Jim Wynn and the Hall of Fame

Jim Wynn died March 26, 2020 at age 78.

The passing of former major league outfielder Jim Wynn, aka “The Toy Cannon,” has me thinking again about an article about halls of fame that has been rattling around in my head for a good little while now. Among this article’s several inspirations are the dubious election of Harold Baines to the baseball hall and a 1974 Sports Illustrated article about that year’s Dodgers that my good friend Nancy mailed to me a while ago. It was Wynn’s first season with LA after eleven with Houston, who traded him to the Dodgers for Claude Osteen and David Culpepper. The Cannon hit 32 homers and knocked in 108 runs for Los Angeles that year and ended up fifth in the National League MVP voting.

I recall thinking upon reading the article that Wynn was a far better player than Baines. Looking through stats of 1970s Dodgers I also came across Reggie Smith, another fine player. Both Wynn and Smith played for my APBA teams at times during the '70s. I compared them to a short list of inducted Hall-of-Famers:

            Career WAR   HR RBI    OPS
Andre Dawson 64.8    438 1591 806
Reggie Smith     64.6    314 1092 855
Dave Winfield    64.2    465 1833 827
Jim Wynn 55.9    291 964      820
Tony Perez         54       379 1652 804
Jim Rice            47.7    382 1451 854
Orlando Cepeda 50.2    379 1365 849
Harold Baines    38.7    384 1628 820

While Smith and Wynn lag behind the group in the counting stats, they compare favorably in WAR and OPS. Six of these guys are in the Hall of Fame. Smith got three votes from the writers in 1988 and was dropped from further consideration. Wynn didn’t get a single vote in his only year of eligibility in 1983. I’m not here to suggest Smith and Wynn belong in the Hall. I’m not sure ANY of them do, though they were all great players. I'll give you Dawson and Winfield as the class of this bunch.

There are lots of statistical tools that folks have developed for assessing Hall of Fame possibilities, from black ink and gray ink to JAWS and HOF Monitor and HOF Standards. I’m thinking of developing the grandpa/grandma test. I can imagine sitting on my grandpa’s lap 55 years ago and asking, “Wow, did you REALLY get to see Babe Ruth play ball?” I can’t imagine some kid sitting on grandma’s lap in 2050 and asking, “Wow, did you REALLY get to see Harold Baines play?”

That's fame.

I'll get to that larger article about halls of fame pretty soon. It's a good social distancing project!

Thanks for the memories, Jim Wynn.