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Continuing with your votes for the 100 best Hall of Fame candidates. No. 50: Fred LynnScore: 46.24 Lynn was the inspiration (or whatever word you want to use) for this series ... I woke up one day with this thought: How CLOSE was Fred Lynn to being a Hall...
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Again, Joe, we are the same age and, I have concluded from reading you for years, share a similar baseball youth.
Craig Nettles was my idol growing up and I wanted to thank you for the write up here as I feel he is criminally underrated. 🙂
“Donnie Baseball” – Kirby
Is Graig Nettles the player whose name was most often misspelled? I sorta understand with Yaz and Klu and Schoendienst but Nettles first name is only five letters.
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I’m 51, old enough to have seen the very tail end of Brooks Robinson’s career but not old enough to have really *seen* him. So for me, Nettles is the defensive wiz against whom everyone else is compared whether its Beltre or Rolen or Arenado or Gaetti or Chavez. That Nettles only won two Gold Gloves is an accident of history and not representative of how amazing he was with the leather in the 70s.
I think Nettles, Randolph and Munson all have very good arguments for the Hall…
My first bat was a Tony Oliva model, which I loved even though I never saw him play. My dad talked about how hard he hit the ball.
In 1981, the Red Sox traded Fred Lynn (about to turn 29) and Steve Renko for Joe Rudi, Jim Dorsey and Frank Tanana. As an Angels fan, this was an exciting trade. Joe Rudi was turning 34, and had just hit .237 the year before. He was basically done as a player. Tanana was still young, but after a tremendous start to his career, had arm troubles and saw his K/9 drop almost in half. And Jim Dorsey had a 9.00 ERA and basically was never a MLB level player. Renko was at the end of his career, but did have a little value left as a back of the rotation pitcher.
But Fred Lynn! One of these guys is not like the other, right? The rest of the guys in the trade were either washed up, never a player or at least way off their peak years. Not Lynn. Now Lynn did have a down year, only playing 110 games the year before and hitting only 12 HRs. Still, he had hit .301 and had been an all star before getting injured. Great trade right? He promptly went out and hit .219 with 5 HRs in 76 games. What a disappointment! For the Red Sox to make this trade, they had to have known something. Now, Lynn was better the next year. He hit .299/.374/.517 with 21 HRs at age 30, in 138 games. But he was mostly hurt the next year again, although he played well when healthy. Then had a pretty good season before signing with the Orioles. I still remember, however, what a disappointment Lynn’s performance was. The Angels made several high profile moves in the 80s and it really felt like they didn’t work out that well. Gene Autry did a lot to try and win a championship, but it never worked. Almost…. but then Donnie Moore grooved a pitch to Dave Henderson (I, unfortunately was at that game) and allowed the Red Sox to turn a groundball to Bill Buckner into part of their losing story.
The Red Sox didn’t trade him because they “knew something”, they just didn’t want to pay most of their stars of the 70’s (Lynn, Fisk, Burleson) Basically, Haywood Sullivan was a terrible GM.
Fred Lynn had that one catch in CF that they used at the very end of the This Week in Baseball montage. He reached over the wall to rob a home run, crashed into the wall, then to the ground, rolled over and without stopping smoothly stood up with his left hand raised in the air and holding the ball. It was one of my favorite baseball things as a kid. He should be in the HoF just for that.