Why So Little Hall of Fame Support For Frank Howard?

This comes up now solely because I recently read that Frank Howard only appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot one time… and he only got 6 votes!

I won’t waste time arguing that Frank Howard ABSOLUTELY should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. I can certainly understand why many voters deemed him unworthy, and that’s no great cosmic injustice.

I’ll just say that I’m very surprised he got so LITTLE support. He seems like a very worthy contender (though not a slam dunk). Why did he get almost NO support at all?

People who supported Jim Rice often made the questionable claim that Rice was “the most feared hitter in the American League.” Well, if we take that kind of talk seriously, I can attest that Frank Howard was VERY much feared in his day! ! Frank Howard had the same number of career homers as Jim Rice. He also had a better on-base percentage than Rice and a better slugging percentage than Rice.

As I said, I can easily understand why Frank Howard never got 75% of the vote, but how did he get only 6 votes, period???

Again, I’m not saying Frank absolutely SHOULD be a Hall of Famer, nor am I even suggesting he’s the most deserving guy who’d been kept out. It just blows my mind that only SIX voters thought him worthy!

The simple answer is that Jim Rice was seen in his time as a great player, and Howard was never so regarded.

Looking at it now, we know they’re similar players. But at the time those votes were taken it didn’t seen that way. Rice was overrated - actually, he’s one of the most overrated players in the history of the sport - and Howard underrated; I know Howard was a feared power hitter but in truth, Rice when he was playing was regarded as a great player, and Howard never was. Had you asked 50 randomly chsen baseball writers in 1981 to name the ten best players in baseball many would have named Rice. I doubt as many, if any at all, in 1970 would have named Howard. I’m not saying that’s right or fair, but it is true. Rice finished in the top five in MVP voting six times, winning once. Howard finished in the top ten three times and was never close to winning.

As to why they were differently regarded,

  1. Rice hit for a higher batting average, which was more highly regarded in the past. Howard drew more walks, which was less regarded.

  2. Howard was a terrible fielder, and in fact was renowned for his awful fielding, an obvious deficiency that sort of coloured people’s impressions of him. Rice was bad at things people tend not to notice - he was arguably the worst player of all time for grounding into double plays, but people don’t tend to notice that.

  3. Rice played in a hitter’s park in an easier time to hit in than Howard, so his career looks superficially better in some respects, though in fact Howard was actually a more effective hitter.

  4. Rice played in Boston, which is regarded by sportswriters as some sort of baseball Vatican. Howard played in Washington, which by the time he retired didn’t even have a team anymore.

  5. Rice drove in 100 runs eight times, which is a big deal to sportswriters; Howard did this only three times.

If you add it all up, everything that could work against Howard worked against him, and many things that could work in Rice’s favour worked in his favour.

When I was a kid, growing up in Green Bay, Frank Howard attended my church, and his daughter was a year or two behind me in school (at that time, he was the first-base coach for the Brewers). An exceptionally nice man.

RickJay makes some excellent points. Just to build on that:

a) Howard was pretty one-dimensional. He was a slugger (and, yes, a pretty good one). He didn’t hit for average (he never had a .300 season), wasn’t fast, and wasn’t strong defensively. If you’re going to make it into the Hall of Fame as a one-dimensional player, you better be absolutely awesome in that one dimension.

b) Even if he was a feared slugger, he didn’t produce great numbers. He only had 382 career home runs (where 500 seems to be seen as the minimum standard for a power hitter to get a sniff of the Hall), only led his league in home runs twice, and only hit 40 or more homers three times.

c) He played in an era in which there were a number of celebrated power hitters (Mantle, Mays, Aaron, McCovey, Killebrew, among others), all of whom were undoubtedly, at the end of his playing days, seen as significantly better than he was.

d) At the bottom of Howard’s Baseball Reference page is a list of players whose statistical career are most similar to Howard’s. The top four closest fits are Rocky Colavito, Joe Adcock, Norm Cash, and Greg Luzinski. None of the top 10 closest fits are in the Hall of Fame, either (though two – Paul Konerko and Jermaine Dye – are active, or don’t yet qualify, but I don’t think they’ll make it, either).

