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Rice still knocking on front door |
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Wednesday, 09 January 2008 |
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By TERRY NAU Sports editor Jim Rice isn't the first Hall of Fame candidate left waiting on the front step at Cooperstown for a few extra winters while baseball writers across America crunch their numbers and wring their hands over his candidacy. He's just the latest one.
The Hall of Fame is an exclusive club. Only 199 major league players have been voted in since 1936 out of 16,000 who have played the game at that level. That's why it's a great honor to get invited in through the front door.
In New England, most of us have a different take on Rice's candidacy. We rooted for the guy from the time he tore up the International League in 1974 for Pawtucket and revealed himself as the next great power hitter in Red Sox history.
Personal confession: Being a Yankee fan, I didn't like the sinewy slugger with the big hair and powerful swing. Rice just scared the heck out of me whenever he came to bat against the Yankees. The same way Manny Ramirez does in this day and age.
My opinion of Rice began to change after I moved to Pawtucket in 1982 and met him once or twice during the former "Alumni Game" proceedings between the PawSox and Red Sox that used to pack McCoy Stadium every spring (when it wasn't rained out). Jim's offensive numbers had begun to decline in the mid-1980s. The man who had intimidated so many of us during his early years in Boston was also becoming more human as he aged.
With this is mind, I approached Rice prior to an Alumni Game in 1987 and asked him to reflect on his one minor league season in Pawtucket 13 years earlier.
"I don't like to talk about the past," he said, brushing me off.
Knowing how to take a hint, I wandered over to the other side of the batting cage, revising my list of writing topics for the next day's newspaper. Marty Barrett? Yeah, that would work. Suddenly, someone was tapping me on the shoulder.
"Hey," he said, and there was Jim Rice looming over me, reconsidering his feelings about the past. Rice then spent the next few minutes talking about his year in Pawtucket, about the empty seats at McCoy Stadium in the summer of 1974, and how that season served as his springboard to great success in Boston a year later.
Needless to say, I've been a Jim Rice fan ever since. So you can discount me as an unbiased observer of his HOF credentials. But after reading a few anti-Rice stories over the past week on the Internet, I do have a few things to offer on the subject of his proposed residency in Cooperstown.
First off, Rice may be one of the first victims of the relatively new and more complex manner in which baseball writers and fans quantify the statistics that bear so much influence on a player's inclusion into the HOF. Rice's numbers have been dissected in so many ways, by so many critics, that it is almost forgotten how great a hitter he was between 1975-86, before his eyes went bad and the power faded away.
People have suggested that Fenway Park gave him an unfair advantage, that Rice hit .320 at home and .277 on the road. As if no other player in the history of the game took advantage of his home field. How about Ralph Kiner, who some modern figure filberts say is the best comparable player to Rice now in the HOF? Kiner played the first eight seasons of his career in Forbes Field, taking advantage of "Greenberg Gardens" in left field. The Pirates had moved the fence in 25 feet when an aging Hank Greenberg played there in 1947 and left the fence where it was for Kiner, a dead-pull hitter who hit a lot of fly balls over that 335-foot barrier. So many that the Pirates re-named the region "Kiner's Korner."
Rice, on the other hand, had to contend with the Green Monster in Fenway, which took away a lot of home runs from line drive hitters like himself. And still does to this day. Manny Ramirez probably loses 10 homers a season when he drills line shots to left and watches them clang off the Monster for singles. Nobody mentions this when they talk about "friendly" Fenway Park.
Rice also gets criticized for hitting into 315 double plays in his 16-season career, almost 20 per season. Can you imagine? What dolt doesn't know that guys who hit the ball on the nose as often as Rice did often hit shots straight at infielders for automatic DPs?
By comparison, the great Roberto Clemente hit into 275 DPs in his 18-year career, around 15 per season. And he could run with the wind. Clemente, of course, hit the ball consistently harder than any player of his era. He hit a line drive one day in the summer of 1969 that whizzed past the head of Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale, who promptly retired the next day, mostly due to arm trouble and partly because Clemente's ball might have killed the future Hall of Fame pitcher had it been six inches left of its path.
The critics also say that Dick Allen and Joe Carter were "scarier" hitters than Rice and they're not in Cooperstown. Guess what? They should be, too.
Then we hear that Rice would have been a shoo-in for the Hall had he finished with 18 more homers than his final total of 382. What a crock! Sandy Koufax won 165 games in his 10-year career in the big leagues and got in on the first try because he had the greatest six-year stint of pitching domination in the history of the game.
Koufax, of course, pitched for the highly visible Dodgers, starring in three World Series during the 1960s. That he spent the first six years of his 12-year career throwing wild pitches to the backstop seems to have no ill effect on his HOF candidacy. But Rice's waning years between 1987-89 are keeping him out. Go figure.
Well, next year seems to be the year for Jim Rice. That's what the experts are predicting, and I have to agree with them. It's Jim's last year on the regular ballot. He'll go into Cooperstown with first-year candidate Rickey Henderson, which is kind of fitting because Rickey had his own style, too.
My guess is that when Jim Rice gives his HOF speech in the summer of 2009, he'll speak from the heart about a long journey that took him from the backwater town of Anderson, S.C. to the sleepy little village in central New York where the Hall of Fame resides. The entire journey will be worth the wait, even these past two years when only a small number of writers kept him waiting on the steps of Cooperstown once again.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 03 February 2008 )
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