Conservatives rightly like to complain about the
establishment media’s political bias. What’s less well known, but
just as obvious, is the “big market” bias of sportswriters. It
shows up most annoyingly in Hall of Fame selections in football
and baseball — and some recent choices are so unfair that
they’ve been galling me all year. So forgive another excursion
out of politics into sports — but with the NFL Hall of Fame
having just announced last weekend its list of 131 “preliminary
nominees” (from which between four and seven winners will be
chosen), now seems as good a time as any to scratch this
persistent itch.
In football, the aggrieved party is longtime Saints
linebacker Rickey Jackson, who is quite literally the very first
defensive player I would choose, from all of NFL history, around
whom to build a team. In baseball, the most unfairly ignored
player is former Expos and Cubs slugger Andre Dawson — although
pitcher Bert “Be Home” Blyleven can make almost as strong a
case.
Start with Jackson. He went unchosen again this past year
while his contemporary, New England linebacker Andre Tippett, was
inducted into the Hall at Canton, Ohio. In fact, Jackson has
never even been a finalist for the honor. But as good as Tippett
was, Jackson was better by all measurable indices, and (I would
argue) by intangibles too. (Attribution note: I am taking some of
these stats from a similar column by John DeShazier of the
Times-Picayune on Aug. 5, as a time-saver,
so credit is due him; but I’ve been planning to write on this
very comparison of Jackson and Tippett since last winter.)
Jackson had more sacks than Tippett, 128 to 100 — and that
doesn’t even include Jackson’s eight unofficial sacks in his
rookie year, 1981, because the league started counting sacks as
an official statistic only in Tippett’s rookie year of 1982.
Jackson is second all-time in league history with 28 fumble
recoveries. Tippett had just 17. Jackson was selected to six Pro
Bowls, Tippett only five. (And Jackson arguably should have been
elected to more; he suffered in six seasons in his prime from
being on the same team as fellow linebacker Pro Bowlers Sam
Mills, Vaughan Johnson, and Pat Swilling, and voters were often
loath to vote for so many at the same position on the same team.
Jackson still was selected twice in those years — and anybody
who watched those teams every week knew that Jackson was the only
indispensable member.)
Jackson was the toughest son of a gun you’ve ever seen:
Playing a brutal position, he missed only two games to injury
during his entire 15-year career (and those were after a car
accident, not an on-field injury); in 11 seasons, Tippett played
just 151 games of a total possible of 169. They each were
starters in one Super Bowl. Jackson’s team (he played his final
two years for the 49ers) won his Super Bowl; Tippett’s Patriots
were blown out in theirs. And Jackson was still good enough to be
a starter on that Super Bowl team in his 14th season — and,
arguably, the Niners would not have made it that year without
him. That was in the mid-1990s, when for several years running
the NFC was by far the stronger conference and the only question
was whether the Niners or the Cowboys would win the conference.
As it happened, the conference winner was determined each year by
who had home-field advantage — and in Jackson’s year, home-field
advantage came down to the regular season match against the
Cowboys. Jackson was a monster in that game, coming up with
multiple tackles and the game’s two biggest plays, a sack and an
interception.
(This was par for the course during Jackson’s career: He
always came up biggest in the clutch. I well remember one crucial
Saints game against the Rams, with the Rams inside the Saints 10
on the last play of the game. I turned to my father and said
something like: “No problem; we’re fine. Rickey will find a way
to make a play.” Sure enough, he did, ending the game with a
monster tackle.)
If Jackson was so good as to be a key cog on a Super
Bowl-winning team while he was on his proverbial last legs
professionally, you can just imagine how good he was in his prime
when he was the only mainstay bridging Saints teams that featured
great defenses for about 12 years running, first for Bum Phillips
and then for Jim Mora. It is no coincidence that Saints defenses
started failing the minute Jackson left the team.
