Addie Joss and the Baseball Hall of Fame's 10-Season Rule

 

Photos of Addie Joss demonstrating his delivery.

Addie Joss is the only player in the Baseball Hall of Fame who played for less than 10 seasons. (Besides players elected for their success in the Negro Leagues, many of whom never made the major leagues at all or played for only a few years after integration.) Joss pitched for Cleveland from 1902-1910, and he died from tubercular meningitis in April 1911, 2 days after his 31^st birthday, and just before he would have begun his 10^th major league season. So, why was Addie Joss allowed in the Hall of Fame if he didn’t play 10 seasons? Join me as we examine his case in more detail.

The Baseball Hall of Fame doesn’t stipulate very much in the way of its requirements. About the only rule for eligibility is that a player must have played for a minimum of 10 seasons. But how is a “season” defined? Is it a full season? Say, a season in which a pitcher throws enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, or a season in which a batter accumulates enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title? Well, let’s look at how the Hall of Fame has handled the players with the shortest Hall of Fame careers.

Ross Youngs, 1897-1927

Ross Youngs played only 10 seasons for the New York Giants, as his career and life were shortened by Bright’s disease. Youngs’s first season, 1917, consisted of exactly 7 games. That’s 4.5% of a 154-game season. That was enough for the Hall of Fame, though. There doesn’t seem to have been much debate over his qualification, as Youngs received votes from the first election for the Hall of Fame in 1936. He was a regular on the ballot until 1956, and he was elected by the Veterans’ Committee in 1972, which included several of his former teammates.

Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Ralph Kiner

Ralph Kiner played only 10 seasons before a back injury ended his playing career. Kiner led the NL, or tied for the lead, in home runs in his first 7 seasons. Kiner averaged 147 games per season, and his lowest games played total was 113 in 1955, his final season. There’s not much of an argument about those all counting as full seasons. Despite his 7-year run of dominance, Kiner received just 1.1% of the vote when he debuted on the Hall of Fame ballot in 1960. That was before the 5% minimum rule was around, though, and so Kiner’s candidacy survived. But it took him the full 15 years on the ballot to gain 75% of the votes, and he was finally elected in 1975.

Dizzy Dean, star of the "Gashouse Gang" Cardinals during the 1930's.

Dizzy Dean pitched in 12 seasons—and 3 of those seasons consisted of a single game. That’s right, 1 game. Take away those 3 games, Dean is at 9 seasons, and presumably not eligible for the Hall of Fame. And one of Dean’s 1 game seasons was a publicity stunt—Dean’s last start, for the St. Louis Browns in 1947.

Dean only had 6 seasons in which he pitched more than 100 innings. Granted, Dean was a very dominant pitcher for those 6 seasons, as he led the NL in strikeouts in 4 of those seasons, and led the NL in wins twice, including his famous 1934 season, when he won 30 games for the St. Louis Cardinals. Dizzy then won 2 more games in the 1934 World Series, as the Cardinals won the championship. Dean also had that intangible “star quality” that no doubt drew sportswriters to his case. Diz was a good old boy from Arkansas, and as the leader of the “Gashouse Gang” Cardinals, he played that role to the hilt. He was funny, a genuine character, and as a radio broadcaster stayed very visible after his retirement. I understand why Dizzy Dean is in the Hall of Fame, despite his extremely short career.

As we’ve seen from the examples of Youngs and Dean, it seems as though 1 appearance, in any capacity, counts as a season. Dean’s 1941 season consisted of exactly 1 inning pitched, in which he faced 7 batters. This helped Joss’s case, since he attended spring training for the 1911 season, and was preparing for his 10^th season when he fell ill and died, just 2 days after the Naps began their season. Since 1 inning pitched counts as a season, you could argue that Joss was merely 1 inning pitched in 1911 away from fulfilling the minimum requirement for the Hall of Fame. Doesn’t it seem petty to keep the man out of the Hall of Fame just because he had the bad luck to die before he could throw 1 measly inning in 1911?

Momentum slowly built for Joss’s election to the Hall of Fame during the 1960’s and 1970’s, and eventually, in 1977, the Hall of Fame’s Board of Directors waived the 10-year rule especially for Joss. Joss was elected by the Veterans’ Committee at their next meeting, in 1978. This must have been something of a “quid pro quo” move, as there was no purpose in waiving the 10-year rule specifically for Joss if he wasn’t going to be inducted. And so it was that Addie Joss became a Hall of Famer in 1978, 67 years after his death.

