This week, ESPN’s Rob Neyer posted two blog entries about a couple of players and their HOF credentials that struck close to home for me and my early baseball fanship. The first item asked if semi-disgraced (is he totally disgraced? hard to say…) slugger Mark McGwire deserves to be in Cooperstown, and the next post asked why Dale Murphy was still waiting for his shot at the Hall.

For a lot of us who grew up in the 1980s, those two players made indelible marks on the game as a whole. I still have (after my dad gave it back to me from its decades in a storage closet) one of my first baseball gloves that bears Murphy’s signature, and I’m surely not the only one who had a Dale Murphy outfielder’s glove – you know, from when pretty much every kid had an outfielder’s glove. McGwire, on the other hand, was one of the first megastars that I remember paying attention to in the late 80s, as he slugged his way to a Rookie of the Year season in 1987, clubbing 49 homers. You know, the season that caused all of us baseball card collectors to save the 1987 Topps cards with the wood grain borders?

As I recollected watching games and those early days of looking at the box scores in the newspaper, what jumped out at me was how my perception of these two was probably driven by the amount of play that they got on the national scene at the time. McGwire was part of a team in Oakland that won a championship, and was on the national stage on a nightly basis for his home run exploits. Murphy, on the other hand, played on some not-so-great Atlanta Braves teams, and only made the postseason in 1982. One was solid and consistent, while the other was like a flash-bang grenade for color commentators covering games across the country for more than a decade.

The fun part of Monday morning quarterbacking this particular debate is that we can play the “if you were starting a team today” game with these two, and go from there. If I said to you that you’d get an absolutely consistent player who’d be a seven-time All-Star, two-time MVP who’d play 6-10 years of really solid ball, or a twelve-time All-Star who’d be a sometimes devastating power threat until the day he hung up his spikes but left something to be desired in the ethics column, who would you pick? I dare say that the wannabe-GM in most of us would take McGwire in a heartbeat. Similarly, that’s probably how you’d evaluate their shots at the Hall of Fame before they ever stepped on a Major League field.

So if Murphy finished his career in the late 90s, or had won a title or two and his stats stayed the same, would we look at him differently? Would it turn into one of those discussions like the one about fan favorite Sandy Koufax, whose 165 regular season wins come nowhere near the “unofficial” bar of 300 wins that many think set HOFers apart from those not going to Cooperstown from the pitching ranks, but never stopped him from being elected to the Hall?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way comparing the way that Koufax hammered the league to how Murphy did, but Koufax had five or six absolutely devastating years, where he was an All-Star six times and won three Cy Young awards. He was also NL MVP for one of those three years, and came in second the other two years he won the Cy. Over those six years, he won 129 games, or 78% of his total wins. He was, by all accounts I’ve ever heard from Brooklyn/LA Dodger fans, the best player at his position for that entire chunk of his career. This is where Neyer’s pro-Murphy argument comes into play — from the ‘82-’87 period he flags, Murphy hit 218 home runs, or about 55% of all the home runs he would hit over his 18-year career. Neyer’s analysis also puts him third or better in home runs (where he was first), games played, runs, RBI, and runs created during those six years. Was he the “best player” at his position or in the league during that timeframe? No, he wasn’t. Was he a damn good one? Absolutely.

So are voters for the HOF able to discern a deserving player from another by more than the unofficial benchmarks of 300 wins, 500 home runs, or a number of hits or games played? You know they are. Has that helped Murphy? Doesn’t look like it.

The reason I flagged these two and dragged them together was that I’m wondering if, going forward, public perception in our everthing-makes-it-on-the-Internet age is going to have more of a bearing on Hall of Fame voting than it might have in the past. Star players tainted with performance enhancing drugs on their resumes alongside seemingly solid players who might not have the same stats columns might get a different look, if only because of the lack of no-brainer choices. Remember, there’s no asterisks next to those four seasons when Mac led the league in home runs, so “blind taste-test”-like voting would probably put McGwire in the Hall without a question. Not wanting to “talk about the past” most definitely plays a part in why he isn’t in it already. As for Murphy, perhaps timing is critical, and how he left the diamond put his Hall hopes in that old storage closet like the baseball gloves that a lot of us wore in the mid-80s.

That said, I’m most certainly keeping the old baseball glove with the replica signature, but the sealed-in-plastic Wheaties box commemorating McGwire’s 70 home run season of 1998 might not survive the next closet purge. Unfortunately, sentimental value doesn’t count for Hall of Fame votes, otherwise there might be a generation of baseball fans whose tattered outfielder’s gloves would be getting sent to baseball writers in Major League cities everywhere in a pro-Murphy campaign.

Tags: Cooperstown, Dale Murphy, Hall of Fame, Mark McGwire