Another Sox “great” falls 2 votes short

I’m starting to wonder if this is going to become a trend among White Sox ballplayers when it comes to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. – two votes shy, and, “Yer out!”

Which means while many baseball fans on Wednesday were celebrating (or bemoaning) the elections of infielder Roberto Alomar and pitcher Bert Blyleven to the Hall (induction ceremonies to be held in July), and others were trying concoct a message from the 64 voters who said “yes” to Rafael Palmeiro (only 11 percent), my attention was flipping around those ballplayers who had some stints in Chicago.

THAT INCLUDES ALOMAR, who along with his brother, Sandy, Jr., played for the White Sox near the end of his career, and Palmeiro, whose career began with the Cubs and might have lasted longer in Chicago had it not been for certain personal indiscretions (Cubs fans of a certain era remember who and what I’m referring to).

But it also includes Harold Baines, who was a White Sox star in the 1980s and managed to do three stints with the ballclub before quitting as an active player back in 2001. For the past four years,, Baines’ ballplaying career has managed to gain just enough Hall of Fame support that he gets kept on the ballot for consideration to the next year.

Not this time.

For it seems that only 28 of the 581 ballots cast by Hall of Fame sportswriters included Baines as a selection – which comes to 4.8 percent. A ballplayer needs a clean 5 percent to be reconsidered.

SO BECAUSE HE didn’t get 30 votes, Baines is gone. He’s no longer a possibility to get picked for the Hall of Fame anytime soon. Maybe some year, one of those veterans committees that studies baseball executives and other causes will give Baines’ career a second chance. Then again, maybe not.

All I know is that the scenario reminded me all too much of Nellie Fox. The White Sox great second baseman from the 1950s worked his way through the years continually falling short of the number of votes needed for Hall of Fame induction.

The reason he gets remembered is because of 1985 – his 15^th, and final year of consideration. That year, he got 295 votes out of the 395 ballots cast. As in 74.7 percent, which rounded up is 75 percent – the bare minimum of support needed for actual induction (for what it is worth, Alomar on Wednesday got 90 percent support).

There were those who cited baseball’s traditions in rounding up percentages to allow ballplayers to achieve records or significant accomplishments. Not in this case.

FOX WOUND UP not making it into the Hall of Fame until 12 years later, when the aforementioned veterans committee picked him.

Which makes me wonder – will it be sometime around the year 2025 (he’d be 66 by then) that someone might take seriously the playing career of Harold Baines – which managed to overcome serious injuries that could have ended his playing career to last for two decades in the American League?

Because among White Sox fans, Baines is as beloved by his generation as the older fans were of Nellie. Now before anyone starts throwing lines of statistics at me to show me how inadequate Harold was, I am fully aware that Baines gets some exaggerated credit because he was the best ballplayer on what were some truly cruddy White Sox ball clubs back in the mid- to late-1980s.

He made six American League All-Star teams and twice finished in the Top 10 of the league Most Valuable Player voting, was 29^th all-time in runs batted in with 1,628, and also led the league in slugging percentage back in 1984. The stat that gets him closest to consideration was 2,844 – as in the number of base hits he got in his career, so close to the 3,000-tally that usually gets people all worked up into thinking “Hall of Fame.”

THEN AGAIN, PALMEIRO exceeded that 3,000 figure, and still is likely to never get in.

My point in rattling off those particular statistics is to indicate that Baines would be far from the worst ballplayer to get into the Hall of Fame, should it happen some day.

In fact, a part of me can’t help but think that the description of “good, but not great” that Baines’ detractors will use to describe him is also fitting of Blyleven – the pitcher from my childhood years who managed to hang on in baseball for so long that his overall career totals (at first glance) look impressive – 287 career wins, just short of 300 wins, the pitcher’s equivalent of 3,000 hits.

The same stat geeks who will bemoan Harold Baines are in love with Blyleven’s record, ignoring the fact that among their contemporaries while they played, Harold was thought more highly of than Rik Aalbert.

WHICH IS WHY a part of me wonders if a future generation veterans committee will be willing to give Baines a second glance.

But for the meantime, we get to celebrate the induction of Alomar (even though the peak of his career was playing for those Toronto Blue Jays teams that deprived the White Sox of an American League championship in 1993). Roberto was on the South Side for both 2003 and 2004, and has family ties to the White Sox strengthened by the fact that both his brother, catcher Sandy, Jr., and his father, infielder Sandy, Sr., also called Comiskey Park home for a stint.