MLB, or the Hall of Fame, has never really gotten into the weeds of what counts as a “season,” and I’m glad they haven’t. I think it’s a little ridiculous to count 1 game as a “season,” but I also don’t want MLB to engage in the minutiae of deciding seasons on a case-by-case basis, where they would decide “this is a full season, this is a partial season.” Knowing how MLB generally operates, you can bet they’d make inconsistent decisions that wouldn’t make any sense. Personally, I think it’s a little ridiculous that Dizzy Dean’s 3 seasons of 1 game each allowed him to qualify for the Hall of Fame. But really, how many players are affected by the 10-year rule for the Hall of Fame? The rule has only been amended once in the 85 years of the Hall of Fame, for Addie Joss. I’m not a huge fan of the precedent amending that rule sets—once you amend the rule for Addie Joss, what’s to stop you from amending the rule for someone else, maybe someone who only played 8 years? But that’s never happened, and I’m not unduly concerned about it happening again. Joss was elected in 1978, and the rule hasn’t been amended in the 43 years since he was elected, so it’s not really a burning issue. I can’t think of any player who played for 9 years that I would say deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

I suppose a team could attempt to bend the rules by giving a player token appearances in order to enable him to qualify for the 10-year rule. It’s such an unlikely scenario, but imagine Mike Trout suffered a terrible, career-ending injury after the end of his 9^th major league season. Everybody agrees Trout is one of the best players ever, and his election to the Hall of Fame will merely be a formality. (2020 was Trout’s 10^th major league season, so don’t worry, this is purely hypothetical.) But let’s say the Angels give Trout one pinch-hitting appearance, he looks at 3 strikes and sits down, and presto, you’ve got his 10^th season in the books! Would anyone complain about that? It’s doubtful, given Trout’s impressive statistics, but it doesn’t set the best precedent if you’re giving guys who really can’t play token appearances just so they’ll qualify for the Hall of Fame. That being said, it’s very unlikely that anyone with a career of less than 10 years would be a serious enough candidate for the Hall of Fame for a team to resort to this kind of stunt.

I find it odd that it took so long for Joss to be elected. The Hall of Fame had been around for 40 years by 1978, so if Joss was so deserving of election, why hadn’t they bent the rules before then for him? What was the point in electing him in 1978? By that time, Joss’s widow and 2 children were already dead. (His widow and daughter died in the 1950’s, and his son died in 1977.)

Addie Joss was an interesting guy, and an excellent pitcher. He’s certainly not the worst pitcher in the Hall of Fame. Joss is the all-time leader in lowest WHIP, minimum of 1,000 innings pitched, with a mind-bogglingly low 0.968. Joss pitched during the Dead Ball Era, so you must look at his statistics through the lens of that era. Still, his numbers are impressive. Fun fact: in 1909, Joss pitched 242 2/3rds innings and gave up zero home runs. I know, I just told you that he pitched during the Dead Ball Era, when no one hit home runs, but still, that’s extremely impressive that no one homered off of him, even an inside-the-park home run.

Joss was a college man, attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison. College baseball players were still a rarity in those days, and Joss was a man of keen intelligence. Joss worked as a sportswriter during his playing days, covering the World Series from 1907-09. He was also interested in engineering, and he worked on designing an electric scoreboard, which Cleveland eventually installed at League Park.

From the moment he debuted in 1902, it was clear that Joss was something special on the mound. He fired a one-hitter in his first major league start. Joss threw a perfect game during the heat of a pennant race in 1908, and a no-hitter in 1910. Although ERA was not an official statistic during Joss’s career, he twice had the lowest ERA in the American League, in 1904 and 1908. Joss hurled 325 innings in 1908, ending the year with an ERA of just 1.16, the 7^th lowest ERA posted since 1900. A torn ligament in his right elbow ended Joss’s 1910 season after his start on July 25^th. Unbeknownst to anyone, that would be Addie Joss’s final game in the major leagues.

Joss attended spring training with the Naps in 1911, and it was only during the last 10 days of his life that he was ill. He died on April 14, 1911. Joss was held in such high esteem that the very first “all-star” game was held as a benefit for his family on July 24, 1911. The Naps invited players from other American League teams to play them, and stars like Ty Cobb, Eddie Collins, Home Run Baker, Tris Speaker, and Walter Johnson took the field against the Naps. The all-stars beat the Naps, 5-3.

Joss received votes for the Hall of Fame starting in 1937, on the second Hall of Fame ballot. His highest vote total was 14.2% on the 1942 ballot. Did the sportswriters realize that they were voting for a player who technically wasn’t eligible for the Hall of Fame? I’m guessing probably not, since this was an era where the HOF rules that we know today hadn’t been established yet. Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg received votes for the Hall in 1945, when they were both still active players. Lou Gehrig received a whopping 22.6% of the vote in the first election in 1936, when he was still an active player who would lead the league in runs scored, home runs, walks, OBP, and slugging percentage that same year.

