Alan Trammell Should be in the HOF

To grow up in the Midwest is to grow up rooting for underdogs.  In my childhood that meant the Detroit Tigers.  I was just becoming a baseball fan in 1961, playing little league and dying a little when my home town team rolled into Yankee Stadium to play the hated Yankees in a Labor Day series that would decide the pennant.  The Tigers were swept, and my long agony – interrupted only be the miracles of 68 and 84 – as a fan was born.  We get used to our teams losing (well, in less you’re a Cubs fan), it’s the lack of respect for our heroes that really hurts.  Oh sure, there is an occasional Kaline or Greenberg that sneaks in, but players who if they had played for the Yankees, Dodgers or Red Sox would surely be in the Hall are routinely ignored.

 To me the most irritating example of this is Alan Trammell, shortstop for the Tigers.  He played of the 84 world champions, the team that opened with a record of 35-5, still the best on record.  He was the MVP of the World Series and probably should have been the league MVP, losing out to George “Taco” Bell of the Blue Jays.  Along with Lou Whitaker, he was part of the longest playing and most productive double play combination in the history of baseball.  He was a consummate professional, adapting to multiple spots in the order to help the team.  No one who looks at the numbers seems to disagree that he fits comfortably in zone of HOF shortstops.  So what’s the problem.

Any Tiger fan can tell you the problem – he played in Detroit.  If he had played in New York, Boston or LA, he would have already have his plaque in the gallery on the first floor of the Hall.   But unless the Veterans Committee has mercy on he and Sweet Lou (Jack Morris was probably the best player on that team but he left via free agency, so Twins and Blue Jays fans can lobby for him) they’ll be unjustly forgotten.  Trammell isn’t upset at the snub, but at its core this is about more than baseball.  This is about having to deal with the snobbery of the East and West coast.  Of having to listen to idiots who think they own the known world because they happen to live in the promised land.  Alan Trammell is being discounted for the same reason we are all discounted – geography.

In the Midwest we grow up hearing about the “best” schools, food, people and sports teams.  We listen, but we never hear our names called.  Frankly, it’s sickening.  I’ve been around plenty of the best people from the best schools, and – unless you count massive egos and hubris – I’m still waiting to be awed.  Alan Trammell (even though he’s from California- only a little better that the East) is a consummate Midwestern hero.  He was a great baseball player, but he wasn’t a celebrity.  He did his job and he did it well – better than a lot of shortstops who have been inducted.

There’s nothing you folks in the East can do to solve what ails us here in the heartland – well you could just shut up and listen sometimes.  But you can make a good faith gesture.  You can put Tramm in the Hall where he belongs.trammell