  -30-

Posturing galore on Wednesday

I’m dreading Wednesday.

That is going to be a day for all the gasbags to come crawling out of the woodwork and express their “outrage” over the great injustices that will be committed that day.

WHAT MAKES IT worse is that there isn’t even just one issue that will cause the rhetorical pontification that will spout up that day. Politics and sports – take your pick. There are going to be ticked off people.

Wednesday is the day that an Illinois government commission will meet both in Chicago and at the Statehouse in Springpatch to discuss the “fate” of the Thomson Correctional Center. That also will be the day that the Baseball Hall of Fame will inform us which ballplayers – if any – wind up gaining admission this year.

The big, fat balls of gas will come out on both issues, and we’re going to hear so much pompous rhetoric – particularly if onetime Montreal Expo Andre Dawson (who played a few years with the Chicago Cubs) doesn’t get it, while the other side of town will give us some people seriously outraged at the concept that former Chicago White Sox outfielder Harold Baines never gains more respect from Hall of Fame voters.

The scary thing is that their rhetoric will be just as intense as the cheap talk coming from the political people at the Thompson Center and at the Statehouse.

FOR IT WILL be on Wednesday that the Illinois Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability will use modern technology to meet without gathering in the same room to express their thoughts about the fact that the federal government wants to purchase the unused maximum-security state prison from Illinois government – so as to provide a place to locate some of the people alleged to have committed acts of terrorism against the United States who now are being held at a U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

State officials even go so far to say that they may reach a decision on what to do with this issue when they meet on Wednesday.

Hah!

I will be the first to concede this is a serious issue. It is legitimate. It ought not to be ridiculed by anyone.

BUT THE IDEA that anything that will happen on /Wednesday will resolve this issue is a laughable concept. For the bottom line is that this is a federal issue. It is going to be the Congress and the president who ultimately settle this score.

All that is going to happen on Wednesday is that a lot of state officials, some of whom have Election /Day interests at stake come Feb. 2, will make pompous statements meant to make themselves look firm and authoritative to the people of their home districts who foolishly elected them once and likely will send them back to Springfield to continue to do “the people’s business.”

The state at some point will have to take some sort of vote approving the sale of the prison that was meant to be opened in the early 2000s as a way of giving the state a modern maximum-security facility – but never was properly opened because the state’s financial problems made it impossible for them to afford to operate it.

In short, Thomson was the fancy new house that we never could afford, and now someone is willing to take it off our hands at something resembling a fair price.

BUT WE’RE GOING to hear the politicking from Republican officials who will parrott the partisan rhetoric of their federal government counterparts – bringing inmates from Guantanamo Bay to Thomson somehow makes us Illinoisans (and Chicagoans in particular) a target for terrorist plots.

Ignoring the fact that the city’s size and amenities already do that, Wednesday will be another case for political people to manage to say something stupid, all in the name of trying to get themselves re-elected. I wish I didn’t have to hear it.

But we’re going to have to listen to more of this trash talk at our local level, on top of the identical arguments that are made at the federal level. At least there, there is legitimate procedures that need to take place. There are Republicans who can hold up the actual purchase of the prison if they are that determined to try to make President Barack Obama look bad.

Of course, all they will really do is make themselves look inane. But that has never stopped political people before. I’d like to think that I could somehow escape the political trash talk by simply looking elsewhere.

BUT THEN, I’M going to encounter all those Baseball Hall of Fame types who already are polluting the Internet with their tyrades. Bert Blyleven in the Hall of Fame? I hardly think so, although here in Chicago we’re going to get our focus of people either feeling self-righteous indignation that Dawson had to wait nearly a decade before being accepted, or more disgust if he (probably rightfully so) gets overlooked again.

When combined with the complaints about Baines (who despite his quality statistics is now paying for being such a quiet, mild-mannered personality when he was an active ballplayer), it is going to be hard for me to figure out whether the sporting-type or the political-type people are being more ridiculous.

Chicago sports fans might have to settle for cheering the election of Roberto Alomar, the one-time star second baseman who played some non-descript ball with the White Sox toward the end of his career.

In short, Wednesday might turn out to be one of those days I lock myself away in my apartment and hide under the covers while the kooks complain. Somebody wake me up when its Thursday.

-30-