The Royals Hall of Fame is about to get MUCH bigger.
The Royals have an absolutely STACKED Hall of Fame ballot, this year. Were the balloting unlimited, I could easily see a scenario where all nine candidates were elected. Sadly we voters are only allowed to place five votes. So I had to get a little bit creative with my ballot, this year.
There were some easier choices to be made off the top of my head. First of all, I knew I was going to leave Johnny Damon off. He was a good player for KC, but even fans of that era probably wouldn’t speak of him first when discussing those teams. He played far more of his career outside KC than in it, even if his longest stop was with Kansas City. He was my first favorite Royal thanks to a leadoff home run in the first Royals game I ever attended in person, but he also was the first one to break my heart. All of that together means he loses out on this stacked ballot and likely would go unelected even if he was the only candidate.
Next up, things get a little bit strategic. Alex Gordon is a top Royals player of all time and was a lifetime player in Kansas City. That sort of thing gets you voted into the Hall of Fame. Similarly, Wade Davis had one of the greatest three-year stretches for a reliever of all time and, despite lacking the saves, is in a conversation for best Royals reliever ever with Dan Quissenberry and Jeff Montgomery. The way I see it, those guys are going to get an overwhelming vote and be elected easily. So, knowing there are 8 guys between whom I must offer my five votes, I choose not to elect the shoo-ins in hopes of getting enough support for other guys I believe in. Gordon and Davis do not get my vote, not because they’re not worthy, but because there are more guys I need to get in and I don’t think they need my help.
So here are the five guys I did vote for.
I always knew I was going to vote for Butler because I knew he was a terrific hitter for Kansas City and because, without him, the Royals don’t make the playoffs in 2014. He also has one of the best moments from those playoffs.
That said, David Lesky wrote over at Inside the Crown, a much better numerical argument for his inclusion.
Let’s look at Butler for a second. Here are his ranks in Royals history offensively that are very impressive:
AVG - 4
OBP - 12
SLG - 14
OPS - 12
H - 9
TB - 9
2B - 8
HR - 10
RBI - 8
BB - 7
OPS+ - 9
XBH - 9
Billy is a top-10 hitter for the Royals All-Time. That deserves to be in the Hall of Fame!
Beltrán would be a shoo-in for the Royals hall had David Glass not tried to cheap out on him over $1 million dollars. Some of you will say Beltrán has no place in the Hall of Fame because of the cheating scandal with the Astros in 2017. To that I would ask why something that happened on a different team more than a decade after he last played for the Royals and which did not impact them in any way should be a consideration for his inclusion in the team Hall of Fame.
Beyond that, Beltrán is extremely likely to be able to overcome all of that to become an MLB Hall of Famer player. There’s no excuse for excluding a guy from a team Hall when he was good enough to make the MLB Hall and good chunk of it was done while playing for your team.
Joakim Soria was so good for the Royals that he once received Cy Young Award votes and MVP votes as a relief pitcher for a Royals team that lost 95 games. He saved 43 of the team's 67 wins that season. He finished his career with three more saves than Greg Holland, which leaves him third all-time in career saves for the Royals behind only legendary closers Jeff Montgomery and Dan Quisenberry.
I’ll admit, he was the last one I decided to vote for. But we’ll talk about how he barely edged out the others when we talk about them.
As I have matured as a baseball fan, I gradually learned that some stats - like batting average and RBIs - were not as meaningful as others. I also began to learn to discount the value of such things as “veteran presence.” But as I matured even more, I realized some of those things do still matter. Just in different ways than I had understood as a child.
One of the things that matters when it comes to Hall of Fame, to me, is whether you can tell the story of baseball (or a team, in the case of the team Hall of Fame) without mentioning that player. You cannot tell the story of the Royals without Jarrod Dyson. He was the epitome of the underdog spirit that helped power the Royals from 2013-2015.
As long as I live, I will never be able to forget hearing about how he was a 50th-round pick, a draft slot that no longer existed long before 2020 came and wiped away another large chunk of the draft along with many minor league teams. As I mentioned when we discussed the podcast on a recent episode of Royals Rundown, whenever I think about the best moment to be a Royals fan it will be all of the 2014 Wild Card game. And when I think of the best moment in that Wild Card game, I think of Jarrod Dyson stealing third base against Athletics’ closer Sean Doolittle in the ninth inning while the Royals still trailed by one. And then capping it all off with a motorcycle revving celebration as the crowd, which had been loud all night, reached new decibel levels.
Jarrod Dyson belongs in the Royals Hall of Fame.
Herrera’s case is extremely similar to Wade Davis’s, but he doesn’t have the saves or the same level of dominance. But, as just talked about with Dyson, there’s more to the Hall of Fame than raw numbers. Herrera meets similar criteria, and so he also gets my vote. If you don’t end up with all three members of HDH in the Royals Hall of Fame, what are you even doing?
That means, in addition to Damon, Davis, and Gordon, I didn’t vote for Yordano Ventura. I know many of you will see that as sacrilegious because of his untimely passing and “what might have been.” And truly, what might have been will perhaps haunt us all forever. But he also got worse every full season he was in the big leagues.
I was up front at the top of this article that, if I had my way, I’d vote for eight or even all nine candidates. But I can’t, and I chose to value Joakim Soria’s actual contributions higher than Ventura’s potential contributions. I don’t begrudge any of you if you choose differently, I think if you asked me on a different day I might choose differently.
With that said, I hope we see at least three or four guys go in this year. The ballot isn’t going to become any less stacked any time soon as players like Alcides Escobar, Jeremy Guthrie, Jason Vargas, Lorenzo Cain, Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer, and Greg Holland all become eligible very soon.
