Hall of Fame

With the Hall of Fame update finally coming to fruition, I wanted to take a look at some of the stats. Here are a few observations I made:

1. The requirements for auto-nomination aren't easy to hit.

As of right now, only 4 players have earned an auto-nomination: Osvaldo Johnson (4 MVPs), Gregg Black (3 MVPs), Javier Henriquez (4 Cy Youngs), and Dave Dunwoody (7 All-Star appearances). All four of these guys should waltz into the Hall as soon as they retire. Guys like Denny Moss, Ruben Hernandez, Calvin Chang, Stephen Michaels, and Sammy Pierce haven't got there (although they still have time). Which leads me to the next point:

2. Our Hall could be empty for a few seasons.

Taking a look at the players who have earned auto nominations and looking at the career leaders (top 15-20) in some of the major categories (home runs, RBI, wins, strikeouts), there is one thing in common- all the lists are comprised entirely of active players. Of course, any player who has already retired has less than 8 seasons, which is a very short time to put together a Hall of Fame career.

3. We may have already found our highly debatable case.

The league chat board has already spit out the name of what could be a very interesting case: King Winn. He has an MVP award to his name, and as of this post he ranks 8th all-time in home runs and 3rd all-time in RBI. He holds the single season RBI record with 182 in Season 4 and holds the third highest total with 168 back in season 1. However, he's been a full-time DH throughout his career- he's played more than 80 games in the field only once and has played 49 games in the field in the past 6 seasons. He's not close to auto-nomination, as he only has 3 All-Star apperances (less than names like Leo Miller, Wendell Durrington, Del Lopez, and Tex Howell) and only 2 Silver Slugger Awards. So the questions that arise here are: can a full-time DH make the Hall of Fame? And was Winn even the best at that position?