The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
MIÑOSO ELECTION GREAT — BUT LATE
White Sox legend knew he was deserving of Hall but refused to campaign for himself.
There’s always a twinge of sadness when a player gets elected into the Hall of Fame after his death, as was the case recently with Chicago White Sox legend Minnie Miñoso.
You’re thrilled Miñoso finally made it after all these years but can’t help thinking about how excited he would have been reacting to the news.
“Don’t tell me that maybe I’ll get in after I pass away,” Miñoso told baseball writer Christina Kahrl in 2015. “I don’t want it to happen after I pass. I want it while I’m here because I want to enjoy it.”
No one would’ve have enjoyed it more than Miñoso, who knew he was deserving but refused to campaign for himself. And he didn’t want to complain when he fell short. After failing to make it on the 2011 Veterans Committee ballot, Miñoso tried to put on a good face.
“Even if it hurts on the inside, I will always be smiling on the outside,” he said.
I’m sure it must’ve hurt even more three years later. Miñoso had one more chance to get in while he was alive but fell short in 2014, being named on eight of the 15 ballots. Former White Sox slugger Dick Allen had 11 votes that year, and Minnesota Twins great Tony Oliva also had 11, both falling one short.
No one was elected, and Miñoso died the following year. After the 2020 Golden Era ballot was postponed a year because of the COVID19 pandemic, Miñoso gained six votes on the 2021 ballot, finishing with 14 from the 16-member committee. He joined Oliva, Gil Hodges and Jim Kaat as inductees for the Class of 2022.
So what changed?
The committee members were different, which helped his cause, and his supporters made a convincing case for his candidacy.
Ron Santo had the same feelings as Miñoso about the Hall of Fame late in his life. Santo was denied on four Veterans Committee ballots and was crushed every time. The phone call telling him he didn’t make it in 2003 turned into a pivotal scene in “This Old Cub,” a documentary by his filmmaker son, Jeff Santo.
And after Santo fell nine votes shy in a 2008 vote by the 64 living Hall of Famers, he had had enough.
“I’m just kind of fed up with it,” Santo said afterward. “I figure, hey, it’s not in the cards. But I don’t want to go through this every two years. It’s ridiculous.”
Santo repeatedly told friends he had no interest in making it to the Hall posthumously. But he died in 2010, and one year later, on Dec. 5, 2011, Santo was named on 15 of the 16 ballots of the Golden Era committee.
Afterward, former Cubs teammate Billy Williams said the committee pointed to his numbers but also discussed his off-the-field merits, including raising more than $60 million for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
“Some people brought out other than numbers on Ron Santo, what he did in the community,” Williams said. “Everyone saw the numbers — the home runs (342) and Gold Gloves (5), but I think they looked at it with a different view — this guy should be in the Hall of Fame. When you get 15 out of 16 votes, a lot of people saw him in a different light.”
I’m not sure if the 2021 committee saw Miñoso in a different light than the one in ’14. But MLB’S decision to acknowledge the Negro League as a major league in 2021 meant Miñoso’s major-league totals increased.
Miñoso had 147 hits added to his numbers, pushing him past the 2,000-hit mark with 2,110. It might also have helped to have former Commissioner Bud Selig, a friend of White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, on the 2021 committee pushing for him.
Either way, most observers expected Miñoso would get in this time. It still doesn’t make up for Miñoso being overlooked when he was alive. He was deprived of the Hall of Fame experience, from learning of the selection to giving a speech in Cooperstown to the simple pleasure of being greeted as a Hall of Famer.
“Minnie was very humble when it came to something like this,” his wife, Sharon, said after the announcement. “Honestly, I know Minnie would have cried. He was a sentimental guy and very humble and never felt he deserved special recognitions. As (his son) Charlie and I did, it was tears of joy.”
While the Miñoso family celebrates the good news, the family of Dick Allen is trying to get over the pain of watching him fall one vote shy for the second straight election following the near-miss in 2014. Allen told me in November 2020 that the Hall of Fame was not on his mind.
“I never really cared about it,” he said. “When you’re a kid and you’re playing ball around the house, you’re not playing ball because you’re thinking of the Hall of Fame. You’re thinking of making it to the major leagues. The big leagues. First things first. I really don’t get it. To me, that’s all (up to) the voting. After all is said and done, it’s what people thought of you after you leave. And after I left, it was only what the sports writers thought of me, not what people thought of me.”
Allen was in bad health at the time and died a month later. His chances of making it this year seemed better thanks to national baseball writers such as Jay Jaffe and Jayson Stark advocating for his induction based on metrics that were around during Allen’s playing days.
Falling one vote short again dealt his family another blow. Because committee members are not required to reveal their votes publicly, none had to explain why they did or did not vote for an individual. This spares the committee members the criticism that Baseball Writers Association of America voters often receive when they reveal their Hall of Fame ballots every winter.
We’ll never know why some voters neglected to check Allen’s name or why they thought he was unworthy of the honor, just as we never knew why Miñoso and Santo were deemed unworthy in previous voting. For the sake of transparency, that needs to change.
“This one hurt worse than 2014, maybe because it happened twice and by the same amount of votes,” Allen’s son, Dick Allen Jr., told Tribune reporter Meghan Montemurro. “I didn’t even know what to say.
... To be honest, I was really angry the rest of the night. I mean, I had visions of taking something and throwing it across the room.”
Hopefully some day Allen will be selected, and his family and friends will get a chance to celebrate his life and career in Cooperstown, just as we’ll be celebrating Miñoso in July.