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The Curly Haired Boyfriend is up to his old tricks, apparently anyone who doesn’t want to vote for Jim Rice for the HOF needs to “get out of the house and look at the sky one time.” This guy has been paid as a professional writer forever and that’s the best putdown he can come up with? Surely he could have dipped into the ‘pocket-protector’ or ‘slide rule’ well. Maybe a Star Trek reference? If being an asswipe is your job, at least be clever about it.

However there’s a real point to be made. While I do remember Jim Rice playing and he was extremely ordinary, it wasn’t quite his peak and so I couldn’t tell you what kind of impression he had on me in 1978. I was seven years old, Popeye and Spider Man had big impressions on me at the time. However I can tell you without question who the most exciting player I’ve ever seen was.

If you only caught the tail end of his injury and illness plagued career, you wouldn’t know it, but Eric Davis was far and away the most exciting baseball player I’ve ever seen. There have been guys who can do it all: run, hit for power, hit for average, make spectacular fielding plays. But Davis was something different. Davis was a high wire act that you knew had a chance in ending in disaster. Davis lacerated his kidney diving for a ball in the World Series, but with Davis that was the norm.

Doug Drinen helped me out once and he seems to correctly identified my favorite Davis moment. On September 4, 1987 I saw a baseball player, I think, risk his long term health to record the final out of a baseball game. With two men on and his team up one, Davis caught a ball that could only be caught one way: by slamming head first into the brick wall at Wrigley a split second after. I think it’s the only time I’ve ever seen a game end with the ball in the glove of an unconscious man. Davis was like this. I’m not sure it was even a desire to win as much as it was a desire to do the things Eric Davis appeared singularly able to do.

He stole 80 bases one year and hit 37 homers the next. He was a man who could win gold gloves, and also couldn’t last more than 135 games in any of his seasons. It was daredevil baseball at it’s most thrilling and unique. And I’ll never, ever, ever forget it.

And if I had a vote for the Hall of Fame, I’d never, ever, ever vote for Eric Davis. And that’s what Shaughnessy and others don’t get. The Hall of Fame has never been about fear or excitement. When given the very first chance to put people in the Hall of Fame, they waited 25 years to put a guy like Sliding Billy Hamilton in, a guy who by all accounts was half ballplayer and half acrobat. It wasn’t about fear, it was about putting in the best players they could: Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner. Mathewson was about as exciting as your average C-Span show, but 373-188 makes that irrelevant.

Was Eric Davis a Hall of Famer. If he had ever managed to stay healthy, most probably. But like Freddy Lynn and Pete Reiser before him, many of his injuries were a consequence of his playing style (and some were not). The reality is that the sum total of Eric Davis’ career does not a Hall of Fame career make. And again, the most exciting player, I’ve ever seen.

And so by the same logic, whether Rice was feared or whomever saw him play and when, what it comes down to is whether Jim Rice had a Hall of Fame career as a baseball player, with the standards being the guys that have tended to be chosen for that honor. Guys like Will Clark and Lou Whitaker, guys with arguably better careers than Rice, dropped off after failing to get 5% on their first ballot. You could argue that Rice was the third best outfielder on those late 70s Red Sox teams, and the other two haven’t made it either (and likely aren’t going to).

So why Jim Rice? It’s a moot point because he’s going to go in, if not next year then whenever he gets to the Veterans Committee. But if the Hall of Fame is of any importance at all, it’s still an important question: isn’t it incumbent upon the supporters of a denied candidate to reach for something other than a “I saw once” or “I remember…” or resorting to garden variety insults at those who disagree? I realize these are sportswriters here and sound reasoning and argument isn’t anywhere in their job description, but without it isn’t it just easier for me to post pictures of Bob Ross and be done with them?