One-team Hall of Famers may be a thing of the past

Tony Gwynn (leftt) and Cal Ripken Jr. are two of just eight players since 1990 to make the Hall of Fame after spending their entire career with one team. Robert Beck/SI

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In a way, the 2008 Hall of Fame ballot sent out last month by the Baseball Writers' Association of America was another Dear John letter to a pretty special, and largely vanishing, breed of player.

The non-steroid-using participant? Well, maybe, but that's not what I had in mind.

Guys who spent at least parts of their careers cavorting in double-knit, polyester pajamiforms? Pitchers who started every fourth day, rather than every fifth? The last eligible hurler (Tommy John) to have pitched to Mickey Mantle and the last eligible batter (Dave Concepcion) to have faced Jim Bunning?

Yes, yes and yes, actually. But I'm thinking of a different endangered species: The one-team player.

One year ago, when Cal Ripken (98.5 percent of the vote) and Tony Gwynn (97.6 percent) were overwhelmingly chosen for enshrinement, they entered Cooperstown as a Baltimore Oriole and a San Diego Padre, respectively. Period. One-team, one-city, one-fan base guys. No questions about which caps they would wear on their plaques. No rainbow of colors in the audience on induction weekend (orange and black for Ripken, a little more variety for Gwynn but lots of brown for earlier Padres outfits and navy blue from more current versions).

It was the first time a pair of one-team stars went into the Hall together since 1999, when Kansas City's George Brett and Milwaukee's Robin Yount were joined by well-traveled Nolan Ryan. And only the second time since Cincinnati's Johnny Bench and Boston's Carl Yastrzemski were easy choices in 1989.

This year the well-traveled Goose Gossage, who played for nine teams, was the only player elected. Among the top 10 finishers who fell short of the required votes (75 percent), only Red Sox slugger Jim Rice, Reds shortstop Concepcion and Tigers shortstop Alan Trammell started and completed their major league careers with a single franchise. So did Yankees first baseman Don Mattingly (11th among runners-up).

Meanwhile, of the 11 newcomers to the 2008 ballot, none of them was a one-team guy. Not Brady Anderson, not Shawon Dunston, not David Justice, not Chuck Knoblauch and certainly not Tim Raines, the most qualified of the freshly eligible. Raines spread his 23 seasons across six different teams, including 13 with Montreal but another 10 with the White Sox, the Yankees, the A's, the Orioles and the Marlins.

And from here, it gets worse. Next year, not one of the 18 likely names on the Hall ballot will be one-team guys. In 2010, there will be two -- Seattle's Edgar Martinez and Cincinnati's Barry Larkin -- out of 15. It will be one out of 18 -- Houston's Jeff Bagwell -- in 2011. Then, in a blip in 2012, three of the seven newbies expected to be showing up on the ballot were one-team guys, though none even remotely resemble a shoo-in: the Twins' Brad Radke, the Angels' Tim Salmon and the Yankees' Bernie Williams.

That means just six of the 60 players coming up for consideration over a five-year period (2008-12) spent their whole careers with one team, demonstrating their Hall worthiness (or not) for a relatively loyal and constant group of home fans while weaving himself into his team's local narrative.

That's a paltry 8.7 percent, a significant dropoff from the shrine's existing crop of one-team guys. Of the 198 major league players in the Hall, 47 of them -- 23.7 percent -- began and ended with just one club. Since 1990, only eight such players have been voted in by the writers. The demand still is there, but it's the supply that has been lacking.

"Cal Ripken, Tony Gwynn, Kirby Puckett -- it would be nice to stay with one team. But once free agency came in in 1976, a lot of things changed," said Bert Blyleven, who pitched for five different franchises over his 22 seasons and has been a perennial bubble pick for the Hall.

"Look, even Harmon Killebrew, as great a player as he was, didn't end his career in Minnesota,'' Blyleven said. "It would have been nice to stay with the Twins. But we had Calvin Griffith as the owner. In Texas, I was able to triple my salary and get a three-year contract, where as Calvin was offering me a 20-percent cut."

Prior to free agency, players rarely left teams by choice because, well, they couldn't. Baseball's reserve clause kept an imbalance of power with the owners. Players either stayed put or were traded or sold.

The relatively recent opportunity for players to finish one contract, then seek out the highest bidder elsewhere has boosted the number of multi-team Hall of Famers. Of the 12 great players elected by the BBWAA from 2000 through 2006, for instance, only Puckett and Ryne Sandberg of the Cubs wore just one uniform. The others were Carlton Fisk (two teams), Tony Perez (four teams), Dave Winfield (six teams), Ozzie Smith (two teams), Eddie Murray (five teams), Gary Carter (four teams), Paul Molitor (three teams), Dennis Eckersley (five teams), Wade Boggs (three teams) and Bruce Sutter (three teams).

Is there anything wrong with that? After all, players still sometimes don't relocate by choice. Certain MLB ownerships set their budgets and take themselves out of the bidding process before it begins.

"It's the economics of the game now,'' said Blyleven, who is now a TV analyst on Twins games. "The Twins offered Johan Santana a four-year, $80 million contract but he can be a free agent at the end of 2008 and he's probably gone. They offered Torii Hunter three years and $45 million and he's gone.

"If you're a good player and you come in with Tampa Bay, you're probably not going to stay with one organization your whole career."

There are two closely related concerns about this decline of the one-team star, beyond the Hall's decision a few years back -- thanks to rumors of a Tampa Bay payola plan for Boggs -- to reaffirm its power in choosing the player's plaque cap.

First, guys like Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial and Ernie Banks rarely, if ever, got booed by fans in New York, St. Louis and Chicago, respectively. Maybe after a muffed play or a crucial strikeout, but never for showing up as the villain in some other franchise's colors. When signature players leave their signature teams, especially if greed trumps loyalty, the game loses.

Second, while all Hall of Famers get admiration and even awe for their abilities and accomplishments, it's the one-teamers who have the best chance of generating love. Sticking with the home team, helping it win, leading it through tough times, being seen as part of the community, that's what gets babies named after you. When Winfield and Puckett shared the stage in 2001, for example, the former was respected but the latter was beloved by those on the grass at Cooperstown's Clark Sports Center.

"Election to the Hall of Fame is so exclusive, every player has his own fan base," Jeff Idelson, the Hall's vice president of the communications and education, said this week. "But the more a player connects with that fan base, regardless of playing on one team or many, the bigger the turnout."

It's safe to assume it was no coincidence, then, that the 2007 ceremony honoring civic icons Ripken and Gwynn drew an estimated crowd of more than 75,000, blowing away the previous high of 50,000 in . . . 1999, the year of Ryan, Brett and Yount.

Steve Aschburner has been a Hall of Fame voter since 1992.