Jim Rice belongs in the baseball Hall of Fame

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by Briggs Seekins

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Baseball fans, and especially baseball fans above a certain age, inevitably look back upon earlier eras as a "golden age" when the players, the competition and the statistics were all "purer," more "meaningful" and "real." Baseball is the ultimate nostalgia sport in our culture, the trigger for so many of us to remember a simpler time and place, when there was nothing more satisfying than listening to the game on a summer evening, nothing more thrilling than a town-rec bus trip to an actual major league stadium, and nobody more heroic, more larger than life, than your own local team's slugger. No player, no matter how great, can ever hold the same mythic grandeur for a 40 year old man that his counterpart three decades ago held for that same man when he was a boy of 8 or 9. I have no doubt that when the immortal Ted Williams was a young rookie, there were certain grumbling old timers in the Fenway stands, telling anyone who would listen: "Well, the kid can hit a little, but he'll never be any Tris Speaker." Behind this crabby, impulse is fear: A fear that the once mighty aura of a great hero will be lost forever, forgotten in the pressing rush of daily box-scores and nightly high-light reels.

Well at the risk of sounding like just another curmudgeonly, middle-aged baseball fan, I will say it: Baseball was a better game, decades ago, when I was a bright-eyed young little leaguer, when the players were not chiseled, steroid-enhanced hulks with freakishly enlarged heads, when only a handful of players hit 30 homeruns or more in a single season, when just the mention of Boston Red Sox left fielder Jim Ed Rice made pitchers throughout the American League wince in terror. And as Rice approaches his last years of eligibility for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, I do fear that his once mighty aura will be lost forever; that it has in fact already been lost, washed away by a generation of inflated homerun numbers, and by all the players during this steroid era who have far surpassed Rice's career totals, but who wouldn't have been good enough to carry his jock had they played during the same years.
From 1975 though 1986, Jim Rice dominated the American League. He was the premiere offensive force in the junior circuit, and it wasn't even close. Rod Carrew and George Brett may have been better pure hitters and Dave Winfield a better all-around player, but nobody could put on the one-man wrecking show that Rice did. During that 12 year period, Rice led all AL players in games, at-bats, runs, hits, homers, RBIs, slugging, total bases, extra base hits, multi-hit games and go-ahead RBIs. From 1977 through 1979, he became the only player in major league history to record three straight seasons with at least 35 homeruns and 200 hits. In 1978 he became the first American League player since Joe Dimaggio in 1937 to collect over 400 total bases in a season, a feat that has yet to be matched again in the almost 30 years since.

I was born in Portland, Maine in 1970, and like all good Maine boys I became a Red Sox fan in due course. Jim Rice was our star of stars, from my earliest baseball memories, until after I had entered high school. It's hard to over-state the mystique Rice had for New England baseball fans of my age. An imposing six-foot-two and rock-solid 205 pounds, his physical strength was already legendary during his career. We would regale each other in glorious tales of Rice's power: how he had snapped baseball bats in two, merely by checking his explosive swing, how he had bent golf clubs on his down stroke, how he would break up on field brawls by lifting a combatant in either hand and holding them in the air, separated from each other. Although Rice was almost always a peacemaker, I still have a vivid memory of him walking calmly to the mound, to express his displeasure once after being brushed by an inside pitch. The pitcher began back peddling towards center field, his face turning to ashen pale, while Red Sox color man Bob Montgomery intoned jovially: "I guess he's afraid he's going to get turned into Rice-a-roni!"

The one aspect of Rice's record, which has hindered his hall-of-fame prospects almost as much as inflated contemporary power statistics, is the dramatic drop-off at the end of career. In 1986 Rice finished third in the American League MVP balloting, recording a batting average of .324, 20 homeruns and 110 RBIs, along with the fourth 200 hit season of his career. Cruelly, eye problems and assorted other injuries made Rice an average player, or worse, almost over night. In 1987 he dropped to .277 with 13 homeruns and 77 RBIs. 1988 was similar: .264, 15 and 72, and during his final season of 1989, he managed to play in only 56 games, batting a paltry .234, with a meager three dingers. I will readily concede that this sudden drop off the cliff does exclude Rice from claiming a spot among the top rung of baseball's very greatest players-the stratosphere inhabited by names like Mays, Ruth, Aaron or Cobb. Even so, when not judged by grossly inflated contemporary standards, Rice's number should be more than good enough to earn a place in Cooperstown. Of the 19 left fielders currently enshrined in the Hall, only five hit more homeruns than Rice's 382 and only eight recorded more RBIs. When the fact that he was the dominant hitter in his league for over a decade is factored in, Rice's place in Cooperstown should be a no-brainer. The only nine retired players with both more homeruns and a higher career batting average than Rice are all Hall of Famers: Hank Aaron, Jimmie Fox, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Mel Ott, Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. If you had to be number ten on a list, those are certainly nine players you would not mind seeing in front of you.
There is one last important point that needs to be discussed in regards to Rice's career homerun totals. I have occasionally heard baseball pundits accuse Rice of having inflated numbers, as a result of being a right-handed batter in Fenway Park. Now there is no question that the legendary Green Monster has given many cheap pop-fly homeruns over the years-Bucky Dent's infamous three run blast during the single game play-off at the end of 1978 comes right to mind. But Big Jim didn't hit a lot of cheap pop-fly homeruns, and anybody who watched him over his career knows that the Green Monster took more homers from him that it gave, frequently turning his laser-like, rising line-drives that would have cleared any other left-field fence in the majors into loud singles.

In the past year or so a backlash has arisen against the inflated homerun numbers of the steroid era, and fans of Rice can again begin to feel some hope that our childhood hero will at long last receive his just due. In recent years he has been receiving more votes, which is rare for a player nearing the end of his eligibility. On the next ballot, he will be the most qualified offensive player listed, and there is some thought that he will be elected along side Rich Gossage, another player who has been unjustly overlooked for too long. The most feared relief pitcher of his era, Gossage's case is similar to Rice's: his greatness simply can't be adequately accessed by the current matrix of contemporary statistics. Of course, knowledgeable baseball fans have always known that statistics are only truly meaningful in a context. Comparing great players from one era to great players from another is a fun debate, but only contemporaries can ever be reasonably measured against each other. And when measured against his contemporaries, Rice's greatness simply cannot be denied. Let's hope the voting baseball writers, finally soured by the phony, inflated homerun numbers of the last couple of decades, will finally realize this in time, and give Jim Rice his proper recognition for a very special career.

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