Fred McGriff is unanimous Hall selection by committee; Dale Murphy falls short again

SAN DIEGO — Just once in 10 years on the writers’ ballot did Fred McGriff get even half of the votes required for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, but his peers and others on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee had quite a different opinion of his career. Unfortunately for another former Braves great, Dale Murphy, that wasn’t the case.

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The 16-member committee voted unanimously Sunday to elect McGriff, aka “Crime Dog,” a durable, affable first baseman who had 493 homers in 19 seasons and helped the Braves win the 1995 World Series. The other seven on the ballot fell well short of the 12 votes (75 percent) required for election to the Hall, including Murphy, a Braves icon and two-time MVP, and steroid-tarnished greats Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

“It’s a beautiful night in Tampa,” McGriff said from his Florida home on a Zoom call with reporters. “I did it. I got in there. I feel as if I’ve been totally blessed my whole life and I continue to be blessed. It’s an honor to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.”

Murphy, who spent his first 14 1/2 MLB seasons with the Braves and won back-to-back MVP awards in 1982-1983, got six votes and was left out for the third time on the Era Committee or Veterans Committee ballots, after never getting as much as 25 percent of the votes during 15 years on the BBWAA writers’ ballot before his eligibility was exhausted in 2013. (That period has since been reduced to a maximum of 10 years on the writers’ ballot.)

Besides McGriff, no others on Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot came close: Don Mattingly was next with eight votes, followed by Curt Schilling (seven) and Murphy. The others — Bonds, Clemens, Albert Belle, Rafael Palmeiro — got fewer than four apiece, though specific vote totals for each were not announced, nor were the votes of any committee member made public, as has long been the case with the committees.

Murphy and the others will have to wait at least three more years before getting consideration again when this particular era committee meets in 2025.

When committee members were announced last month, there was optimism in Braves Country that McGriff and Murphy, two of the most popular players of the team’s Atlanta era, might get in, since the 16-member group included Greg Maddux and another Braves icon, Chipper Jones. Both were teammates of McGriff’s on the 1995 World Series title team.

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But Jones had to be replaced on the committee at the last minute Sunday after contracting COVID-19. Major league executive Derrick Hall replaced him on the committee, which included six other executives, three media members/historians, and Hall of Famers Maddux, Jack Morris, Ryne Sandberg, Lee Smith, Frank Thomas and Alan Trammell.

Murphy, a five-time Gold Glove outfielder widely regarded as one of the five or six best hitters of the 1980s, nevertheless peaked at 23.2 percent in 2000 on the writer’s ballot in his second year of eligibility.

McGriff’s percentage jumped from 23.2 percent in 2018 to 39.8 percent in 2019, but that was still barely half of the 75 percent required for election via the BBWAA ballot. So it was left to the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, which considers players whose greatest contributions came from 1980 and later.

Each member of the committee could vote for a maximum of three on the eight-player ballot. All 16 deemed McGriff worthy of the Hall of Fame, something that former teammates and opponents said for years when his low voting totals ranked among the more puzzling annual rites of BBWAA balloting for a decade.

McGriff played 19 seasons from 1986 through 2004 — 4 1/2 seasons with the Braves — and hit .284 with 493 home runs, 1,550 RBIs and .886 OPS in 2,460 games. He finished in the top 10 in league MVP balloting six times, including fourth place in 1993, the year he was traded from San Diego to Atlanta and helped guide the Braves past San Francisco in one of the greatest playoff races of the modern era.

“He never drew attention to himself, he was never a hot dog, he was never a prima donna,” said Jim Leyland, longtime former manager of the Pirates, Marlins, Rockies and Tigers. “He was another of those guys who was like an old shoe. He just went out there every day and he was lightning in a bottle. He never promoted himself or any of that stuff. He was kind of a quiet guy, just went about his business to beat you. Great guy, great guy.”

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McGriff was a five-time All-Star and three-time Silver Slugger Award winner, and one thing that separated him from many other great players was how he consistently thrived in postseason play, particularly with the Braves. He played 50 games in five postseasons including four with the Braves in 1993 and 1995-1997, helping Atlanta win the World Series in 1995 when he slugged .649 during a 14-game postseason march to the city’s first pro sports title.

