Memorializing Albert Belle

What Do You Do With Baseball's Most Troublesome Player?

As you are probably aware, Albert Belle's baseball career has ended. His degenerative hip condition, much like Bo Jackson's, has made it impossible to continue playing.

The press surrounding the tragic circumstances of his retirement has been odd, as the customary teary-eyed reminiscence has often been replaced with outright disdain.

Belle has never been what you call a "people person." He has always been one of the more intense, skilled and intelligent competitors, but he had the glad-handling skills of Howard Stern at a NOW meeting. He hated reporters and was usually overtly rude to them.

That was his main transgression, a terrible sin for which he was robbed of a few MVP awards. But, as any beat writer will tell you, it wasn't just about his relationship with the media. And they're right; Albert Belle did some inexcusable things. He chased down some trick-or-treaters with his car. He gave the bird to the crowd once.

But he was also a brilliant player, who made his team win. He's responsible for a few years that were among the best in history. In each of the years 1994, 1995, 1996 and 1998 he was solely responsible for adding 5-6 more wins to his team's totals than would an average player, according to Total Baseball. That's very, very rare.

So where is the best place to stand during these days of his "passing"? In every situation, the best thing to always do is to go back to the central edict of all organized sports and work form there. The edict, of course, is: Winning is everything.

There have been players in history (Dick Allen comes to mind) who were so disruptive that their behavior actually hurt their team's ability to compete. Belle wasn't one of them. He joked with his teammates occasionally, but usually wanted to be left alone. He didn't create divisions and bad feeling in the clubhouse; he was just a loner.

And, as I've already stated, Belle's superb play helped his teams win, like few other players can or ever have. So according to the central sports truth, "Winning is everything," he deserves tremendous acclaim and some respectful words as a tragic injury cuts short a brilliant career.

Baseball is about performance on the field; everything else is a side issue. Memorials for Belle should be the same way: they should highlight his tremendous play and them mention his personality in passing.

Of course, that's not what's been happening. A few spiteful writers have been using this sad moment to take some parting shots, and to gleefully deny that Belle has a chance at the Hall of Fame.

In a word, this is unconscionable. These writers are being petty and childish. Maybe Albert wasn't a saint, but he wasn't a terrible man either. He just wasn't interested in smiling and giving the writers a few meaningless phrases to throw into the evening news.

The root problem is not the writers, though. It's the whole culture surrounding player interviews and PR, the obsessive need to turn everyone who can hit well into a public figure. The problem is encapsulated in the post-game interviews, which are, with few exceptions, tedious and pointless.

Let's be frank -- do we really need all the quotes from players? Do they ever have anything interesting to say? Occasionally it's nice to get to know a player better in a formal interview or a deep-digging cover story, but who really enjoys it when yet another player spits out yet another cliché about "the team coming together" or "taking it one day at a time"? Who does it serve? What's the point?

I don't blame Belle for shunning reporters after games. It must take superhuman patience to have to weather the same stupid questions every night. Especially if you are, as Belle was, very inwardly-directed and very emotionally invested in the outcome of each game.

Even for the occasional interesting question, about personality clashes or position battles, you're much better off if you don't say anything. Anyone who communicates through the press about colleagues or teammates is doing it the wrong way. I don't believe that anything good can be accomplished by escalating minor squabbles by getting the media, and therefore the whole world, in on the discussion.

I'm usually not in favor of curtailing the role of the press. I'm in the journalism field (sort of), and I have tremendous respect for the media. I think that the media has the invaluable job of being the society's truth-teller, whose job is to keep people, in all walks of life, accountable for their actions.

But what truth is served by driving a guy like Albert Belle, who simply doesn't want to chat, into antagonism with constant hounding? Does every great hitter have to also be a grinning gadfly? Can't we learn to have a distanced respect for people who want that distance?

More to the point, what is the deal with this obsessive, unseemly need that we, the public, apparently have to fall in love with great baseball players? We were like Pepe La Pew with Belle, constantly making unwanted advances. In a sense, the reporters were merely doing our dirty work for us -- a tough job, but someone, ostensibly, had to do it.

We have this false expectation that everyone who excels should become a complete celebrity, with every part of their lives and personalities feeding the public's voracious, irrational need for stories and glamor.

Basically, there are some great players who want to be appreciated on a personal level as well as a professional one. There are some who don't. I wish we could recognize the difference, and could be respectful enough to honor their wishes. Or, more to the point, I wish that we could own enough self-respect to not force affection and attention on people who don't want it.

As a result of his standoffish personality, I don't love Albert Belle the way I love Kirby Puckett or Tony Gwynn, guys who are genuine, fun and friendly. But I have great respect for his hard work, his intelligence, and his talent, and it shocks me to see many people smiling at his tragic downfall and discrediting his great play just because he didn't want to be adored.

Hall of Fame? Anyway, another topic of discussion with Belle's retirement is his Hall of Fame credentials. Many are saying that his unfriendliness has already doomed his chances.

But before we take such ancillary issues into account, let's do the basics. Let's look at a few metrics designed to encapsulate a player's Hall of Fame merits: Hall of Fame Standards number, his Hall of Fame Monitor number, and most-similar player, all according to baseball-reference.com. I'll also include how many of his top ten most similar players are already in the Hall, of the ones that are eligible.

For the hell of it, let's compare him to first-ballot-Hall-of-Famer Kirby Puckett, who had also had a tragically shortened career but was his diametric opposite in terms of public image and personality.

