Ron Santo’s Legacy

An old Irish toast to the departed: “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

This seems written for a man like Ron Santo, who died last week at the age of 70. Cub fans cherished him, in part, because he was the consummate fan. Alongside Pat Hughes in the radio booth, Santo seemed to take each Cubs failure–of which there are multitudes — as a personal wound and each good moment as a personal uplift. When it came to his team, Ron Santo couldn’t hide much.

If you weren’t a Cubs partisan, then you admired Santo for his personal courage in the face of a lacerating and relentless disease and for his commitment to the vanquishing that disease. For so many reasons, he is missed, remembered and loved by many.

The other, lesser part of the story is how the gatekeepers of the Hall of Fame have terminally neglected Santo.

Why is this? Certainly, the era in which he played makes his offensive numbers look less impressive than they are in context, and there’s also the broader neglect of third basemen as a species. On the latter point, consider how the Hall of Fame breaks down from most- to least-represented position …

Position No. of Hall of Famers
Right Field 24
Shortstop 21
Left Field 20
First Base 18
Center Field 17
Second Base 17
Catcher 13
Third Base 10

So why is this happening? My best guess is that, in the minds of the voters, third basemen dwell in some sort of nebulous category. They’re not quite of the run-producing mold that other corner defenders are, and they’re also, obviously, not manning those key, up-the-middle positions. As such, I’m not sure voters know how to evaluate third basemen who don’t hit like a left fielder (e.g., Mike Schmidt) or field the ball like a shortstop (e.g., Brooks Robinson). In any event, Santo’s probably suffered because of this phenomenon.

But he shouldn’t have. Santo’s career WAR of 79.3 ranks seventh all-time among those who spent at least the plurality of their careers at the hot corner. Among all players, he ranks 47th. The Baseball-Reference flavor of WAR is a bit less charitable but still ranks Santo as the 75th-best position player in history. Take a gander at his career wOBA graph and you’ll see a conga line of good-to-great seasons.

One would think that the traditional-minded voter would note Santo’s place in the top 100 for home runs, RBI, walks, and sac flies, in addition to his five Gold Gloves and nine All-Star appearances. All this while, for a good portion of his career, battling Type 1 Diabetes at a time when we didn’t know much about it. Still and yet, Santo was never named to more than 43.1% of the ballots, and the Veterans’ Committee has passed him over on four different occasions.

Besides the structural bias against third basemen, some other factors could be at work, at least insofar as the mind of the typical voter is concerned. The Cubs of late 60s never made the postseason despite some impressive top-end talent, and some of the blame has rubbed off on Santo. As well, Santo’s longtime manager Leo Durocher was quite unsparing in his public assessments of him, and Santo had a bit of an complicated reputation as a player. These may sound like petty trivialities to you and me, but they may matter more than you’d think, particularly on the Veterans’ Committee.

Santo will have his next chance in the winter of 2012, and he’ll probably make it. The shame is that, first and foremost, Santo won’t be around to revel in his election. The other, lesser shame is that those who best know Santo as the Cubs’ “mascot in the radio booth” may think he’s an undeserving sort whose posthumous election was sentimental in nature. But Ron Santo was a hell of a ballplayer — one of the 10 greatest ever at his position — and he deserved Hall-of-Fame laurels years ago.

The Hall mattered a great deal to Santo, and his exclusion surely embittered him (though you’d barely know it). In the end, though, it means more to have lived a life worthy of a great old Irish toast.





Handsome Dayn Perry can be found making love to the reader at CBSSports.com's Eye on Baseball. He is available for all your Twitter needs.

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BassmanUW
13 years ago

One of the reasons a lot of voters give for not letting Santo in is that he was “the fourth best player on a team that never made the playoffs.” This is utterly false. The three players they are referencing are, of course, Hall of Famers Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins. We’ll toss Jenkins out of this because he was a pitcher, and just look at the position players.

Santo was a very good to great player for a decade, from 1963 to 1972. Over those 10 seasons, Santo put up 72.1 WAR, with a high of 10.2 in 1967 and a low of 4.0 in 1971 (the only year that decade he had a WAR under 5.1.)

Ernie Banks had an extended stretch of being a very good to great player as well, but that was nearly done by 1963. By that point, Ernie Banks had already put up 59.8 of the of the 74.1 WAR he’d retire with in 1971. He spent the rest of his career being an average at best first baseman.

Billy Williams actually was a very good to great player at the same time Santo was. In fact, Williams’ best decade matched up exactly with Santo’s, but he wasn’t as good as Santo. Over the same 10 years Williams put up 58.1 WAR. His WAR for his entire career (69.7) wasn’t as high as Santo’s was for one decade.

Santo was an all time great player. There were a number of people I saw on television over the past weekend who said, “I didn’t realize how good he was.” As a result, one of the greatest baseball players ever is not going to be able to give his own HoF induction speech. Which sports tragedies pale in comparison to the far more serious and terrible things that happen in the world, this seems to be pretty high up there as far as sports tragedies go.

Al Dimond
13 years ago
Reply to  BassmanUW

Yeah, Billy Williams was always considered the brighter light. At the time, in Cubs history, to HoF voters… and by Santo himself, who always said Billy was the real star of the team. Santo is really the picture of a player that would be overlooked for the Hall. I hope he gets in.

joeiq
13 years ago
Reply to  BassmanUW

My initial reaction was he was only good for 13 seasons, but I was one of those people that never realized exactly how good he was until early this year. Now I feel bad.

Plus he had diabetes which definitely shortened his career.