RIP....
Miñoso became eligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1970 – a year before the Hall began considering players from the Negro leagues or taking into account the accomplishments of major leaguers in the Negro leagues – and was dropped from the ballot for insufficient support. He was restored to the ballot five years after his final 1980 appearances as a player, and finally began to receive support as a candidate, remaining on the ballot for fourteen years before his eligibility expired; however, most of the writers voting by that point had little memory of him during his prime. In 2001, historian Bill James selected Miñoso as the tenth greatest left fielder of all time; based on the then-general belief that Miñoso was born in 1922 rather than 1925, James wrote, "Had he gotten the chance to play when he was 21 years old, I think he'd probably be rated among the top thirty players of all time."[52]
Author Stuart Miller makes the case for Miñoso's election based on the wins above replacement (WAR) statistic, which calculates the number of additional wins a team would get from a player's production compared to having played a replacement-level minor league player at the position. Miñoso is among the top five AL players in WAR for seven of his MLB seasons, ranking first in WAR for two of those seasons.[53] Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated has written that Miñoso's Hall of Fame candidacy may have been damaged by the publicity stunt game appearances in his later life. He said that the biggest question for Hall of Fame voters would be how much potential major league production was taken away from Miñoso because baseball was not integrated at the outset of his career.[54]
Miñoso was selected to be on the Hall of Fame's Golden Era Committee election ballot in 2011 and 2014.[55] Since 2011, the Baseball Writers' Association of America's (BBWAA) Historical Overview Committee serves as the Hall's screening committee every three years to identify ten long-retired players, managers, umpires, or executives (living or deceased) from the "Golden Era" (1947–1973) for possible induction into the Hall of Fame .[56] In order to be inducted, a candidate on the ballot must receive at least 12 of 16 votes cast by the 16-member Golden Era Committee at the MLB Winter Meeting in December.[57] In 2011 and 2014, Miñoso received 9 and 8 votes; in 2011, Ron Santo with 15 votes was elected to the Hall of Fame (inducted 2012),[58][59] but in 2014, no candidate was elected by the committee.[60]
