Traynor and Hack but not Boggs and Jones, prr? I’d be really interested in hearing your reasoning there.
I think you are wrong about Traynor. He was considered the best glove until Brooks came along. You’ll note many off us are giving glove work extra weight at third.
Schmidt
Brett
Brooks Robinson
Traynor
Home Run Baker
Buddy Bell
Ossie Bluege
Wade Boggs
Ken Boyer
George Kell
Mike Schmidt (Tremendous bat, excellent defender.)
Eddie Mathews (Schmidt’s equal with the lumber, not so good a defender. Seems to get very little respect for some odd reason, but he could rake)
George Brett (Yeah yeah it probably doesn’t exist, but George was the best clutch performer I’ve ever seen)
Wade Boggs (On-base machine, worked hard to improve his D)
Chipper Jones (Went to my high school, so yeah I’m voting for him. Only the 4 guys above were comparable hitters)
Ron Santo (Too bad his career came to such a sudden stop, but would he have really added any significant value if he had limped along like Brooks for 4-6 years of sub-average play? Hope the VC elects him before it’s too late)
Home Run Baker (Like Wagner would have been a tremendous power hitter in the lively ball era)
Brooks Robinson (Overrated but has the glove)
Darrell Evans (Most underrated player in the history of the game. Give him a do-over in the likes of Wrigley or Yankee Stadium and it’s a completely different story)
Paul Molitor (Don’t know why he isn’t in your original list, RJ. There’s no DH ballot if I’m not mistaken and Mollie played the majority of his games in the field at third, so he has to play somewhere, right?)
I also await PRR’s explanation for Boggs and Chipper being absent from his ballot. An OBP over .450 during Boggs’ prime is very hard to argue against.
Mike Schmidt - Head and shoulders above everyone else. Excellent fielder and amazing hitter. I grew up cheering (and booing) him.
George Brett - Man he could hit. Plus, pine tar!
Eddie Matthews - Ton of homeruns.
Brooks Robinson - Great fielder
Chipper Jones - Great Name!
Home Run Baker - Funny to look at his nickname and then how many home runs he hit. But, that’s how times change.
Pie Traynor - mmmmmmm pie
Wade Boggs - Excelllent hitter. Plus all those chickens!
Stan Hack - Never heard of him before this. But, really great stats.
Jimmy Collins - I was struggling to find a 10th and a combination of RickJay’s support, his statistics and inclusion in numerous top 10 lists, and the fact that he played for a team called the Beaneaters made him my final choice.
I’m saving Paul Molitor for the DH vote. I really don’t remember for one position.
I almost had Hack at my #10, but really Molitor belongs. I don’t see how you can choose Traynor over Hack; Traynor played in a league with much higher offensive levels than Hack did (yeah it’s the NL in both cases, but runs/game dropped significantly after 1930). Hack was a leadoff hitter, and a good one, scoring 100 runs several times; Traynor had all those triples because of Forbes Field. Despite the difference in leagues, Hack had an OBP more than 30 points higher, as Traynor didn’t walk much. As for the D, Traynor was better but Hack was pretty good, which isn’t enough to offset the difference in their bats. Hack is almost as underrated as Darrell Evans.
I’m also a little disappointed by the lack of support for Darrell Evans. Yeah he hit .248, but with lots of walks and a goodly amount of power too. His D is colored by those final years as a rather hefty guy playing out the string on WTBS, but during the 70’s he was a good glove. I’ll agree that he’s marginal, and hardly inner circle, just want people to at least consider him more closely.
Considered by whom?
Also, I’m going to submit an amended ballot. John DiFool and a reperusal of the relevant Hall of Merit threads convinced me as to Stan Hack’s worth, and I’d rather not throw my vote away on Dick Allen (who I can vote for as a wild card) as long as Traynor threatens to be top-ten.
RickJay, please note my amendment:
Mike Schmidt
Eddie Mathews
Chipper Jones
George Brett
Wade Boggs
Ron Santo
Home Run Baker
Paul Molitor
Brooks Robinson (sentimental pick)
Stan Hack (replacing Dick Allen)
Can you at least explain why you think Traynor does not belong? His hitting was great even if inflated and his glove work was supposed to great by all reports I have ever seen.
