It’s the ‘Hall of Fame’, not the ‘Hall of Great Stats’. If being popular among sportwriters and (especially) fans isn’t reason enough to be in the Hall of FAME, I don’t know what is. This tendency to be a stickler for numbers, as if they can tell the whole story of a player’s career and impact to the fans, is why the Hall of Fame has become such a joke in recent years. Now it’s all “but he’s .02 lower than the lowest current member…clearly he shouldn’t be in…”

Bah.

Really, I think the fact that Ogden Nash used him should tell *you* something about whether he deserved to be in there or not. I seriously doubt he was “stuck” for the letter ‘B’.

He consistantly landed near the top of the regular balloting (fifth that year), was considered by both John McGraw and Branch Rickey to be the best catcher they had ever seen and if he isn’t the last catcher to steal over 200 bases in a career (it’s hard to get accurate numbers from those early days), he’s one of the very few.