 Player    Standards   Monitor   Most-Similar (HOFs in top ten)
 Albert      36.7        135       Juan Gonzalez (2/4)
 Kirby       39          156       Don Mattingly (2/9) 

It's not exactly a mismatch, is it? Let's evaluate Belle's numbers a bit.

Of all the players in history who are eligible for the Hall, very few have Monitor numbers as high as Belle's and aren't in the Hall. Those above 120 that not enshrined are Joe Jackson, Ted Simmons, Dave Parker, Steve Garvey, Don Mattingly, Gary Carter and Jim Rice. All except Jackson are recent borderline players who will probably end up in eventually. This would appear to point toward Belle being worthy.

However, Belle's Standards number, a stat I prefer, is a tad lower, realtively speaking. He's basically tied with the following bunch: (asterisks denote Hall of Famers, parentheses denote players not yet eligible for the Hall) (Chili Davis), Billy Herman*, Jackie Robinson*, (Julio Franco), Rusty Staub, Vern Stephens, Orlando Cepeda*, Bid McPhee*, Earle Combs*, Ben Chapman, (Gary Sheffield), Luis Aparicio*, Bobby Bonds, (Brett Butler), Max Carey*, Vada Pinson, (Manny Ramirez), Edd Roush*, (Jose Canseco), Ken Boyer, Dale Murphy, (Todd Helton), Ralph Kiner*, (Ozzie Smith), and Dixie Walker.

It's a weird list, made up of nothing but borderline cases (besides Robinson, of course). As I stated in a previous article about Kirby Puckett's Hall of Fame credentials, with borderline cases, all the ancillary credentials (the World Series heroics, the defense in the outfield, the heroism, his demeanor, how well he was liked), come into play. While all these are positives for Kirby, most are negative for Belle. This would appear to push Belle back to unworthiness for the Hall. Hmm.

Albert's most-similar player bit is skewed by the fact that most of his most-similar players are still active and will quickly leave him in the dust. Still, those of the top ten who are retired are telling: they include Dick Allen, Ricky Colavito, Ralph Kiner and Hank Greenberg.

Two of those guys, Kiner and Greenberg, are tremendous sluggers whose careers were cut short by injury. One, Colavito, had a smattering of brilliant seasons over a bizarrely shortened career but was never quite at the perennial-league-leader level of Greenberg and Kiner. The last, Dick Allen, was a terrific slugger, with a career more similar to Colavito than Kiner, who was so contentious that he actually hurt his team's chances of winning.

Which was Belle? He wasn't a Colavito -- he was at that superstar-slugger level that compares well with Greenberg's best seasons. And again, I insist that he wasn't a disruptive person, just a loner, so I really don't think he's a Dick Allen.

I suspect that Kiner and Greenberg are closer parallels. I'll try to prove it.

Going by Total Baseball's total Player Rating statistics, Kiner had five years in which he was one of the top five hitters in the league, 1947-1951. In two of those years, 1947 and 1949, he was the best hitter in the league, according to Total Baseball. There were two other years, 1946 and 1952, in which he led the league in homers but was not a terrific hitter, and then three more years in which he was a good-to-average hitter.

Contrary to popular opinion, Kiner wasn't a one-dimensional hitter. He drew walks at an amazing clip, leading the league three times. And he even hit .300 three times. If not for the abbreviated career (only ten years!) he would be on the All-Century Team.

Hank Greenberg, despite having a better reputation, was pretty comparable. Greenberg's great years were more spread out, and his numbers are gaudier because he played in the offense-crazy late-'30s. He had about six seasons in which he was among the top five hitters in the league, never quite appearing to be the hands-down best (not an easy task when you share a league with Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx, then Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams). He had three other good-to-great years and only one mediocre one, his rookie year in 1933.

Instead of owning a career stopped suddenly short, Greenberg was injury-plagued throughout and also lost three years serving in World War II. He totaled 13 seasons but ended up with almost exactly the same number of career at-bats as Kiner.

In other ways it's not that easy to differentiate between these two. Greenberg had a lifetime TPR of 30.0, meaning that he essentially was solely responsible for 30 wins for his team, while Kiner logs in at 28.9.

And Albert Belle is very comparable to both. I don't have TPR ratings for 1999 and 2000, but for the first ten years of his career alone, Belle logged a 31.3. Like both Kiner and Greenberg, Belle had a handful of years in which he was one of the top five hitters in the league, 1993-96 and 1998. In both 1996 and 1998 he checks in with the best TPR in the league and should have won MVPs, but in both years Juan Gonzalez won because the writers were determined to be petty and punish Belle for not saying enough "we're taking it one day at a time"s.

But Belle's best year was really 1995, when he hit 50 home runs and 50 doubles in a strike-shortened season. Belle's 5.8 TPR for 1995 comes in a hair behind Tim Salmon's 5.9. This is bogus, and is due to Total Baseball's skewed defensive ratings.

Belle had another five years in which he was good but not great, including 1999 and 2000. And then there were two partial seasons. All in all, it's an extremely similar profile to that of both Kiner and Greenberg.

The key to all of this, and what separates this trio from a guy like Rocky Colavito, is that all three were among the top five hitters in their league for at least a five-year stretch. Each had a few years were they were arguably the best hitter in the league. It's just that none of them got the chance to tack on enough mediocre-to-good years that would make their career stats look like those of a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

I'll agree that most of Belle's ancillary credentials are negative and should be taken into account. Maybe the writers can punish him further and can keep him out for a while. But when he compares favorably to blue-chip Hall-of-Famers like Ralph Kiner and Hank Greenberg, he's a Hall of Famer.

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