McGriff hit .303 with 37 RBIs and a .917 OPS in 50 career postseason games, and with the Braves it was an even more robust .323 with 10 homers, .411 OBP, .581 slugging percentage and .992 OPS in 45 postseason games. During Atlanta’s 1995 postseason run, he hit .333 (19-for-57) with six doubles, four homers, nine RBIs and 1.065 OPS, including two homers and a .955 OPS in the World Series against Cleveland.

The Braves lost a six-game World Series against the Yankees in 1996, but not because of McGriff, who hit .300 with two homers and a 1.023 OPS.

McGriff was one of the great trade acquisitions in Atlanta history, doing everything the Braves hoped he would when they got him before the 1993 trade deadline from San Diego in exchange for Melvin Nieves, Donnie Elliott and minor league pitcher Vince Moore, who would never make it past Double A.

McGriff hit .310 with 19 homers, 55 RBIs and a 1.004 OPS in 68 games with the Braves that season, when Atlanta won 104 games and the West division title over San Francisco (103 wins). He had his fifth consecutive top-10 MVP finish that year, coming in fourth behind Bonds, Lenny Dykstra and Braves teammate David Justice. Another Brave, Ron Gant, finished fifth.

McGriff had a career-best 37 home runs that season with San Diego and Atlanta, the sixth of his seven consecutive seasons with more than 30 homers. Though he never had more than 37, he had 10 seasons with at least 30 homers and was the home-run leader once in each league.

Manager Bobby Cox penciled him in the cleanup spot throughout the slugger’s years with the Braves, batting him behind the likes of three-hole hitters Gant in 1993, Ryan Klesko and Terry Pendleton in 1994, and for three seasons behind Chipper Jones, beginning in Jones’ 1995 rookie season.

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“No disrespect to Harold Baines or someone like that,” Jones said on The Athletic’s 755 Is Real podcast in 2020, “but Freddie McGriff could rake. Five hundred homers, and he was my bodyguard for my first two or three years in the league — and man, he got me a bunch of fastballs. People would have much rather pitched to me than they would him, and every year you could ink 30 homers and 100 RBIs out of Freddie McGriff, and not many people even to this day you can say that about.”

Baines was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2019 by the Veterans Committee, an election that shocked many around baseball, simply because while Baines was a very good player, he never was regarded as one of the best two or three players in his league. Baines was an outfielder and DH who played 22 MLB seasons through 2001, finished with a .289 career average, 289 home runs and an .820 OPS. He never finished higher than ninth in MVP balloting.

In that same 2020 interview, Jones discussed Murphy, who, in addition to winning NL MVP awards in 1982 and 1983, led the NL in homers in each of the next two seasons (1984-1985) and was a seven-time All-Star and four-time winner of the Silver Slugger Award. Jones wasn’t on the committee at that time, but said he thought Murphy’s chances of being elected at some point were “very good.”

“I’m going to be pushing for it,” Jones said. “When you think of the 1980s, at least in the National League, there were two perennial MVP candidates, Mike Schmidt and Dale Murphy. In the other league, it was George Brett. And those guys (Schmidt and Brett) were first-ballot Hall of Famers, by the way.”

The knock on Murphy has always been that, while he had a fabulous run in the 1980s, his stats plummeted after his age-31 season, hence the .265 career average and .815 OPS that are well below average for outfielders in the Hall of Fame.

Murphy, who is now 66, had 350 doubles, 398 home runs and 1,266 RBIs in 18 seasons, including 371 homers and an .829 OPS in 14 1/2 seasons with the Braves. He finished his career with Philadelphia and Colorado. Knee injuries diminished his performance late in his career and limited him to 44 games in his final two seasons before he retired at 37.

From his first full season with Atlanta in 1978 through 1988, Murphy hit .273 with an .852 OPS with 332 homers and 981 RBIs, averaging 30 homers and 89 RBIs in that 11-year span and receiving MVP votes seven times.

