Al Kaline Might Not Make the Hall of Fame Today, Which Is Ridiculous

Al Kaline joined Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, Tris Speaker, Hank Aaron, Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente on Sept. 24, 1974.

Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams and Rogers Hornsby don't have 3,000 career hits.

Kaline retired after the 1974 season with 3,007 hits  He batted .297/.376/.480 and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1980. There is no question that Kaline was one of the greatest players ever.

He has been described as "a Picasso, a Van Cliburn and a Nureyev rolled into one."  Kaline was in the same class defensively as Aaron and Clemente. His throwing arm was just as strong as theirs and his accuracy was second to none.

This brings us to Johnny Damon, who just signed with the Cleveland Indians. Let's get one thing straight. Damon is no Al Kaline, but his statistics are similar to Kaline's.

Joel Sherman of the New York Post points out that a metric revolution is occurring. The Baseball Writers' Association of America now includes members from statistically-driven sites such as Baseball-Reference, Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus.

Damon has batted .286/.353/.435 with 231 home runs. Sherman believes that even if Damon achieves 3,000 hits, he will have trouble getting into the Hall of Fame.

The fact that hits without walks seem to diminish the value of hits and the conclusion that batting average has become a devalued statistic, at least in the eyes of the sabermetricans, would hurt Kaline today. His numbers are better than Damon's, but not by much.

What would Kaline's chances be in 2018 or even today if he were on the Hall of Fame ballot and some of the voters had seen only the latter part of his career or, even worse, evaluated him solely statistically?

When Kaline retired in 1974, statistics were important, but they were trumped by evaluating a player by seeing him play every day, or at least whenever the Detroit Tigers played the team a voter was covering.

There is one Kaline achievement that magnificently illustrates how statistics were viewed during the middle 1970s. Kaline retired with 399 home runs. Would any player contemplating retirement in 2012 end his career without getting home run number 400?

Individuals who  never saw Kaline play will never appreciate his greatness.