A few years ago Wade Boggs caused a stir when it was suggested that he had an agreement with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to have a Devil Rays cap featured on his Hall of Fame plaque. Either because of that -- or by virtue of a grand coincidence -- the Hall took the choice away from the players and decided that it, with an eye toward properly representing the players’ history it, and not the player, would make the final decision.
One caveat to that: the Hall still seeks player input, and the option of a blank cap remains on the table. One presumes this is so in the event that it truly is too difficult to assign one cap to a player given comparable historic legacies with multiple teams. Or, perhaps, if the player had a serious falling out with his most historically significant team at some point. Gotta have an out, right?
Well, two unexpected inductees have taken that out. From the Hall of Fames plaque announcement today:
It seems pretty nuts to me that Maddux will not be in a Braves cap. While there are multiple ways to measure the value of a career, one must tread into the land of lunacy to come up with an argument that Maddux’s contributions to baseball as a Brave were rivaled by his contributions as a member of any of the other teams for which he played. Cubs included. Heck, add up his Cubs, Dodgers and Padres years and I bet you still don’t equal his Braves years.
La Russa may be a closer case -- he did win a World Series and three pennants with the A’s -- but two rings with the Cardinals and nearly twice as many wins in St. Louis than in Oakland suggest that he should be a Cardinal on his plaque.
I assume that the deciding factor in both cases was Maddux and La Russa not wanting to play favorites. And I suppose that’s awfully nice and diplomatic of them. But really, if the Hall of Fame is not going to give the inductee final say, I’m not certain it should be weighing their preferences all that heavily either. Especially when such preferences, with all respect to the feelings of these two guys, skew ahistorical.