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Jones summarized his thoughts regarding Murphy in that 2020 interview: “He’s a great Atlanta Brave, he’s a great ambassador for the game of baseball, and I think it’s a supreme injustice that he’s not (in the Hall of Fame) already.”

McGriff, who turned 59 last month and looks like he still could hit .280 with 20 homers, had eight seasons with more than 100 RBIs, six seasons with a .300 or higher batting average, 11 seasons with an OPS of at least .923, five seasons with more than 90 walks. He had only three seasons with more than 120 strikeouts. In 1989 with Toronto he led the AL in homers (36), OPS (.924) and OPS+ (165).

Another stat that often went overlooked, at least in his years on the BBWAA ballot: McGriff played more than 150 games in 10 of his 19 seasons, and that’s not counting 1995 when he led the NL by playing all 144 games for Atlanta in a season shortened by a work stoppage, which started in late 1994.

If not for games lost to the work stoppage — the Braves played 114 games in 1994; McGriff played 113 — there is little doubt he would have finished with more than 500 homers, which some believe was one reason he was left off ballots years ago when statistical milestones such as 3,000 hits, 500 homers or 300 wins virtually assured election.

He was well on his way to a career-high for homers in 1994 before the season was halted, McGriff finishing with 34 in 113 games. He had 61 homers in 257 games during those 1994-1995 seasons with Atlanta, playing all but one team game in that span. His 61 home runs in 258 team games in those two seasons projects to 76 homers if the full seasons had been played, and the additional 15 homers — or even if he’d slumped and hit only half that many — would’ve given McGriff 500 or more career homers.

“I pray to God that (that McGriff gets in the Hall of Fame),” Andruw Jones told The Athletic last year when asked about McGriff’s chances via the Era Committee. “I love Fred McGriff and I know what kind of player he was, what he brought to the table. Nobody can tell me what Fred McGriff didn’t do in his career that wasn’t better than some guys in the Hall of Fame now.

“Even considering the guys that just went in the last 10 years at the first-base position. Nothing against (Jeff) Bagwell; Bagwell was a great hitter. But I don’t think he was a better first baseman than Fred McGriff.”

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Marquis Grissom, another Braves teammate in 1995 and 1996, had been confident McGriff would get into the Hall of Fame. Grissom batted leadoff for the Braves both of those seasons and scored a career-high 106 runs in 1996, often being driven in by McGriff.

“He’ll get there eventually,” Grissom said just over a year ago. “He’s a Hall of Famer. His numbers speak for themselves.”

After McGriff ran out of eligibility on the BBWAA ballot in 2019 — six years after Murphy’s eligibility expired — Hall of Famer Andre Dawson told The Athletic that both players should be enshrined at Cooperstown.

“(Murphy) was destined for the Hall of Fame; he had done everything you could ask him to do,” said Dawson, the 1987 NL MVP with the Chicago Cubs, five years after Murphy’s consecutive MVPs. “Whether longevity was going to be another factor involved, I don’t know — I don’t know what those (writers) are thinking about when they vote. But you’re talking about a player who was dominant. He was one of the top two or three players in the league for a stint, and I mean, he did everything the right way, on the field and off the field.”

“I tell you, (Murphy) was one of the players I admired the most,” Dawson said. “Because of how he conducted himself; how he carried himself. And in a sense, I saw a lot of myself in him, and that’s probably why I admired him from a distance. But to me, that’s the thing about the different eras — players get lost, because of the fact that you have another generation of players that come in when the game is played a little bit differently, and you’ve got other aspects that change the game itself, and the numbers. And you kind of get lost in the shuffle.”

Dawson also spoke about the increased use of analytics in today’s game: “With all of these different stats that they come with — I don’t even know what half of it or what it stands for, or what impact it has on winning and losing and having a good season. But you mentioned Fred McGriff — that’s a no-brainer (for Hall of Fame election). It’s a no-brainer. But again, that’s a situation where writers have varying and different opinions, and for that reason, the vote total is all over the place.”

(Top photo of former Atlanta Braves first baseman Fred McGriff, shown in 2015: Brett Davis / Associated Press file)

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