks around too long to gain a magic number, it's points against him).
2. Dominant player at his position for an era
3. Numbers he put up in a shortened career (what he would have done).
4. He's better than player X already in the Hall.
I haven't seen too many people that veered from their opinion on what the HOF criteria should be...and maybe that's why the hof veterans committee has tinkered so much with how the voting process is and who votes. It's the only way that any of these more modern players would ever vote for older players (and for that matter, not many management hof'ers would vote for labor leaders like Marvin Miller, which is what the problem is right now).
At 50, I'm not going to be able to convince someone 35 and younger that there are certain players I watched in the late 60's or early-mid 70's that were dominate at their position and deserve to get in to the Hall. They would just look at the overall numbers or go to a Bill James reference to prove I'm wrong. The overall problem is that everyone buys in to the baseball myth that you can compare players from the past and present, but lets face it, the only thing the same is the distance between the mound and the plate, and the distance between the bases. Rules have been tweaked to raise/lower the mound, outlaw spit-balls, outlaw performance enhancing drugs, etc. You can't compare Hernandez to Daubert...heck, you can't compare any firstbaseman today with anyone in the 90's or early 2000's due to steroids. Players in the 60's and 70's were given "greenies" by the handsfull, and who knows what the olden-day players took.
Anyway, I don't believe it waters down the hall to put players in that were dominate at their position during any one era.
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