The Era committee announces their nominees for the Hall of Fame. I remain unconvinced that there’s anyone before 1980 that hasn’t been looked at many times and found not quite Hall worthy
Tommy John is the outside shot, but only for the fame part. His stats don’t measure up. But his surgery moves him into consideration. The rest fall short in all ways.
I liked Luis Tiant a lot but I can’t justify the Hall for him.
Tommy John had 288 wins at least.
First, I don’t know why Parker and Garvey are even being considered.
Second, I don’t know to assess a guy like Donaldson. Sounds like he played in a lot of pick-up games?
Third, the obvious problem with putting lesser talents in the Hall is the lowering of the bar: Boyer and Allen were better than Baines, and John and Tiant were better than Morris.
Tiant is the only one I’d vote for…and where the hell is Lou Whitaker?
ETA: I guess Whitaker’s career started too late for inclusion. I thought of Garvey and Whitaker as being contemporaries, but Garvey debuted in '69 and Whitaker '77.
Dave Parker should be voted in, if only based on this photograph:
I can’t speak to Parker, but I suspect Garvey’s candidacy has resurfaced because he was (rightly or wrongly) considered a big star player in the '70s, for one of the best (and most popular) teams in baseball.
- In an 8-season span (1973-1980), he hit .300 seven times; the one season that he didn’t (1977), he hit .297.
- He won an MVP award, four Gold Gloves, and was an All-Star for eight consecutive seasons.
- He was part of what was, at that time, often considered to be one of the best infields in baseball (along with Davey Lopes, Bill Russell, and Ron Cey).
- The Dodgers were consistently one of the strongest teams in baseball when he was at his peak, winning the NL pennant four times, and winning one World Series – and their rivalry against the Yankees in that era was emblematic of baseball in the latter half of the 1970s.
- He was MLB’s “iron man,” prior to Cal Ripken, and played in 1207 consecutive games.
- Beyond his play, he was really well-liked by fans and the press at that time: he was seen as clean-cut, friendly, and nice, and he (along with his attractive wife, Cyndi) was a frequent fixture on TV and in the press.
OTOH, and much of this we only know now, looking back:
- He was a good, but not particularly great, player. Sabermetrics were in their infancy when he played, and we didn’t have measures like WAR, but looking at it now, only once did he score a bWAR above 5 (5.1 in 1975), and only scored a 4+ in four seasons.
- He won four Gold Gloves, but I’m not sure that, in retrospect, he was a particularly good fielder (someone more informed than me could comment more on that, I’m sure). Baseball Reference gives him negative defensive WAR ratings in every season during which he was a full-time player; I’m not sure how accurate those ratings are looking back 50 years, but it’s not what one might expect to see for a four-time Gold Glove winner.
- When he won the NL MVP in 1974, he was one of the best players on the NL pennant winner. But, when we look back at the MVP race, there were very likely other players who deserved it more, including Mike Schmidt, Johnny Bench, and Joe Morgan.
- Looking at his “similarity scores” to other first basemen on Baseball Reference, his best matches are Garret Anderson, Al Oliver, John Olerud, and Ruben Sierra, all of whom, IMO, belong in the Hall of Very Good, rather than the Hall of Fame.
- His clean-cut persona turned out to be not as it appeared to the public: Cyndi left him, and he had been having an affair with his secretary. Later in the '80s, he apparently got two different women (one of them his fiancee) pregnant at the same time.
I think he’s being considered once more because he played for the Dodgers, in an era that they were very good, and he won a fair amount of hardware for that era (though, again, a fair amount of those awards may have been due to popularity and visibility as much as performance).
That is certainly a noteworthy feat.
But is it HOF-worthy?
I can’t remember if his eligibility window for the Jerk Hall of Fame had lapsed. 
I went back and looked at Parker.
- Excellent player for five seasons (1975-79); during that span, he won two batting titles, led the NL in slugging twice, won an MVP (and finished in the top 3 two other times), and won three Gold Gloves.
- His performance fell off a cliff in 1980, due to, AIUI, a combination of injuries and drug use, and he was playing at just above replacement level from 1980-84.
- He moved to his hometown Reds in '84, and he had a great season in '85: he hit .312, and led the NL in doubles and RBIs.
- He played for another six years, but again, pretty much at replacement level.
Parker was one of the players who received a one-year suspension in 1986 as a result of the “Pittsburgh drug trials,” though his suspension was commuted when he paid fines and did community service.
His backers maintain that his implication in the drug trial has prevented voters from considering him for the Hall, but I think that, ultimately, he just wasn’t good enough for long enough – essentially, he had 6 really good seasons, and another 13 average-to-poor ones.
Now reports are that he’s agreed to the same deal as he previously had. I’m not sure what the purpose of opting out was. It happened immediately so it seems like this was the plan.
He did genuinely seem to like being a Yankee which is his childhood team.
Crazy, cool.
I guess the Yankees are covering their bases here. 
And they’ve picked up the option on Manager Aaron Boone.
Garvey was a better defensive player than that would suggest. For starters, almost all first basemen, even good ones, have negative defensive WAR on BBRef. Keith Hernandez is only 1.3 for his whole career and is almost universally regarded as the greatest fielder in the history of the position.
I’ve noticed that whenever I happen to be looking at WAR for first baseman. How can that make any sense? Who are they being measured against? I’m not convinced that dWAR, as compiled by baseball-reference, has any utility as a statistic.
I don’t grasp their system, either, but I think it compares players to ALL OTHER defensive players.
In fairness you do have to account for the inescapable fact that some positions are more valuable than others. A league average defensive first baseman is not contributing as much to his team as a league average second baseman. The way BBRef does it hides it, though, in a way that makes it really, really hard to see what t he hell they did. They credit Garvey with 36.8 career offensive WAR and -11.7 defensive WAR, which adds up to his career total of… uh, 38 WAR?
Well, that would explain it. Why do these slow-footed guys who can’t play any other position have no range?
I wonder who among modern first baseman has or had the greatest range. (I know there are a zillion other measurements of defensive worth, but this is the on that I assume disadvantages first basemen the most.
Keith Hernandez. No contest. He was AWESOME.
Garvey actually moved pretty well. He started as a third baseman, but was moved to first because he couldn’t throw.
Just for fun, here are some Keith Hernandez defensive highlights:
One overlooked (and undervalued) asset of a first baseman is the ability to catch a bad throw while holding his foot on the bag. I wish there was some metric that would measure the ‘errors saved’ by a first baseman on errant throws by the other infielders.
Eric Hosmer, who won four Gold Gloves while playing first base for the Royals, was a master at catching such throws.