Back in 2014, I included Joss on a list of players I didn’t think deserved to be in the Hall of Fame. I’ve softened my stand on Addie Joss since then. I’m fine with Addie Joss being in the Hall of Fame. Unlike most of the other Veterans’ Committee selections that I included on my list from 2014, Addie Joss didn’t make it into the Hall of Fame because the Committee was comprised of his former teammates. By the time Joss was elected, almost all of his former teammates were dead. He didn’t make it into the Hall by cronyism. Yes, he was granted an exception by the Board, but it was more than 65 years after his death. The story of Joss’s eventual election to the Hall of Fame is a remarkable one. I’m not a huge fan of the precedent of making an exception for someone who really only played 9 seasons. But it’s not Joss’s fault that he died before he had a chance to compete in his 10^th season. And as I mentioned, making an exception for someone who played in fewer than 10 seasons has only happened once in 85 years of the Hall of Fame, and I think it’s extremely unlikely that it would ever happen again. So, Addie Joss gets to be this weird footnote in the history of the Hall of Fame. And maybe he gets a little more attention and fame because of his exceptional status. Addie Joss sounds like he was a remarkable fellow, and the next time I go to Cooperstown, I’ll make sure I spend a moment in front of his plaque, paying homage to an unlikely Hall of Fame story.

Steve Carlton: 66 baseball cards

 

Some of the 66 Steve Carlton cards I recently got from eBay. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

I’ve written about my collecting of Steve Carlton baseball cards in several posts from last year. Every once in a while, I feel the need to buy more Steve Carlton cards, even though I’ve got just about every card he’s ever appeared on. Recently, I bought a 66 card lot on eBay for $10. Okay, it was $14.50 with the shipping and taxes. It was a nice mix of Carlton cards from the 1970’s and 1980’s, but the thing that caught my attention were the 3 cards from the 1983 Topps League Leader Sheet. This was a mail-in promo—there was a scratch-off game in packs of 1983 Topps, and the League Leader Sheet was one of the prizes. The sheet contained 8 cards of 1982 league leaders, featuring the same photos from their 1983 Topps cards. The only difference was a box in the upper left-hand corner saying what category they led the league in. The sheet was 8.5 x 11, so if you see individual cards, they’ve been cut from the sheet. The cards have a blank back. The League Leader Sheet isn’t especially rare, but it’s one of those 1980’s oddities that I never heard of during my childhood and only discovered in the last few years.

1983 Topps League Leader card. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Carlton’s 1983 League Leader card commemorates his leading the NL in wins in 1982. 1982 was the year Carlton won his then-record 4^th Cy Young award. Carlton was the only 20-game winner in the majors that year, and he also led the NL in games started, complete games, shutouts, innings, strikeouts, and hits allowed.

The 66 cards featured a smattering of cards from the 1970’s, and Carlton’s 1968 card, just his third Topps card. It’s not in great condition, so it’s not worth much, but it’s still a cool card. Carlton looks like such a gangly kid on his 1968 card. His glove almost looks gold on the card, it’s quite odd.

One of the coolest league leader cards is the 1973 Strikeout Leaders card. It features Carlton and Nolan Ryan, who would battle each other for the all-time strikeout lead during 1983 and 1984, and who were number 1 and 2 in career strikeouts for many years. 1972 had been a breakout year for both pitchers. Both Carlton and Ryan were traded during the 1971-72 off-season, in deals that were quickly regarded as two of the worst trades ever. In December of 1971, Ryan and 3 other players were traded by the Mets to the Angels for Jim Fregosi. The Mets had drafted Ryan in 1965, but he just hadn’t quite panned out. Sure, the kid could throw heat, but he was still so wild! In 1971 Ryan struck out 137 batters, but walked 116. The Mets had a fantastic pitching staff, anchored by Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman, and they had promising rookie Jon Matlack coming up as well. They figured they didn’t need this wild pitcher, and besides, Fregosi was a 6-time All-Star!

During spring training 1972, Cardinals owner Gussie Busch was frustrated with Carlton’s salary demands, and he was exploring trade offers for the left-handed pitcher. The Cardinals had signed Carlton in 1963, and he had been a vital part of their rotation since 1967. Carlton had a breakthrough season in 1969, when he started the All-Star Game, and struck out 19 Mets in a game in September. (Ironically, Carlton lost the game because Ron Swoboda hit 2 home runs off of him!) Carlton was coming off his first 20-win season in 1971. I’ve heard different figures about how far apart Carlton and the Cardinals were on salary, but it wasn’t more than $15,000. Carlton has even said that he was ready to accept the Cardinals’ figure when they called him to tell him he’d been traded to the lowly Phillies, for pitcher Rick Wise.

