The Country test

Itry not to think about the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. I haven’t been there since I was a little kid, and can’t see making a special trip. I try not to care about who gets elected to the Hall of Fame, and sometimes I succeed.

For example, a year or so ago, a reader wrote to correct my assertion that Enos “Country” Slaughter was a Hall of Famer. He told me that while Slaughter was in the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame, he had not made it to Cooperstown. I assumed he was right, and thanked him for the gentle correction. It wasn’t until I started to think about writing this column that I actually looked Slaughter up—he is in the Hall of Fame, elected in 1985 by the Veterans Committee.

Enos Slaughter retired after the 1959 season; I’ve never saw him play, but he featured prominently in my baseball education. I read a lot about his “mad dash” from first base to score the winning run for the Cardinals in the ’46 series— about what appeared to be his intentional spiking of Jackie Robinson in a game in 1947.

It was that spiking—and unsubstantiated rumors that he was part of a group of Cardinals who planned to boycott games against the Dodgers if Robinson played in 1947—that probably kept him out of the Hall of Fame for so long. Slaughter protested he never intentionally spiked anyone, and there’s no evidence that the Cardinals did anything more than grumble about having to take the field against a Black player (here’s no reason to believe Slaughter even did that, other than the fact that he was from rural North Carolina, the son of a tobacco farmer named Zadok).

Slaughter joined the Cardinals in 1938 and played for 19 seasons, losing three to his service in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He ended up hitting an even .300 (actually .2998993204) and was named to 10 All-Star teams. He led the National League in runs batted in in

1946 and was a four-time World Series champion.

If I were to establish a threshold for a Hall of Fame outfielder, it would be very close to Enos Slaughter. Better than Country? You’re in. Not quite Country? Sorry, nice career.

Slaughter is a quantum test, the Schrödinger’s cat of Hall of Fame candidates. Until you look him up, he’s simultaneously in and out of the Hall.

On the one hand, he seems an exemplar of the Hall of Very Good; after the Cardinals traded him to the Yankees two days before the start of the 1954 season, he was never the same player. He spent the last five years of his career as a part-timer, mainly contributing as a pinch hitter. In his final year he hit .171.

But I could make (and almost believe in) a case for Slaughter as better than Pete Rose—or at least a Rose without the luck or the self-promotion acumen. Slaughter finished with more than 2,300 hits and would have finished close to 3,000 had he not lost three seasons to the war. He probably would have been extended more opportunities to build his hit totals late in his career had he been closer to 3,000 hits.

People cared about 3,000 hits in the ’50s; Sam Crawford, who finished his career with 2,961, was obsessed with the number back in 1917. After he was released by the Detroit Tigers, Crawford desperately tried to catch on with another team to continue his pursuit.

“Baseball has been good to me and I appreciate the fact,” he wrote in Baseball Magazine shortly after his release. “…. management is after results, and if those results can be better obtained by having someone in my shoes … I am not criticizing anybody nor anything except the unusual succession of events which have brought me so near the realization of my dreams and then threatened to leave me just short of its attainment. For I am not thru [sic], I will not admit that I am thru. I can still hit that old baseball. I can still play the game up to major league standard. I can still get those 3,000 hits if only I have the chance.”

He never got it. Crawford played his next four seasons in the minor Pacific Coast League. (He made the Hall of Fame in 1957.)

Rose emulated Slaughter; after being upbraided by a minor league manager, Country ran out everywhere on a baseball diamond for the rest of his career. (When a writer marveled to Yankees manager Casey Stengel that Slaughter ran “out everything, even pop flies,” Stengel said thoughtfully: “It is remarkable. I just wish he didn’t hit so many pop flies.” )

Like Rose, Slaughter’s only outstanding baseball attributes were his competitive spirit and his ability to hit line drives on command. Both were overachievers; both hung around a couple of seasons too long. I guess Rose was a better player than Slaughter, but he was a whole lot closer to Slaughter than he was to, say, Ty Cobb.

Still, by the Better than Country standard, Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame. I’m not sure he really wants it at this point. While baseball has given him his chances, Rose has made an industry of his exile.

I think if baseball is going to have a Hall of Fame (and I’d just as soon it make do with a museum) then it should be comprised of the best players, and that their stories should be told in context with their times. We wouldn’t be punishing Gary Sheffield because his name turned up in the Mitchell Report; Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Pete Rose would be in be in there with parental warning on their plaques. We would be grown up about the sometimes rowdy, sometimes irredeemable people who populate the pastime.

Slaughter thought himself unfairly deprived of being in the Hall of Fame by baseball writers who considered him a racist. Maybe he was, though he’d go on to mentor Lou Brock, who was inducted to the Hall on the same day in 1985. In his induction speech, Brock talked about how Slaughter’s generation of players feared the influx of Black players when Robinson was called up by the Dodgers in 1947.

“Those persons were merely acting upon borrowed attitudes,” Brock said. Forgive them, they know not what they do.

Two Black members of the Veterans’ Committee, Monte Irvin and Buck O’Neil, championed Slaughter’s cause. When someone pointed out to O’Neil that Slaughter was an alleged racist, O’Neil said, “Well, he was hardly the only one.” And years later, when someone suggested that O’Neil had supported Slaughter because he expressed regret for his action, O’Neil demurred:

“No. It’s because he could play ball.”