I would take exception to the statement “his hitting was great even if inflated.” His lifetime OBP, for instance, is .362, not much better than the league average of .353 over that set of years. His SLG is similarly decent but not great by any stretch. His OPS+ of 107 puts him tied for 716th all time, and behind most of the other 3B’s being considered here (though, admittedly, ahead of Brooks Robinson.)
Instead of “…great if inflated…,” I would say “because of the inflation, merely good.” Just an opinion, of course. 
**WRT Paul Molitor: ** Please, everyone, understand the ballot is open. If you want to vote for Molitor (or Edgar Martinez) by all means do so. He wasn’t named on the ballot simply because he played only about thirty percent of his career at third; the ballot is only for informational purposes, not to restrict your votes.
Wow, I know Runs and RBIs don’t get the respect they use to but Pie had 1273 rbi & 1183 runs to Hack’s 642 rbi & 1239 runs. Hack’s ops+ is only a little better than Pie’s. 119 to 107. It is not a stat I use but I note even Nettles has a 110. Mike Schmidt is a much higher 147.
Gadarene: As to the glove work of Traynor, how I am suppose to cite readings over 30+ years. If you do a quick Google on Pie Traynor you should find plenty of links that talk about his defense. If you think these are not correct, fine but I have yet to see anything that would suggest so.
I agree with Parthol, What Exit?. My quick and dirty eyeballing of OPS+ over on Baseball-Reference confirms my sense that Traynor was decidedly worse offensively, relative to his peers at the time that he played, than Hack, Ken Boyer, Ron Santo, and even Heinie Groh, who no one’s mentioned yet in this thread.
OPS+, for those who don’t know, is a park-adjusted metric of how well a player’s OPS, or OPB+SLG (which is a rough way of approximating someone’s overall effectiveness at the plate),* stacks up against a hypothetical “league-average” player at that time. Anything over 100 OPS+ is better than league average; anything under is worse.
Here are the top ten full-ish seasons by OPS+ for Traynor, Hack, Boyer, Santo, and Groh.
Traynor: 125, 124, 118, 114, 113, 111, 109, 108, 107, 104
Boyer: 144, 135, 130, 130, 124, 123, 121, 114, 109, 101
Hack: 142, 142, 132, 132, 129, 125, 125, 118, 111, 105
Groh: 149, 148, 143, 131, 123, 122, 121, 120, 107, 103
Santo: 164, 161, 153, 146, 139, 131, 128, 126, 121, 115
…Dang, Ron Santo was a great hitter.
Edit: And a career OPS+ difference of 119 to 107 is actually huge. According to that, Traynor was substantially closer to being as good as a league-average hitter throughout his career than he was to being as good as Stan Hack. (Put another way, Traynor only had two seasons that were as good as Stan Hack’s average season.)
- OPS is a flawed but useful statistic. It does not, for example, take into account baserunning other than through doubles and triples, nor does it account for any of the many intangible positive qualities a ballplayer might possess. (Or defense, of course.) More significantly, it weights slugging and on base percentage equally, while most contemporary analysis shows that ability to get on base correlates a bit better with a team’s offensive prowess in scoring runs than does the ability to hit the ball very far.
Traynor played in a much more run-rich environment*…and, of course, RBI is a stat that’s almost entirely dependent on the quality of your teammates (can’t drive anyone in if no one’s on base, other than by homer). Unless you’re claiming that Traynor batted much better with runners in scoring position than Hack did, and I don’t see anything to suggest that one way or the other, then the RBI differential isn’t all that meaningful.
*Let’s say you have two players in separate leagues, each playing a 162 game season. League A, where Player A plays, uses a baseball-sized Superball and aluminum bats: teams average 14 runs per game, and it’s not unusual to see contests ending in scores of 22-19. League B, where Player B plays, uses a deadball-era baseball, wooden bats, and a humidor to boot: teams average 3 runs a game, and shutouts are common. Player A drives in 150 runs and scores 150 more; Player B manages only 100 runs driven in and 100 runs scored. Who’s a better offensive player?
