Most homers, 2nd in slugging and RBI to Hornsby, 4th in OPS. Even with the slow start to his career Kent turned out very well and is so high up the 2B leaderboards it seems difficult to justify keeping him out over his late start, but performance is now secondary to narratives. Ortiz is let in with a positive steroid test while the others like him are not given the same treatment, Schilling is kept out for politics, Kent is out for being undesirable, Vizquel is out over a civil claim with no publicly available evidence, the vets committee appears to have reached Frisch era corruption of picking friends. Performance is a lot less relevant than it was 30 years ago. Makes it more difficult to pick who will or won’t among current players that will be up for votes in another decade plus - it will probably have as much as to do with narratives not about actual performance as it does anything definable.
|