In addition to that, there's the Mark McGwire steroids issue and the questions of just how much support he'll get. But if we can put the steroids aside for a moment, there are a lot of baseball historians as well as voting members of the Baseball Writers Association who maintain that, his 583 homers notwithstanding, McGwire should not be an automatic first-ballot electee. Indeed, the case can be made that, as a barely adequate first baseman who had only 1,626 hits, McGwire was a one-dimensional player. I have always looked at 2,000 hits as a benchmark for the Hall of Fame.
Case in point: One might say Reggie Jackson was a one-dimensional player, especially since he struck out more than any player in the history of the game and had his share of shaky moments in right field. But for all his strikeouts, Jackson also had 2,584 hits, 958 more than McGwire. And while perceived light-hitting shortstops such as Ozzie Smith, Dave Concepcion and Larry Bowa were all noted for their fielding, all of them had more than 2,000 hits. The Hall of Fame slugger most compared to McGwire in terms of being one-dimensional is Harmon Killebrew, a below-average third baseman/first baseman who had 573 homers, leading the AL six times. But Killebrew's .256 average is the lowest of any Hall of Famer except catcher Ray Schalk (.253) and because of that, plus his inferior fielding, I didn't vote for Killebrew. But at least he did have 2,086 hits and that was undoubtedly a helpful factor in his being elected to the Hall on his fourth year of eligibility in 1984.
