Quote:
Originally Posted by topcat61
Jack Chesbro and Cecil Travis played in completely different eras. It's a difference between apples and oranges. Happy Jack was voted in by the Old Timers Committee in 1946 so most likely, those who voted him in actually saw him play or followed him in the papers.
There are very few people around today who can remember seeing Travis play and too many fans and card collectors put too much on stats and forget that you cant compare players of one generation to today's standards. We also tend to forget or not quite understand the time in America in which these players lived. One poster he said, and I completely agree, that Travis's injury was out of his control -his government asked him to do a job -and a compulsory job at that. It would've been a completely different story had he been injured playing the game.
There is noting to assume that had he not been in the Service, that he wouldn't have continued those 1941 numbers or had a few awards because of the depleted ranks. Travis was also a very humble man and I doubt he'd ever consider himself a Hall worth candidate even if he had Cobb-like numbers. That just wasn't his style.
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I'm quite aware that they played in separate era's. If the argument is that Chesbro had too short of a peak to make the hall, then Travis doesn't make it either. Or are we allowing single season peaks only for players in Travis' era, and not others (ignoring that Chesbro, in fact, had other very high performing seasons)? What kind of a reasonable standard is that?
OPS+ does not compare the player to today's standards. Not at all. It compares them to the league average in that specific year. Nowhere have I compared Travis' play to the numbers of today, and quite specifically, placed his batting average in the context of the era and league in which he played.
If your point is that we today can't accurately judge players from the past, then Travis should not be elected, because we cannot judge him. Nobody before year X should ever be considered then.
"There is noting to assume that had he not been in the Service, that he wouldn't have continued those 1941 numbers or had a few awards because of the depleted ranks" - This is very true. There is also nothing to assume that he would repeat his 1941 season several times, and play at a significantly higher level of play from every single other one of his years. Why should we make the assumption he would?
The Hall of Fame should not be based on selective arguments that are not applied to any other players. If there is no logical consistency, and we can elect players by just filling in their careers with fantasy years because we like them or war service tugs on our heart strings, then it's a Hall of Fiction, not a Hall of Fame.