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The debate over whether Ron Santo belongs in baseball’s Hall of Fame goes on — mainly because the Veterans Committee of his supposed peers hasn’t deemed anyone worthy of joining them the last few times they’ve voted. Bill James long ago pronounced Santo the best player not enshrined at Cooperstown. Last week Santo got more statistical backing from Baseball Prospectus’s Nate Silver in his online column “Lies, Damned Lies.” Silver was writing about the best player in the game each year from the origins of professional baseball in the mid-1800s through the present day. When he got to 1966 and ’67, whom did he give the crown to but Santo. The columns ran on BP Premium, a subscription service, so while I can’t link to it — all I can say is I find it well worth the $5 a month — here’s the passage on those two years:
Silver also said Santo was side by side with Willie Mays as the best player in the game in 1965, and was in a three-way tie with Hank Aaron and Bob Gibson in 1968. Yet that’s not so surprising. In The Baseball Encyclopedia, Peter Palmer and Gary Gillette found Santo led the National League in batting and fielding wins (their version of James’s win-shares formula determining how many actual wins a player is responsible for) in 1964, ’66, and ’67. Now it’s just a matter of getting the Veterans Committee to recognize what they’ve been slow to acknowledge.
