Taken at face value, the take isn’t actually all that contentious. Derek Jeter has had a remarkable career as the face of baseball for two decades, including 14 All-Star selections, five World Series Championships, five Silver Sluggers, five Gold Gloves, 2000 World Series MVP and 1996 American League Rookie of the Year. He’s been clear of off-field scandal and has conducted himself with decorum. At the time of writing, he has a career batting average of .311 and just passed Carl Yastrzemski for seventh on the all-time hits list with 3,420. Derek Jeter certainly deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, and every single voter should agree.
The issue is not Jeter’s resume. The issue is that Jeter shouldn’t have to be the first unanimously elected Hall of Famer. The only reason that ridiculous plaudit even exists anymore is because of the stubbornness of baseball writers who won’t elect anyone unanimously because Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig or whoever was not. Probably a dozen players – maybe more – deserve to have been elected unanimously, but the Baseball Writers Association of America has a hidebound insistence on sending every player in with only two digits in front of the decimal.
Take the aforementioned pitchers, Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine.
Maddux was an eight-time All-Star, four-time Cy Young winner, 18-time Gold Glove winner and retired with a 1.98 ERA. He is the only pitcher to win 15 games in 17 consecutive seasons, one of only 10 to win 300 games and throw 3,000 strikeouts and the only to do so with under 1,000 career walks. His 355 wins rank eighth all-time and second since the start of the “live-ball” era in the 1920s. His number has been retired by two of the most historic ?franchises in North American sports: the Atlanta Braves and the ?Chicago Cubs.
Tom Glavine, on the other hand, managed a measly 305 wins, making him one of only two dozen pitchers to win over 300. He won the Cy Young twice, 20 games in five seasons and 164 games in the 1990s, second in the National League only to Maddux. He won four Silver Sluggers and a World Series, all while serving as the Atlanta Braves player representative in the ?players union.
How could either of those men not clearly be unanimous electees? Or Hank Aaron? Or Seaver? Or Cal Ripkin, Jr.? And yet all sit just a few points short, possibly because a man who retired nearly 80 years ago fell five percent short himself.
John Smoltz, Chipper Jones and Mariano Rivera will all come up for election before Derek Jeter. All deserve to be unanimous Hall-of-Famers – especially Rivera, who was the greatest ever at his position.
The issue isn’t that Jeter doesn’t deserve to be the first to be unanimously elected. It’s that he shouldn’t ?have to be.