They did both have 382 HRs. But the OBP and SLG were nearly identical. OBP was, in fact, identical at .352 and Rice has Howard beat in SLG .502 to .499.

Rice won an MVP and played in twice as many AS games (8 to 4). Howard only finished in the top 5 for MVP twice while Rice did 6 times.

I certainly would not say everything went in Rice’s favor. It was pretty well known that he was far from a media darling.

Howard’s best comp on baseball reference is Rocky Colavito, who also only picked up 0.5% of the HOF vote.

All that said, I like Frank Howard. As of a couple years ago he was on the coaching staff of the Columbus Clippers (not sure if he still is) and was known to be very fan friendly.

Fair points all.

Strangely enough, even 500 homers wasn’t always a magical ticket to Cooperstown. Even Eddie Mathews and Harmon Killebrew had to wait several years years before being voted in.

I lived in the DC area in the late 60’s and went to several Senators games as a kid. Frank Howard was obviously my favorite player on the Senators. I can’t imagine any player at the time being bigger than Hondo. wiki says he was 6’8" and 275 lbs. That had to be massive back in the 1960’s. he had a grand total of 8 stolen bases and I remember seeing the highlight on the local news. Warner Wolf was beside himself when Hondo stole a base.

Eddie Mathews, now there is a puzzler. I guess they just had a lot of guys to pick from.

If you look at Mathews’s totals, though, the name you are drawn to is Gil Hodges. Hodges actually got up to 60% in his eighth year. Normally a guy like that you’d say “He’ll get in,” but then his vote totals levelled off, and eventually fell away.

It’s because Rice is a weak hall of famer in the first place, so anyone comparable is going to have a hard time getting in.

It seems that Rice’s peak seasons carried him; he had 4 seasons of 5+ WAR, whereas Howard was a bit more “slow and steady”–only two 5 WAR seasons, but more 4+ WAR seasons than Rice (6 to 5).

Not disagreeing with anyone on Howard’s credentials vs. Rice’s, but this seem to be the old argument (which I support, generally) favoring the high-peak player over the “slow and steady” compiler of numbers.

Howard’s stats were depressed by outside factors. He played in an era when batting stats were down, and he played in a ballpark, Dodger Stadium, that depressed batting stats even more. I’m not saying he belongs in the HoF, but it is something in his favor to consider.

This, but also I think that hitters in Howard’s era were judged extremely critically if they had a high strikeout total. A hitter like Howard would be highly valuable these days, because we recognize that strikeouts aren’t a terrible baseball sin as long as they’re accompanied with an ability to get on base and beat the shit out of the ball.

Eddie was a disappointment, if you can believe it. Everyone saw that he was a great player, but he disappointed people by losing the last quarter of his career to the bottle. He was also apparently a giant asshole, so that doesn’t help.

The statistics don’t tell the whole story (and they rarely do in HOF balloting). The things was that during the time Howard was at his peak, he was not considered to be one of the major stars of the game. He was good, and a hero in Washington, but was one-dimensional and didn’t get a national reputation. He was someone who hit a lot of home runs, but not so many as to make people think “Hall of Fame.”

It’s a mug’s game to compare him to Rice. Even if they had similar statistics, that is meaningless; there are many other factors.

Me too. I saw him hit a home in D.C. in the Senators last season.

Hall of Famer? No more than Jim Rice.

Popular opinion is the only one I can think of.

Oh, I don’t know about that. He was famous enough to do a spot for Nestle Quik.

A mug’s game, sure.

One can ALWAYS point to some borderline Hall of Famer in ANY sport, and say, “Well Joe Blow had almost identical stats, so why isn’t HE in?” I concede, that’s pointless and silly.

Jim Rice himself had to wait a VERY long time, so it’s not as if EVERYBODY was floored by his stats and voted him in on the first ballot. In my mind, BOTH Frank Howard AND Jim Rice are borderline cases. I’m not horrified that Rice is in, nor am I outraged that Frank Howard isn’t

Nor is Frank Howard unique. I can think of NUMEROUS borderline players for whom one could make a very plausible case, but who aren’t in the Hall and probably never will be (Orlando Cepeda, Reggie Smith, Joe Adcock, Rocky Colavito).

