Post#17 » by Schad » Thu Apr 12, 2018 6:44 am
I'm good with the Level of Excellence as is, honestly. Alomar's something of an edge case; he wasn't here a spectacularly long time, but he's in the Hall with a Blue Jays cap, and that's the primary reason you have to have him there.
Breaking out the statisticals, the criteria seems to be:
- On pure merit: Stieb, Halladay, Fernandez, and Delgado are in our top five in WAR as a Jay.
- Make the HOF as a Jay: I mean, yeah, that'll about do it. So that's Alomar.
- Win the MVP, maybe? George Bell.
As you say, I'm guessing that's the primary reason Bell is there (he was a good player, but probably not one worthy of immortalization otherwise, but at the time the LoE came into being he was our only MVP in 20-odd years), and also because having a Level of Excellence and then only including Dave Stieb at its inauguration would be a little funny. On the above, we'd get:
- Bautista, in. He's the other member of our top five by production. Seems a safe bet.
- Donaldson, possibly in. He's our second MVP winner. Only having four years as a Jay might work against him, though.
- Encarnacion, almost definitely not in.
Mostly, we just need to have some more damned long-time Blue Jays, particularly on the pitching side. Juan Guzman's sixth all-time in starts as a Jay for goodness sake! JA Happ could crack the top 10 this year! Our bleh drafting history is also a big contributor there, as we've had few players stick around long enough (or merit sticking around) to reach level of excellence territory, so our best players have often joined us mid-career, leaving less time to accumulate success before they reached free agency or the end of their productivity.
**** your asterisk.