Both Carlton and Ryan were looking to establish themselves with new teams, and make their old teams regret the deals. They both accomplished their goals. Carlton won the pitching Triple Crown, leading the NL with 27 wins, a 1.97 ERA, and 310 strikeouts. He achieved this while pitching for a last-place team, and his 27 wins were 46% of the Phillies’ total! The next highest win total for pitchers on the 1972 Phillies was Bucky Brandon, with 7. Meanwhile, in the American League, Ryan exploded with 19 wins, a 2.28 ERA, a league-leading 9 shutouts, and an astronomical total of 329 strikeouts, 192 more strikeouts than he had in 1971.

1973 Strikeout Leaders, 1983 Strikeout Leaders. (This was the best picture I could get, the cards have bowed quite a bit.)

In 1982, Carlton again led the NL in strikeouts, and appeared next to AL champion Floyd Bannister on the 1983 Strikeout Leaders card. (Carlton and Bannister were later teammates on the 1986 Chicago White Sox.) As I looked at the back of these two cards, I was fascinated to see the top 10 strikeout pitchers a decade apart.

Backs of the 1973 and 1983 Strikeout Leaders cards. There's 10 Hall of Famers on the 1973 card.

What’s crazy is how many Hall of Famers are on the 1972 card. Of the 20 pitchers, 10 are Hall of Famers. Wow. The top 5 NL pitchers are: Steve Carlton, Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Don Sutton, and Fergie Jenkins. I’d face off against any team with those guys as my rotation! There’s even Hall of Fame pitchers from that era that aren’t on this card, like Phil Niekro. The AL leaders also featured 5 Hall of Famers: Ryan, Gaylord Perry, Bert Blyleven, Catfish Hunter, and last but not least, 8-time 20-game winner and 3-time Cy Young Award winner Jim Palmer. Fast forward to 1982, and there are only 3 Hall of Fame pitchers among the 20 listed: Carlton, Ryan, and Jack Morris. There are a lot of really good pitchers among the 1982 strikeout leaders, but it’s certainly not as illustrious a list as 1972. Among the 1972 leaders, all of the 10 Hall of Famers won more than 200 games, and there are 2 more 200-game winners who didn’t make the Hall: 1968 World Series hero Mickey Lolich, and the always entertaining Jerry Reuss. (Reuss was another promising young left-hander the Cardinals traded away in 1972.) So 12 of the 20 pitchers from 1972 won more than 200 games—in contrast the 1982 leaders had 4 200-game winners: Carlton, Ryan, Morris, and Bob Welch. (Fun fact: Welch won 27 games for the A’s in 1990, tying Carlton for the most wins in a season since Denny McLain won 31 games in 1968.)

It’s fascinating to me how you had a cluster of pitchers who debuted in the 1960’s who had these amazing, Hall of Fame careers, and then you don’t see a similar group of Hall of Fame-caliber pitchers until the emergence of Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Randy Johnson in the mid-late 1980’s. (Yes, I know Clemens isn’t in the Hall of Fame.) I’m also amazed at how those guys who came up in the 1960’s took the ball every 4^th day, threw 250+ innings every single year, and were hardly ever injured. And that was an era when conditioning wasn’t taken as seriously as it is today. I wish someone had written a book chronicling all of those pitchers while they were all still alive, and tried to figure out what their secrets were.

Book Review: The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography, by Scott Donaldson (2015)

Book cover of The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography, by Scott Donaldson, 2015. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Literary biographer and professor Scott Donaldson, 1928-2020.

The literary biographer Scott Donaldson died last December, at the age of 92. Donaldson wrote biographies of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Archibald MacLeish, and the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, among others. Donaldson began his career as a newspaperman, then moved into academia, teaching at the College of William and Mary for 27 years.

I have a couple of personal connections to Scott Donaldson—we were both born in Minneapolis, and we attended the same high school, graduating some 53 years apart. I met Donaldson at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference in 2017, and he was a kind and generous man. I’m a great admirer of his work on Fitzgerald, as I think his biography Fool for Love is an excellent examination of Fitzgerald’s personality.

After Donaldson’s passing, I read his 2015 book The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography. I wish I had read it while he was still alive, so I could let him know how much I enjoyed it. The Impossible Craft isn’t exactly a memoir, but throughout the book the reader learns many things about Donaldson as he describes the ups and downs of writing biographies of writers.