Another thing to consider: Jackson also played the run
incredibly well — indeed, unlike other pass-rushing specialists
who garnered sacks at the expense of run stuffing or pass
defense, Jackson was also good in pass coverage (eight career
interceptions vs. just one for Tippett) and, if anything, even
better against the run than against the pass. Even in the last
five years of his career, he almost never let the corner be
turned against him — even when he didn’t shed a blocker, he had
a way of pushing the blocker in such a way that it sealed off the
corner on sweeps, forcing the runner back inside where others
could make the tackle. In short, Jackson was an every-down
player, not a one-trick pony. John Madden, who knows football
like few others, regularly put Jackson on his All-Madden team,
year in and year out, above Swilling and the rest, for just that
reason: Jackson was a rock.
The only reason, indeed, that Jackson never got the
Lawrence Taylor treatment was because he played in small-market
New Orleans rather than in the Big Apple — and, further, because
Jackson never “talked big” off the field, unlike the loquacious
braggart Taylor whose mouth got louder still when he fed his drug
habit. As it was, Taylor was credited with just 4.5 more sacks
during his career than Jackson was, and Taylor recovered only 10
fumbles compared to Jackson’s 28. Finally, one last statistic:
Jackson made 1,173 total tackles during his career, compared to
Taylor’s 1,088 and Tippett’s mere 778.
It is, in short, a rank injustice for Rickey Jackson not to
be in the Hall of Fame.
THEN WE MOVE TO BASEBALL, where statistics (at least before
the steroid era) always tell the tale. This past year, Jim Rice
was inducted into the Hall in Cooperstown. Andre Dawson wasn’t.
Rice and Dawson were, roughly, contemporaries. Rice played his
whole career in the hitter-friendly Fenway Park, in the much more
hitter-friendly American League, compared to Dawson’s tougher
National League and tougher (for part of his career) stadium in
Montreal. But compare their stats. Dawson 438 home runs, Rice
382. Dawson 1,591 RBIs, Rice 1,451. Dawson 1,373 runs, Rice
1,249. Dawson 314 stolen bases, Rice 58. 503 doubles vs. 373.
Near-identical best single power year: 49 HR, 137 RBI vs. 46 HR,
139 RBI. (Rice did have a better batting average overall, .298
vs. .279. But he had better “protection” in terms of better
hitters around him than “the Hawk” did, which meant opposing
teams couldn’t pitch around him.) They each played in eight
all-star games, Dawson starting seven compared to Rice starting
only four. They each won one league MVP Award.
Then there’s defense. Jim Rice was merely decent, Hawk was
superb. Rice won zero Gold Glove Awards; Dawson won 8. Dawson
recorded 51,58 putouts, Rice just 3,103. Even taking into account
the fewer opportunities for putouts for Rice in Fenway’s narrow
confines, that difference is astonishing.
In sum, there is no way on God’s green Earth that Jim Rice
deserves to be in the Hall of Fame before Andre Dawson.
And lest I be accused of a fan’s bias, the truth is in the
other direction. I live and die with the Red Sox; I became hooked
for good on the Sox during the splendid rookie years of Rice and
Fred Lynn, in part specifically because of the excitement caused
by rookies Rice and Lynn. I cheered for Rice his whole career; I
was utterly indifferent to Dawson. But pre-steroid statistics
don’t lie: Dawson was slightly but consistently the better
all-around player, and he kept his skills at a high level longer
than Rice did.
Finally, by reputation at least, Dawson was a better
teammate, gregarious and generous, while Rice was by reputation
surly and perhaps selfish. It was passing strange that the Sox
made so few playoff appearances during Rice’s tenure, despite an
abundance of talent; the word always was that its clubhouse was
almost never a happy one. Last I checked, baseball remains a team
game.
The only thing that argues in Rice’s favor is the luck of
playing in one of the highest-profile markets in sports, while
Dawson was stuck for more than half his career in a whole other
country, Canada, where the United States media had far fewer ties
(and where no literary types like John Updike ever waxed poetic
about the game being played in a “lyric little bandbox”).
So, for Dawson as for Rickey Jackson, here’s a message to
the two games’ respective hall of Fame voters: Wake up, drop your
prejudices and your absurd haughtiness and preconceptions, and
look at the indisputable evidence. Rickey Jackson and Andre
Dawson belongs in their Halls of Fame.
(Mr. Hillyer started his journalism career as a
sports writer in New Orleans for the
Times-Picayune.)
