'Cooperstown Chances' examines the Baseball Hall of Fame case of one candidate each week. This week: Bob Grich.
Who he is: The word’s been out on Bobby Grich for a while, that in 1992 the former Orioles and Angels second baseman got robbed in Baseball Hall of Fame voting his only year on the writers’ ballot. Grich received 2.6 percent of the vote, likely doomed by his .266 batting average and 1,833 hits. As David Schoenfield of ESPN and Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated noted about Jim Edmonds, another one-and-done candidate, no position player who began his career after 1960 has made the Hall of Fame with fewer than 2,000 hits.
But Grich’s career demands more than a cursory look. It helps his case to consider sabermetric stats like his 43.4 Wins Above Average, best of any player not in the Hall of Fame who's been retired since 1996. It’s also better than every Hall of Fame second baseman except Rogers Hornsby, Eddie Collins, Nap Lajoie, Joe Morgan and Charlie Gehringer. Hall of Fame voters are often loathe to consider sabermetrics, though. Some voters have the idea that if a candidate requires much thought, they’re not a Hall of Famer.
MORE: The 25 best players not in the Baseball Hall of Fame
Grich didn’t make the ballot for the 2014 election for the Expansion Era Committee, which votes every three years under the current Veterans Committee setup. Grich could be on the ballot in December for the 2017 election. But don’t expect him to be holding his breath. In fact, Grich doesn't think he will make the Hall of Fame in his lifetime.
“No, I’m not optimistic at all,” Grich told Sporting News. “I don’t think that I have much of a chance to be very honest with you.”
Cooperstown chances: 25 percent
Why: The Hall of Fame is simply very slow to change. Sabermetrics has been around in name since the early 1980s and goes back as a concept decades longer, but Cooperstown has arguably yet to have a purely sabermetric selection. Even Bert Blyleven had 287 wins and 3,701 strikeouts. If and (very likely) when another favorite Hall of Fame candidate of the sabermetric community, Tim Raines, gets in, it will be because he was one of the best leadoff men in baseball history. Grich, who played from 1970 to 1986 with the Orioles and Angels, doesn’t have the same kind of crossover appeal.
“I think that for the most part, a couple of things that I did well was defense. And actually I was very disciplined at the plate,” Grich said. “I had a high on-base percentage. I got a lot of walks and scored a good amount of runs, especially my years in Baltimore when I was batting second most of those years. So I think those things, defense and walks and on-base percentage, especially in the ‘80s, it was not really talked about, not paid attention to. It was home runs, batting average and RBIs, and those were the metrics that everybody was pretty much measured by.”
Even his first team devalued him. Grich had 29.3 defensive runs saved in 1973, fifth-best ever by a second baseman. Granted, no one knew what Total Zone was in 1973, though even by stats that might have been available that year, Grich had the most assists, putouts, and double plays of any American League second baseman, as well as the best fielding percentage. He won a Gold Glove and promptly lost in salary arbitration, then in its inaugural year. Grich asked for a raise from $38,000 to $49,000, and Orioles general manager Frank Cashen balked. (Grich wound up with $46,000 for 1974, according to Baseball-Reference.com.)
Grich said of Cashen, “He degraded me so bad at the negotiation table and said, ‘We do not pay for defense. You didn’t hit this, you didn’t hit that. We pay for offense only.’ I was astounded, and I was offended to be very honest with you.”
To be sure, Grich’s defense is among the best of any second baseman in baseball history, even if his primary value was that he didn’t give runs back at the plate. (Among current second basemen, his closest comp is Chase Utley, another player who doesn’t have a prayer when his turn comes on the writers’ ballot for Cooperstown.) Grich’s 16.2 defensive WAR rates 12th best among all second basemen. He also won four Gold Gloves and, with third baseman Brooks Robinson, shortstop Mark Belanger and first baseman Boog Powell in Baltimore in the 1970s, helped comprise arguably the greatest defensive infield all-time.
Grich said he took great pride in getting a jump on the ball.
“I played a lot of basketball as a kid and in high school — I was a guard — so I always had really good footwork. I had quick reactions and I had quick feet,” Grich said. “I had to use that in order to get a good jump and then to watch the pitch, know what the guy was throwing, know the hitters, get a cheat as the ball was going toward the hitter, slidestep so the hitter couldn’t see me move. I would slidestep sometime three slidesteps, which is like nine to 10 feet. Between the time the ball got out of the pitcher’s hand and it reached home plate, I would have slidestepped three steps and moved 10 to 12 feet from where I started my position.”
He conceded that his .266 lifetime batting average could scare some Hall of Fame voters off, though he’s quick to point out his high walk totals, with 88 walks for every 162 games during his career according to Baseball-Reference.com. “Does it matter how you got to first base?” Grich said. “Does it matter if you walked or if you got a hit, unless of course there’s a man on second base or third base to get the RBI? To get to first base anyway you can, a walk is as good as a hit lots of times.”
Grich also noted that his ballparks, Memorial Stadium in Baltimore and Anaheim Stadium, were good pitchers’ parks with deep power alleys. Balls didn’t carry at all in California at night. Grich is aware of how having a good hitters park helped a few second basemen he’s sometimes likened to. “I was just checking Ryne Sandberg and I was checking Lou Whitaker and Bobby Doerr. Check their stats on just home runs alone. Their home-to-road, they all hit about 30 percent more home runs at home than they did on the road.”
MORE: Most controversial players in MLB history | Is Steve Garvey a Hall of Famer?
Grich thinks if he’d played half his career in either a hitters’ park or one with artificial turf, he might have been a .280 or .285 lifetime hitter. There might be something to this. Baseball-Reference.com has a tool to convert a player’s stats. Between Baltimore and Anaheim, Grich hit .266 lifetime with a .371 on-base percentage and .424 slugging percentage. If Grich had played his career for the Tigers, the stat converter suggests he would have hit .279 with a .385 OBP and .532 slugging percentage. If he’d played for the Red Sox, those numbers go to .285 with a .393 OBP and .542 slugging percentage. Bottom line, Grich’s projected OPS had he played for the Tigers or Red Sox is better than every Hall of Fame second baseman except for Rogers Hornsby.
If Hall of Fame voters thought in these terms, Grich would have been enshrined 20 years ago. He’s closer to inner circle Hall of Famer than a player who deserved just one go on the ballot. As it stands, Jack Morris looks to be the most popular candidate on the coming Expansion Era Committee ballot. There’s a chance if Morris is inducted, it could create a ripple effect leading to teammates Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker getting in and Grich going in sometime after as a comparable second baseman to Whitaker. But under the current veterans voting structure for the Hall of Fame, that might take a decade to unfold.
Grich knows he’d be foolish to expect that. But even at 67, he remains hopeful.
Grich said if between now and 2040 “there’s never another second baseman that had as good a year as I had in ‘73, and there’s never another second baseman who gets to 900 total chances three years in a row, that they’re all the sudden gonna look back and go, ‘Wow, the stuff that Bobby Grich did back in ‘73, ‘74, ‘75 [laughing] actually was pretty outstanding.’”
Grich stopped chuckling to add, “I think there’s a chance that’ll happen.”
'Cooperstown Chances' examines the Baseball Hall of Fame case of one candidate each week. Series author and Sporting News contributor Graham Womack writes regularly about the Hall of Fame and other topics related to baseball history at his website, Baseball: Past and Present . Follow him on Twitter: @grahamdude .