It just astonishes me that Frank appeared on the ballot for just one year and couldn’t get more than a handful of supporters. If he had gotten, say, 100 votes a year until he ran out of chances, that wouldn’t bother me. But I’m stunned that practically NOBODY thought he was worthy of even THAT much support.

HoF voters seem to do an about face between when they vote for the MVPs (yes not the exact same voting pool-HoF’s is larger-but there is a lot of overlap) and a few months later when they vote for the Hall-all those RBI machines that got all those MVP votes all of a sudden are dogmeat and not the least bit worthy for the Hall-instead they inexplicably switch their alleigances to singles hitters. Never grokked that at all.

Edit: Researching this in more detail, be back in a bit…

Okay, here are the players in the top 100 MVP shares leader list who are eligible for the Hall, but aren’t in [overall rank in MVP shares in the () ].

  1. Dave Parker (28)
  2. Jeff Bagwell (35)
  3. Juan Gonzalez (42)
  4. Steve Garvey (56)
  5. Albert Belle (66)
  6. George Foster (67)
  7. Dale Murphy (69)
  8. Pedro Guerrero (71)
  9. Don Mattingly (76)
  10. Vern Stephens (82)
  11. Boog Powell (92)
  12. Mark McGwire (93)
  13. George Bell (98)

So, you’d assume that this represents whom the BBWAA considers, via their own criteria, to be “peak” candidates, i.e. those who had one, and likely more, outstanding season. I.e. dominated by big sluggers who typically had lots of RBIs in said big seasons. Yet most of them have been also-rans in Hall voting-Juan Gone in 2011 barely hung onto the 5% cutoff to stay on for next year. It’s true that almost all had short careers, but that hasn’t stopped the voters from electing other peak candidates thru the years (in recent years Kirby Puckett (56th) being the most obvious example-Rice too (30th)). McGwire and Belle have been blackballed it seems, but that’s mainly for other reasons (offtopic ones).

The top 100 RBI list has a lot of the same guys-seems they don’t care (much) for even weighty career RBIs either when the HoF ballot comes calling. Long story short I’ve always found this seemingly contradictory pattern, 2 mostly incompatible sets of standards, to be weird and inexplicable. BTW Frank Howard is 187.

Orlando Cepeda has been in the Hall of Fame for ten years or so, IIRC.

Players like Howard never get support.

Players of Howard’s quality might get support, but that’s different. Players LIKE Howard do not. Jim Rice and Orlando Cepeda were players of similar value, but they weren’t the same kind of player and didn’t have the same career shape; Cepeda and Rice hit for high averages at their peak, and each won an MVP Award, and each were on many All-Star teams. So while they might have the same WAR or Win Shares or whatever as a Frank Howard, they were a different image of ballplayer.

If you look at players who are actually similar to Frank Howard in their image and player type, they almost never get crap in HoF voting. To see if I was right, I looked up Norm Cash, who was a better player than Howard but, was much more similar in the type of player he was and the shape of his career. Guess how many votes he got his first year on the ballot?

Six.

Another guy who was a lot like those guys, hey, Jack Clark. How many votes did he get?

Seven.

Darrell Evans was a similar player but, really MUCH better than any of those guys. Guess how many votes he got?

Eight.

That’s what that kind of player gets. Guys with moderate power and lots of walks get absolutely screwed in HoF voting unless they hit 500 homers. Some types of players are crazy overrated in HOF voting, some are crazy underrated.

If I could take a guess, the factors are

  1. Winning an MVP Award matters a lot. Not winning an MVP is a significant disadvantage.
  2. Being in many All-Star games helps a lot.
  3. Between two players of equal value, a player whose value is focused in one ability is overrated; a player who does many things reasonably well is underrated.
  4. Walks are underrated, batting average is overrated.
  5. High peaks matter; just being really good for a long time is not well regarded.