Donaldson’s Ph.D. was in American Studies, which makes sense as you read his work. Through American Studies, Donaldson had a knowledge of many different disciplines, not just literature. His work is more vibrant and alive than what you might think of from a typical English professor. Side note: You know who else had a Ph.D. in American Studies? Tom Wolfe, of course! Like Wolfe, Donaldson often focused on class and status in his writings. As Donaldson wrote: “You could not adequately understand Fitzgerald or his fiction, for example, without an awareness of the precarious position he occupied, growing up, within the social hierarchy of St. Paul, Minnesota.” (p.21) As a Fitzgerald fan who gives walking tours of his neighborhood in St. Paul, I’m biased, but I agree with Donaldson’s assessment.

Donaldson began each of his books with an admiration of all the writers whose lives he chronicled. “It could hardly have been otherwise, after spending four or five years going to bed at night and waking up in the morning thinking about each of them in turn. The more I learned, the more I understood. The more I understood, the greater the fellow feeling.” (p.122) Donaldson shares his assessment of the authors whose lives he chronicled: “Hemingway was, I believe, the greatest of all the authors I did time with, as well as the most tortured…I felt a closer kinship with Fitzgerald than with any other subject…I even thought, at times, that I could imagine my way into his head.” (p.125-6) It makes perfect sense why Donaldson wrote 5 books about these two brilliant authors, including a fantastic book, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, about their difficult relationship.

The Impossible Craft takes us through some of the challenges the literary biographer might encounter. While you might not be that interested in the particulars of the struggle of poet Edwin Arlington Robinson’s literary executors to appoint an official biographer, the story is a case study of how different parties have competing interests, often to the detriment of the deceased author. As Donaldson points out, by producing a censored biography of Robinson that protected other deceased members of his family this had the unintentional effect of cooling any interest in Robinson, and his work slid into obscurity.

Donaldson also shows us how all biographies are subjective in his examination of how 14 different authors handled an incident in Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s lives. The incident is the relationship between Zelda Fitzgerald and Edouard Jozan, a French aviator, during the summer of 1924. The only fact we know for sure is that Zelda and Jozan had a flirtation of some kind while Scott was busy writing the novel that he would eventually call The Great Gatsby. Did this flirtation escalate into an affair? It depends on which biography you read. (Since Donaldson’s 2015 examination appeared, Kendall Taylor wrote an entire book about the relationship between Zelda and Jozan, 2018’s The Gatsby Affair.) Adding to the confusion about the summer of 1924 are the stories that Scott and Zelda themselves told about the relationship, and Zelda’s fictional treatment of the relationship in her novel Save Me the Waltz. Donaldson comes to no grand conclusions about what really happened, but he shows us how biographers can spin things to fit their own thesis. As Donaldson writes, “It can safely be said that the single trait all biographers share is a certain arrogance as they undertake to understand how it must have been, say, for Zelda and Scott and Edouard a long time ago.” (p.187)

The Impossible Craft concludes with a chapter aptly titled “The Cheever Misadventure.” Donaldson had long been an admirer of the short stories of John Cheever, and he succinctly summed up what made Cheever such a wonderful writer: “Cheever’s greatest gift was his capacity to bewitch quotidian existence into something magical.” (p.222)

Donaldson began his in-depth research into Cheever shortly after Cheever’s death in 1982. Donaldson informs the reader that, with the benefit of hindsight, there were red flags from the Cheever family from the very beginning. What seemed to begin as a decent relationship soon fell into acrimony. Donaldson wasn’t allowed full access to Cheever’s letters and journals, as the family feared that his biography would overshadow a forthcoming collection of Cheever’s letters. Donaldson’s biography, published in 1988, presented a portrait of Cheever as a troubled man, but ultimately Donaldson concluded the book on a positive note, as Cheever finally conquered his struggle with alcoholism.

Twenty-one years after Donaldson’s biography, Blake Bailey published his own biography of Cheever, this time with the full cooperation of the Cheever family. Bailey painted a much darker portrait of Cheever, but for whatever reason, the family was happier with Bailey’s book than Donaldson’s. Perhaps it was simply the passage of time, and perhaps the Cheevers were pleased that someone was doing something to keep their father in the public eye, as the publishing boom of books about John Cheever during the 1980’s and 1990’s had ended. (This was partially the fault of the Cheevers themselves, as they have never authorized any additional collections of Cheever’s short stories.)

The Impossible Craft is an eloquent summary of Scott Donaldson’s work as a biographer. Donaldson’s own writing ultimately draws us back to the great writing that inspired him to document the lives of those who created it.