OT: 2020 - the year of HOF deaths

[Koufax32fan]

[Leon - please move this to the watercooler section if you want.]

With the news of Joe Morgan's death, I was reflecting on how terrible this year has been for HOFers - Morgan, Seaver, Ford, Kaline, Brock and Gibson. (Each loss of human life is terrible, and some of these players were amongst the best of all time.)

I was looking for a listing of HOFers by the year of death to determine if 2020 is extraordinary based on the number of deaths. I could not find one easily, so I put one together using Baseball-Reference. (I can't upload an Excel spreadsheet, but am happy to share via email.) The six deaths (so far, and let's hope there are no more) this year is the second most during any year. In 1972, we lost seven HOFers (Wheat, Bancroft, Weiss, Traynor, Hartnett, Robinson (Jackie) and Clemente).

Recently, the history has been:

2019 - 1 (Frank Robinson)
2018 - 3 (McCovey, Harvey and Schoendienst)
2017 - 3 (Doerr, Bunning and Halladay)
2016 - 1 (Irvin)
2015 - 2 (Berra and Banks)
2014 - 2 (Kiner and Gwynn)
2013 - 2 (Musial and Weaver)
2012 - 3 (MacPhail, Miller and Carter)
2011 - 3 (Snider, Dick Williams and Killebrew)
2010 - 4 (Santo, Anderson, Roberts and Feller)
2009 - 1 (Kell)
2008 - None
2007 - 2 (Rizutto and Kuhn)
2006 - 1 (Puckett)
2005 - 1 (Lopez)
2004 - None
2003 - 2 (Spahn and Doby)
2002 - 3 (Slaughter, T. Williams and Wilhelm)
2001 - 3 (Boudreau, Mathews and Stargell)
2000 - 1 (Lemon)

So, yes, if you also have been feeling like 2020 has been extraordinarily sad based only on the number of HOFers we have lost, you have good reason to feel that way.

Let's celebrate our living HOFers, the oldest of whom is Tommy Lasorda, followed by Mays, Herzog, Aaron and Aparicio.

[rats60]

Those guys were all first ballot Hall of Famers except Ford who got 67% his first ballot and was elected on the second. That is a lot of talent for baseball fans of the 50s, 60s & 70s.

[Fred]

edited to remove content because I can see some people might be offended...

[Mike D.]

Doesn’t really matter, probably...but both Halladay and Santo passed away prior to election, right?

[Mike D.]

Interested to see if there is higher than normal numbers in the next few years.

Up until a certain date, the Hall had a lot of long-gone players elected (the pre-1939 backlog). Then a higher percentage of players were selected via the veterans committee (relative to more recent elections).

It wasn’t until these 60’s and 70’s stars became eligible that we had a high percent of recent era players (retired 5-10 years) making up the vast majority of those elected. If these players all played at the same time, it makes sense that they’d be of similar age and pass away at about the same time.

Or maybe (hopefully) 2020 is just the fluke / dumpster fire we all know it is!

[seanofjapan]

In addition to HOFers, there seem to be a lot of other retired players passing (Jay Johnstone for example). That would be a much bigger data set to look at to see if 2020 is an abberation compared to the average year since there are probably about 100 times as many former MLB players as there are HOfers.