Hall of Fame voting and WWII

[topcat61]

Originally Posted by G1911

Travis' best season does not qualify as a hall of fame season by the standard you have set for Chesbro. Seems like the argument for him is thus completely null now.

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.