I don’t really know if I should be voting on these, since so many of the names are players I’ve never seen, not even on old clips, and know virtually nothing about. It’s annoying when more than half the candidates are just pure numbers to me, as I feel like an accountant in spreadsheet jockey mode.
Sorry for the delay. I didn’t vote for Jones because I’m reluctant to vote for active players. (I’ll bet Mark McGwire would have been a shoo-in around 1998; now, not so much.) Boggs was a fairly one-dimensional player–he got a lot of hits, but in a hits-rich environment, Fenway. (And I’m a Sox fan, so believe me I’m not voting him down out of any animus.) His power, apart from one year, was nothing special, in an age where Mathews, Schmidt, Santo, Boyer redefined what kind of power you should get from 3B, his baserunning was undistinguished, and his defense only a little better than his baserunning. This was a tough field, and having watched him closely for a long time, I couldn’t judge him one of the ten best ever.
As for some of the old timers, as I grew up I read about Pie Traynor being the greatest 3Bman ever all the time (sometimes they said Jimmy Collins, other times Baker, but mostly Traynor) and I doubt that my ballot reflects the full range of history. Like Windwalker, I and several others here are making the mistake of supporting those players whom they’ve never seen with their own eyes, and I’m trying hard to counter-balance the prejudice of my own subjectivity.
You think Chipper’s on steroids? 
If not, I’m hard-pressed to see what might change for the worse about our evaluation of his place in history. He’s easily one of the top hitting third-basemen ever, behind Schmidt and maybe Mathews, and at least on par with Brett and Baker. I’m not sure why we’d be viewing him differently, say, ten years from now.
As for Traynor, do you find my and Parthol’s points at all persuasive? The guy was simply nothing particularly special at the plate, and I think he’d have to be a truly exemplary defender to deserve a spot in the top ten over Jones or Heinie Groh (whose contemporaries considered him the best-fielding third baseman in the game, and who was better than Traynor at the plate)*. Like I said, Pie Traynor has a cool, old-timey baseball name. But I think Jones and Groh (and Boggs, who I haven’t addressed here) were discernibly better players, and by a decent margin.
- I really recommend that second hyperlink, by the way; it’s a 1919 article about Groh and his fielding (among other things) from the New York Times.
As has become my practice in these threads, the names of players I have seen in live action (whether on TV or in the stadium) are bolded, while stars of earlier eras get the nod on the basis of reputation:
Frank “Home Run” Baker (96 career homer total pales alongside live-ball era sluggers, but nickname was acquired when he “went yard” in two consecutive games of the 1911 World Series, a much more noteworthy feat then than it would be today)
Wade Boggs (hitting stats make him impossible to ignore)
George Brett (unfairly, the “pine tar incident” seems to be what he’ll be best known for by those fans who came along after he played)
Jimmy Collins (literally set the defensive standard in the early days, and a fine hitter who had good power for the dead-ball era)
George Kell (AL’s best in the immediate post-WWII era)
Eddie Mathews (great power numbers, and being on the cover of the first issue of Sports Illustrated didn’t curse him)
John McGraw (better-known as a manager, but could have been inducted into Cooperstown on his playing career alone)
Brooks Robinson (the standard for hot corner defense during my lifetime)
Mike Schmidt (the standard for third-sacker power during my lifetime)
Pie Traynor (consensus choice for the NL’s, if not MLB’s, best of the 1910-1950 era)
As a Cleveland native, I was tempted to vote for Rosen, Keltner, and/or Nettles, but they just don’t merit inclusion among the Top Ten. Lave Cross came very close, and I wouldn’t mind seeing him get in via another tie for tenth!
The more I think about it, the more I think I ought to toss at least a token vote for righting a wrong.
Take Ken Boyer off and put on Buck Weaver.
Didn’t cheat, and didn’t rat on his teammates.
Wade Boggs
George Brett
Eddie Mathews
Mike Schmidt
Paul Moliter
Ron Santo
Frank Baker
Jimmy Collins
Larry Jones
Brooks Robinson