The Hall of Famers: AL St. Louis Browns.

[Bill_McCurdy]

Baseball Almanac just got a whole lot better as the primary resource for any kind of baseball research. That's my opinion, at any rate.

In response to the visitor named jalbright who asked/suggested that it might be nice to have our own Hall of Fame thread that we could link to his place, I decided to take on that idea. With the help of Baseball Almanac, it wasn't hard, and it also brought up more players than most of us had considered as a Hall of Fame group that had a direct connection to our American League Browns. I didn't mess with including the 19th century St. Louis Browns of the National League that later became known as the Cardinals, but here's a link to the Baseball Almanac Hall of Fame I use to compile our list here for the American League St. Louis Browns:

http://baseball-almanac.com/hof/hofmem3.shtml

The St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame Museum also remembers the history of the St. Louis Browns. On their website, the following statement has this much to say about the Browns:

Remember the St. Louis Browns (1902-1953), the city's American League team. The pennant-winning A.L. Browns played against the N.L. Cardinals in the 1944 Streetcar series, so named since both contenders were St. Louis teams that, incidentally, both played in Sportsman's Park. A fine collection of memorabilia from the Browns gives an overview of their years in St. Louis. One of the Brown's greatest stars, Hall of Famer George Sisler is represented with a collection of personal memorabilia from the Sisler family.

Here's the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame Museum's website address for a closer look at what they do:

http://cardinals.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/stl/history/stl_history_halloffame.jsp

In terms of how many Browns have been honored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the picture is an interesting one. As we know, there are only two former American Browns who reached the HOF primarily for their merits on the field with our franchise. George Sisler and Bobby Wallace are listed below on our list in bold type to show their status as guys-who-got-there-as-AL-Browns. That being said, there are also 11 other Hall of Famers who passed through St. Louis as players and/or executives who really did not earn their passage to great acclaim by, or mainly because of, their time spent with the AL St. Louis Browns. Nevertheless, these other 11 men do swell our list of Hall Famers to 13 who have had some hisorical connection to the AL Browns from 1902 to 1953.

Here is the List of The 13 Former Browns Now in The Hall of Fame, with the two pure Brown inductees in bold type. The list also shows their position in the game, the year of their induction, the % of votes they received, unless picked by the Veterans Committee, and their seasons with the Browns:

Hall of Fame AL St. Louis Browns

1. George Sisler 1b (1939) 85.77% - Browns Years 1915-27.
2. Rogers Hornsby 2b (1942) 78.11% - Browns Years: 1933-37.
3. Jesse Burkett of (1946) Veterans - Browns Years: 1902-04.
4. Rube Waddell p (1946) Veterans - Browns Years: 1908-1910.
5. Dizzy Dean p (1946) 79.17% - Browns Years: 1947
6. Bobby Wallace ss (1953) Veterans - Browns Years 1902-16
7. Heinie Manush of (1964) Veterans - Browns Years: 1928-30.
8. Branch Rickey c/executive (1967) Veterans - Browns Player Years: 1905-06, 1914.
9. Goose Goslin of (1968) Veterans - Browns Years: 1930-32.
10. Satchel Paige p (1971) Negro Leagues - Browns Years: 1951-53.
11. Jim Bottomley 1b (1974) Veterans - Browns Years: 1936-37.
12. Rick Ferrell c (1984) Veterans - Browns Years: 1929-33.
13. Bill Veeck executive (1991) Veterans - Browns Executive Years: 1951-53.

This thread is now linked to the other forum's thread on franchise Hall of Famers. I'd like to invite the rest of our family of posters here to pick up again on a discussion we had a while back. That is, what other Browns are deserving of the Hall of Fame? If I recall correctly, Ken Williams is the only former Browns player who received strong support for the HOF, but there was some boosting for Ned Garver. As much as I like Ned, I can't really place him in the group of candidates for Hall of Fame consideration.

The link to jalright's HOF thread outside our forum is: http://baseball-fever.com/showthread.php?t=49981

What do you guys think? Did I miss anyone we should've listed? And does Ken Williams, or any other former Brown, really deserve further consideration by the HOF in 2007?

[Brownieand45sfan]

It is interesting to note that we have the Orioles beat in Hall of Famers 13-10, despite our being in existence for only 51 years compared to their being in existence for 52 (I know, I know, some of their players, like Cal Ripken, have to wait out the mandatory post-retirement period! But that only gives them 11. And something tells me attorney Peter Angelos isn't going to be inducted into the Hall anytime soon.

see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Orioles#St._Louis_Browns

P.S. If Globe-Democrat sportswriter Bob Burnes had lived longer, he would have had Ken Williams in the Hall through the veteran's committee by now.

[Brownieand45sfan]

Does anybody see any sense in including the 19th Century Browns in our allotment? It would sure swell our ranks:

James Francis "Pud" Galvin
Roger Connor

or at least these two Brownies who were in an "American" league (i.e. the American Association)?:

Charlie Comiskey
Clark Griffith

or maybe not?:D

I am not an expert on 19th Century baseball, but I notice that although the Browns are generally recounted as having moved from the AA to the NL in 1892, not one* of the 29 players from '91 were retained for the '92 roster and that Owner Von Der Ahe seems to have drafted his new National League Browns from the four winds, which winds surprisingly included other former AA players but none from the AA Browns whom he had had on his payroll only months before. This despite the fact that the Browns had reeled off a seven-year stretch of great baseball including one third place finish, two second-place finishes, four first-place finishes and a 1-2-1 record in World Series. That's how you reward success?

And with thew Western League picking up as a minor league just a year or two after the demise of the AA, it is not much of a stretch to say that the Western League was the inheritor of the AA's mantle more than the National League (although the WL had been around in rudimentary form in the 1880s, it too had suffered bankruptcy, dissolved, and was a new creature when it was reformed by the young Ban Johnson in 1893. It of course took a while for the WL to pick up the pieces of rejected ball players and fashion them into a league, but not long. The Western League becomes the American League in 1900 and declares itself a major league in January 1901.

So other than the fluke of ownership and name, I don't see how the AA Browns are even associatable with the 1890s NL Browns-Perfectos-Cardinals.
Look at it this way. If the *American* League Devil Rays are disbanded and the players dispersed but the next year the same owner gets a National League Devil Rays franchise, with whole new players from a franchise draft, are the AL Devil Rays and the NL Devil Rays the same "team"? It would have been neater and cleaner if von Der Ahe had rechristened his St. Louis Nationals something other than Browns in 1892. This obscured the lack of connection between the pre- and post- 1892 Browns. And it would have appeared plainer to the eye that the '02 Browns were in a real sense a rebirth of the old American Association team.

I am sure there is some 19th Century expert out there who can correct me if I am wrong. If I don't get an answer in a couple weeks I may take the thread over to the 19th Century Baseball forum.