Bob Feller - Is he a top tier Hall of Famer?

[Exhibitman]

A number of thoughts:

--I cannot judge a player on "what could have been had he not..."; simply opens too many cans of worms. Satchel Paige wasn't allowed to pitch in the Majors until he was about 41 years old. Martin DiHigo, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson...and so on. Feller lost several years to the war but as is pointed out above he could have wrecked his arm, been killed in a car crash, etc.

--I do not divide HOFers into tiers as finely as others. I only ask myself whether or not I would have voted for him. I'd guesstimate that there are probably 25% of the HOF that I would not have voted to admit, mostly the Veterans' Committee selections from the worst cronyism period. A lot of the admits then were just very good players who were friends with the committee members.

--I'm not a big fan of the logic that runs "Player X is in, Player Z has similar career stats, so Player Z = Player X." There's more to it than that. Joe Morgan and Lou Whitaker may have had similar overall career stats but that run Morgan had from 1972-1977 is one of the great performances of the postwar era no matter how you slice the statistics. I ask whether a player was among the very best and for how long.

--When I think about pitchers I tend to focus even more on dominance than consistency/longevity than I do for a position player. Different duties and way different risks. Don Drysdale's WAR for pitchers is 52nd, Koufax is 82nd. If you have the World Series on the line, who would you start? I'd probably vote yes for Dizzy Dean for the Hall because he had that run of 6 dominant years where he was one of the three best pitchers in the game.

--All of which leads me to select the tippy top pitchers as a combination of dominance and consistency/longevity. I voted "yes" for Feller because he was pretty much the best pitcher in the game for seven years [38-41, 46-48]. The balance of his career was learning the ropes followed by being varying degrees of dangerous but not dominant. A run like that means a heck of a lot more to me than padding stats with mediocre seasons at the end.