Alan Trammell Belongs in the Hall of Fame, and It Doesn't Matter

When it comes to catching posterity's myopic eye, Alan Trammell has a problem. If you haven't heard of Trammell—and if you're a baseball fan under the age of 30, there's no reason why you should have, given that his last interesting season was in 1993—he was a Detroit Tigers great, the MVP of the 1984 World Series, a four-time Gold Glover and a six-time All-Star who is about to be none-too-gently ushered off the annual Hall of Fame ballot after 15 years of neglected residence.

Whether you witnessed Trammell's career or came late and are trying to place him via the back of his baseball card, there is no way to take an objective look at his career without reaching the conclusion that he was one of the 10 best shortstops of all time, and most certainly was at the time his career ended. A few shortstops had higher peaks, some had longer careers, and a small handful were better defenders for longer, but none of that takes away from his accomplishments. The Baseball Writers Association of America, Cooperstown's gatekeepers, are about to give him the bum's rush anyway.

With every Hall of Fame ballot debate, there are folks who come as smug martyrs, wanting to proselytize on behalf of some player who must get a plaque lest irreparable harm be done to the game's Sacred Scrolls of Honor. By this, they mean they feel very strongly about the completeness (as they perceive it) of an obscure museum in a picturesque upstate New York hinterland. Beware people who perceive mystic powers in intellectual hoarding. By fixating on the Trammells of the world (or the Blylevens, or the Santos), the warrior priests tend to overestimate their own power to select or deselect details of history. They also tend to overestimate the patience of the typical fan's attention span.

We all have our personal cult figures who never got the mainstream love they deserved—our Kinks to everyone else's Beatles. We can delve into the reasons for that, but often we just have to shrug our shoulders and say, "There's no accounting for taste," or, if we're in a snobbish mood, "The average person's palate isn't educated enough to appreciate [insert something not a Transformers movie here]."

Facts, though, aren't a matter of taste. That's why Trammell isn't the Ray Davies of baseball but—going back to an earlier British invasion for the appropriate metaphor—the John Adams. Though Adams did as much as anyone to get the United States on its feet, and was more clear-eyed than his fellow Founding Fathers on the threat to the Republic posed by plutocracy, his face doesn't grace the currency the way Benjamin Franklin's does, nor has received a big marble payoff from posterity the way George Washington has on the National Mall; all he got was Paul Giamatti. The man himself predicted that he would be written out of history in favor of a simplified narrative that reduced the nation's founding to Franklin and Washington. He was as right about that as about a great many other, more significant things.

Washington and Franklin were more charismatic than Adams, whose accomplishments were also subtler—fewer guns, no lightning. Trammell, too, got lost in a crowd. Although his Tigers won the 1984 championship and were very good at times, during his career—which overlaps almost exactly with the Sparky Anderson era in Detroit—they were in aggregate more often a runner-up or an also-ran in a tough AL East dominated by the Yankees, Red Sox, and Blue Jays. Trammell also got lost behind flashier teammates. Lou Whitaker, Trammell's longtime double-play partner and a deserving Hall of Famer himself, won the Rookie of the Year over him; MVP voters tended to rank Trammell behind more traditional slugging teammates like Kirk Gibson and Cecil Fielder.

Voters of that time had the excuse of being primitives hung up on batting average, home runs, and RBI. With seven full .300 seasons but no batting titles, Trammell only half checks the first box; with an average of 17 home runs a year and only one hundred-RBI season, he misses the other two almost entirely. He also had bad timing: obscured by somersaulting Ozzie Smith on the one side and the position-redefining Cal Ripken on the other.

Today's voters should be better informed. Smith and Ripken's plaques are already dusty on the wall, so they're out of the way, and we can more easily contextualize shortstops of the pre-Jeter/A-Rod/Garciaparra era now that all of the above except Rodriguez are in the rear-view mirror. Hint: They looked a lot like Trammell, who retired with the third-most home runs hit as a shortstop.

When Trammell retired, in 1996, he ranked as the seventh-greatest shortstop of all time, as measured by career Wins Above Replacement, nestled comfortably between Hall of Famers Arky Vaughan and Pee Wee Reese. Since then, he's dropped all of one place, having been edged by Derek Jeter, a more durable offensive player but a significantly inferior defender. By this standard, Trammell is about equal in career value to Barry Larkin, who is already in the Hall. During his own career, Trammell was a three-time top-10 finisher in MVP balloting, including a close second-place finish in 1987, a year in which voters in both leagues—and this is a first-guess from someone who actually was around then—must have been on some truly spectacular drugs.

If you've read this far expecting a review of Trammell's accomplishments and an argument for his enshrinement and only sort of got it, well, it's been 15 years. You've heard it before, and if you remain an apostate after this long there's probably no reaching you. And that's OK, because none of it matters! Memory and museums are inevitably incomplete, and this will be the case whether Trammell gets into the Hall or not.

Sure, it's important to grapple with history—you can't know what you've got until you know what you had. Unfortunately, whether we're talking sports history or history-history, both sides of that had/got equation inspire unbridgeable conflict. We have learned, painfully, that we cannot usefully debate the meaning of the Civil War, the Reconstruction, Confederate battle flags, the Second or Fourteenth Amendments, or, for that matter, whether today's antibiotic-fed athletic specimen might possibly be superior to his dwarfish Deadball-era ancestor. We're so touchy and ill-informed about the big things, not to mention the Bonds things, that the comparatively prosaic underrating of Alan Trammell and his ilk barely registers.

The history of baseball is incomplete with or without Alan Trammell. The National Mall might be incomplete without a big statue of John Adams. There's probably someone out there who feels it's incomplete without a graven image of Chester Arthur, and they might be right. One could also argue that no zoo tells the complete story of biodiversity unless it includes Lumholtz's tree kangaroo, and also my cat. If it doesn't, it's useless. Bulldoze it.

Then again, there are a great many more people who have never heard of Lumholtz's thingamabob and are happy just to see the elephants and the giraffes. They're bored by tree kangaroos, which sleep most of the day anyhow. This is no less true of the common baseball fan, who is far more concerned with next year's shortstop.

So to whom is the Alan Trammell argument really directed? Not the general fan, not the voter, but to a subset of true believers who know a brick building can and must tell a complete story, even though it's impossible, even though we could never agree on what that story is—as demonstrated by the exclusion of Trammell, an obviously deserving candidate. They're talking to each other for their own self-gratification. Once you accept that reality, all urgency regarding the enshrinement of Trammell or any other figure on his tier of baseball history should vanish in a puff of apathy. Where Cooperstown is concerned, this is just how it works—even, and maybe especially, when this means it doesn't work at all.