Hall of Fame Early Baseball Committee

[Fred]

They could divide the 19th century into a couple/few categories that include players and "pioneers". Pioneers would be those that were around in the earliest phases of the game that had no way of fulfilling the 10 year rule. If they started around the mid 1880s, then they at least had a good chance to reach the 10 year criteria.

What's also tough is that there will be SABRist that will indicate the AA was not as competitive as the NL, which would then remove Caruthers from possible consideration because 175 of his 218 wins were wile playing in the AA.

Pioneer:
Ross Barnes (how could they exclude him? Had 9 years but most ABs in any season was < 400).
Mathews (combo of pioneer and player with 10 years, 297 Ws)

Players:
Caruthers (ya know, Pedro Martinez could have also had over 200 Ws and less than 100 Ls if he had not come back for that last season where he was 5-1 for Philly)
Stovey - he led the leagues in so many statistical categories during his playing days (5 x HR, 2 x SB, 4 x R, 4 x 3B)
VanHaltren - didn't lead the league in many yearly categories, but 12 x 100 run seasons is fairly impressive.

Probably many more arguably very deserving.

Two players come to mind that had (5) really good years and a few not so statistically relevant years:
Corcoran
Orr

[CardCollector]

[Deleting a double post]

[CardCollector]

Originally Posted by CardCollector

What's also tough is that there will be SABRist that will indicate the AA was not as competitive as the NL, which would then remove Caruthers from possible consideration because 175 of his 218 wins were wile playing in the AA.

"Not Bad for a Beer League" (see p. 55 of this link: http://research.sabr.org/journals/fi...Pastime-15.pdf) does a nice job of presenting some evidence suggesting that the AA was pretty competitive. Here's the takeaway:

"All of the available evidence--championship series, exhibition games, incidence of bushers and the experience of transferred players--suggests that relative parity was achieved between the two leagues between 1886-1889. Partial evidence (exhibition wins, percent of bushers, a tied championship series) supports the theory that this state of parity was achieved as early as 1885. (Indeed, even the Spalding Guide of 1886 admitted that the American Association clubs had shown 'marked improvement in the strength of their teams' in 1885.)

[alaskapaul3]

Jimmy Ryan? 2500H 118 HR and .308 average. Not too shabby.

Would love to see Mathews and Stovey too

[Kenny Cole]

Ryan was a player. No doubt. Hard for me to argue that he is much different from Van Haltren. Both good ballplayers in the day.