Padecky: Sorry, but Harold Baines isn't worthy of Hall of Fame

No sport loves numbers more than baseball. Addiction is a more accurate word - numbers being a drug of sorts, for one can’t speak of a player’s ability without mainlining what he hit when the air temperature was 100 degrees and 115 degrees on the artificial turf at 2 p.m. with barometric pressure steady at 29.6. Oh, yes, he hit against a left-handed pitcher who threw three-quarters with a 95-mile-an-hour heater and a 10-to-6 curveball. The answer, apparently, is in there somewhere.

Concerning Harold Baines’ recent election to Cooperstown, I’ll try not to make it too complicated.

Baines doesn’t belong in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

There, that settles it. Silly me. As if I could be that simple.

When I first became eligible to vote for the Hall of Fame, I asked a veteran writer what were his criteria as he judged a player’s worth. He only had one.

“Could the history of professional baseball be written without his name being mentioned?”

Of course I was confused. It was an emotional response he was citing. But where were the numbers? The OBP? The OPS? The WAR? The PA? It’s okay if you don’t know. You aren’t a baseball illiterate. You just don’t want to crunch a human being into an adding machine, save for the obvious and necessary baseball digits like home runs, runs batted in, batting average, earned run average and pitching victories. Hall of Fame selection, after all, isn’t a swimsuit competition, who looks good in an uniform.

If that were the case, a skyscraper by the name of Frank Howard is in and Babe Ruth and his hot dogs are out.

Baseball, in a very real sense, demands emotion, for it fuels the necessary tension. Just watch how a batter reacts when he gets buzzed by a fastball. Or a shortstop gets taken out at second base by a spikes-high slider. Fans? Fans who have never met Madison Bumgarner call him MadBum like he’s their next-door neighbor.

If you’re a Giants fan, you don’t need to be told the last name of Barry, Hack, Willie, Mitch. If you love the A’s, you love Rickey, Stew, Big Mac, Eck.

If you’re a hitter, you damn well better feel you can hit Chris Sale. If you’re a pitcher, you damn well better feel you can take out Mike Trout. And don’t get me started about managers who made late-in-game moves, playing a hunch, his gut telling him to pinch-hit this guy, not that guy.

A Hall of Fame player requires an answer of YES to all of the following questions.

Was he ever the centerpiece of a team? Did he ever turn a good team into a great team or a great team into a World Series champion? Did the mere mention of his name bring up a champagne toast? Was he a superstar?

Harold Baines was none of that. Rather, Harold was more like this: “Harold Baines, wasn’t he the guy who ... ?” And then your voice trails off. Here’s the rest of that question: “ended the longest game in major league history - 25 innings - with a walk-off homer against Milwaukee in 1984.”

My point: If you struggle to complete that sentence, you’re not talking about a Hall of Famer. To be fair, Baines had a terrific career. Six teams hired him. His was a steady personality. He fit in everywhere. He was good and a few times he was very good. He made any lineup better. Harold is a first-ballot choice in the Rock Steady Hall of Fame.

If I need to bring numbers in this, I will only this time. Baines was a designated hitter 15 of his 22 seasons. Yet, Baines didn’t hit 400 homers, bat .300 over his career or have 3,000 hits. Baines lasted 22 years primarily for his offense and yet he never reached the base benchmarks that merit Cooperstown consideration.

Tony LaRussa, the former A’s manager who had Baines in Chicago as well as Oakland, said Baines would have reached 3,000 hits if not for a strike-shortened season. Sure, and Willie Mays would have hit more homers than the Babe if he didn’t hit in the cavernous Candlestick.

We’ll never know.

LaRussa was part of the 16-member Veterans Committee. With a bucketful of passion expressed with a gift of the tongue, Tony can be quite persuasive. Easy to imagine Tony grabbing the bully pulpit to champion Baines. That’s why his players loved him; he got their six. And if Tony was to be accused of cronyism, he’d gladly take the hit.

But the Hall of Fame is for the immortals, the unforgettables, the titans of the sport when they played. Instead, we now suspect the base standard for induction has been lowered.

If Harold Baines can make it because he had solid numbers, then let’s take it one logical step further. How about these numbers: exit velocity and launch angle? These are recently added obsessions, how the baseball leaves the bat, and spoken of by broadcasters with great reverence.

So Player A gets into Cooperstown instead of Player B because his exit velocity was three miles an hour faster and his launch angle resembled at the start the trajectory of the space shuttle at launch. Who knows? Maybe launch angle will replace WAR and barometric pressure as considerations.

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