I recently did an article on how tough it can be to get into the Hall of Fame - almost everything needs to go right. And also on how the stolen base for many guys is a fleeting weapon.
Maury Wills never made the Hall of Fame despite being the first player to steal over 100 bases in a season.
Part of the reason for that was the presence on the Dodger team of a guy who a few years later was briefly an utterly inept 1962 Met for a while on an utterly inept 1962 Mets squad.
Don Zimmer (not always fat) had a measly 4 hits, 3 walks, and an RBI in 55 plate appearances for the Metsies before moving on to another team.
But in 1958, he was the Dodgers' slugging shortstop, hitting .262 with 17 HRs and 60 RBIs, blocking Wills.
Zimmer followed that up in 1959, hitting a miserable .165 with a .224 OBP in 292 PAs, opening the door for Maury Wills to arrive finally and play half a season.
In 1957, the tough Dodgers had an effective young Charlie Neal at SS and an aging Hall of Famer in Pee Wee Reese at 3B sucking up ABs. There was no room for Wills at that point on LAD.
Neal, by the way, was a 3X All Star and quite solid for the 1962 Mets, getting to the plate 579 times and hitting .260/.330/.388 at age 31. He plummeted, though, in his final year in 1963, hitting just .211 at age 32. Wills, on the other hand, was highly effective through age 38.
The speedster, Maury Wills, got close to the Hall of Fame, but didn't quite get there. But we live in a "woke" time - who knows if that oversight (as I see it) will change.
The MVP and seven time All Star stole 104 bases in 1962 at age 29 and 94 more at age 32 in 1965. But because of the aforementioned logjam in the Dodgers infield, he did not make his Dodger debut until he was 26 years and 247 days old. Keep in mind that he started his minor league career at age 18.
All of the whys and wherefores as to why he took so long to get to the big leagues I will leave for someone else to write about. But certainly the infield logjam of those quality 1950s Dodger teams was a major factor.
He stole just 7 bases in that half season (258 PAs) in the bigs, what a waste of speed, but then was unshackled and notched 50 steals in 1960. He had a very solid season in 1961, but stole "just" 35 before his record breaking 104 steal season in 1962.
Other than his two 90+ steal seasons, he had 3 others in the 50s, the latest being at age 35, and he stole 40 for the last time at age 36.
Despite his very late MLB career debut, he got to the plate over 8,300 times in his career before retiring with 586 stolen bases, a .281 average, and nearly 1,100 runs scored.
Seems HOF caliber to me, considering a guy like Nellie Fox is in the HOF. He also hit a fine .278 with 52 steals at age 35 in the "year of the pitcher" in 1968, quite an accomplishment.
He had just 20 HRs, but did manage to hit 2 of them in a single game in 1962 in a rout of...the inept Mets.
So, 2 future Mets (Zimmer and Neal) slowed his trek to the major leagues, and it is hard to make the majors when you only have a few hundred at bats before the age of 27.
But maybe somehow that will be reconsidered now. Why not? He belongs there.
5 comments:
I was sales manager of WRC-AM in Washington D.C. in 1972.
Charlie Neal covered sports for the TV station, along side Willard Scott.
Nice guy.
Nice, Mack. Willard Scott was always fun to watch in NY.
Mack, I wonder if Maury was a Met 10 years later, with a much weaker team and in a less racial decade, if his MLB career would have started 4-5 years earlier and we'd have never seen Bud Harrelson.
Hard to justify Wills in the HOF when a superior player like Hodges is out. During his playing days no one really considered him HOF material.
But apples for apples, middle infielder contemporaries, Nellie Fox is in the Hall. .288, same low HRs, several hundred fewer steals. Gil belonging in the Hall is a separate and logical argument.
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