scott rolen was elected to the baseball hall of fame on yesterday, and i've been holding on to this card to mark the occasion. he is now officially a part of my hall of famer collection with this card as his entry:
i only saw rolen play in person once, and it was the start of his rookie of the year campaign. on april 1, 1997, the phillies opened the season in dodger stadium. they shut out the dodgers behind curt schilling 3-0 with rolen playing third and going 1 for 5 with an rbi.
once i began playing fantasy baseball in the early 2000's (i had first played in 1988 and 1989 but who wanted to comb the newspaper box scores every morning to track the scoring), rolen was a guy i targeted. he wasn't flashy but put up decent numbers. i was successful with him on my squad a couple of those years, so i paid fairly close attention to his career. by this time, he was a cardinal which was kind of weird as i had started a pc of him in '97.
as i mentioned up top, rolen was the national league's rookie of the year in 1997, the first non-dodger to win the award since jeff bagwell in 1991. rolen was the unanimous selection for the award, by the way. the dodgers had no real rookie to celebrate that year, so i was happy with rolen's win.
even though he falls a bit short of one of my personal checks for hall of fame status for guys who may just be worthy of the hall of very good (hits+bb >3000), his defensive prowess adds to his record, and he is deserving of the honor according to those who vote. i am sure you can find many articles explaining why he was elected (and some as to why he shouldn't have been) so i won't go in to that. i will just say i am happy to have him in my hall of famer collection.
Fantastic looking card! Your HOF auto collection is incredible! I definitely think Rolen was a steady, well-rounded 3B deserving of HOF status. Though I must admit I didn't think of him as an all-time great when he played.
ReplyDeleteSaid it before... and I'll say it again. I love the Clearly Authentic autographs. And I like it when I see autographs on cards using the 1986 Topps baseball design. As for Rolen...he was on the border for me until a year or two ago. But I've heard many ballplayers support his way and if his colleagues says he deserves to be in... it's hard to argue with that.
ReplyDeleteHard for me to think of him as a HOFer. As an American League team fan, I never really saw a lot of him. He was such a highly-touted prospect for the Phillies, I guess I always thought he was considered something of a disappointment. I guess he's a Barry Larkin/Larry Walker type, didn't put up great overall numbers due to lots of injuries, but was very good when he was actually in the lineup.
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