C- Thurman Munson, Ted Simmons, Manny Sanguillen

1B-Gil Hodges, Cecil Cooper

2B- Nellie Fox

3B- Graig Nettles (maybe)

SS- Cecil Travis, Glenn Wright

OF- Al Oliver, George Foster

P- Sparky Lyle (first reliever to win Cy Young Award)

Of pp's list I don't think any are worthy, except Fox, who's already in.

Here is a ballot by baseball-reference for 2015 (Hence, unofficial)

Somehow Nellie Fox got in when I wasn't looking.

I admit it would be fatuous to compare my nominated outfielders to Willie Mays or Joe DiMaggio. But it wasn't me (I?) who started watering down the Hall of Fame so that players got inducted who really can't compare with the true greats of the game.

That may be the most cumbersome sentence I've ever written. :(

I'll stand firm for Thurman Munson, though. He was the keystone of the Yankees in their 1970s glory days. Again, I say unto you... Ray Schalk, Rick Ferrell, Roger Bresnahan, and maybe even Mickey Cochrane...

<To All and Sundry> Speaking of the Hall of Fame, how come we never hear much about the Hall of Statuary in Washington, D.C.? Here, every state of the Union is represented by two statues of (supposedly) its two greatest residents.

Al Kaline, yes. Tony Perez, no. For example. McCovey, yes. Cepeda, no.

Yes, the Hall is watered down and how far is always a question. Remember, there will always be a "best player not in the Hall of Fame." It's unavoidable.

He was a surefire Hall-of-Famer, with a lifetime batting average of .320 and more home runs/RBIs than Munson in about the same number of games.

And he took a backseat to nobody in leadership skills. His teams won five pennants and three World Series in a seven year period (1929-1935), unprecedented for a non-New York player. When he was traded to the Tigers and became their manager in 1934, they went from a .500 team to two straight pennants.

So why did, for example, Schalk make it in? There are at least a couple of ways of achieving fame in baseball. First of all, the stats. These endure and impress everybody forever.

But fame can also be achieved by stirring the emotions of fans. Sterling defensive play, fiery inspiration, memorable team play, simply being a great character. That's where players like Schalk, or Wallace or Tinker/Evers/Chance/ or Rabbit Maranville made it into the Hall.

However, unlike the stats, these achievements fade away as memories and contemporaries disappear, making the player seem unworthy to later generations. I'm sure that, in fifty years, the election of Ozzie Smith will seem as incomprehensible as that of Schalk.

It helped Orlando Cepeda a lot that he won an MVP (naturally, after being traded from the Giants).

I would vote for Trammel if I had a vote. But Ozzie Smith really could electrify a crowd--which I guess will be forgotten by and by. Defensive stats are so much less informative than offensive stats.

Here's a list. Of course, many of the players are post-Clarke, but he's down at #99. It's possible he may have been second lifetime on the Yankees; the only other player I recognize higher than Clarke is Bobby Richardson.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/l...

That way he could rate Cochrane as maybe the greatest ever, while claiming Bill Dickey was not among the very best.

Plus catcher must be the absolute hardest position to judge. There's just so much a catcher does that isn't captured by numbers. On the other hand, how can you be sure better pitching is due to the catcher?

Today Yadier Molina is given tremendous credit for his catching and leadership abilities. Ivan Rodriguez before that, though he was a better hitter than Molina. How to judge that?

Playing second base behind the likes of Mel Stottlemyre and Fritz Peterson, Horace got to field an awful lot of grounders. Too bad he didn't get to play behind Tommy John, too.