“Save for Gussie Busch, every single individual is enshrined in Cooperstown at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “

Boyer’s not in the Hall, either

... i don’t think there’s any doubt that if Ducky and Bottomley played in the 1960s or later their #s would be retired. frankly, i think that any player who enters the HOFer as a Cardinal should have their number retired. and, as a rule, on those players should be retired (i.e. no McGee) except in the most exceptional circumstances.

great, informative read

Flood v McGee

Games played
1738/1661

Runs
1853/760

Stolen Bases
88/301

Singles
1454/1282

Homeruns
84/63

Flood
3 time All-Star
2 time World Champion
7 Gold Gloves
0 Time MVP
5 time Top 20 MVP Voting

McGee
4 time All-Star
1 time World Champion
3 Gold Gloves
1 MVP Award
1 time Top 20 MVP Voting

If a case is going to be made for McGee, that case is much stronger for Flood. Flood, who cut his own career short, probably would have been a HOF’er based on his glove had he played only a handful of seasons more. If not, he’d have joined Paul Blair and Jim Edmonds as OF’ers with 8 Gold Gloves and no HOF.

And I would like to ad Vince Coleman’s accomplishment of stealing over 100 bases in three consecutive seasons. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Cards should retire his No. 29, it is a feat that neither Lou Brock nor Rickey Henderson - the two greatest basestealers in the history of the game - ever accomplished.

Branch Rickey should have his up there if for just the sheer innovation

of course I hope we have number five up there many years in the future

Where Ray ranks all time in Cardinal History:
5th all time in Hrs with 228
9th all time in Rbis with 829
8th all time in runs with 928
8th all time in doubles with 339
6th all time in SB with 250
7th all time in XBH with 619
14th all time in hits with 1479
10th all time in games played with Cards with 1580

The stats speak for themselves…Ray Lankford deserves to be in the Cardinal HOF and it’s a shame he doesn’t get more respect for the great career he had in St. Louis.

His greatest accomplishment was the courage to fight the clearly illegal reserve clause. That bravery alone should qualify him for a spot at Busch. I think many of us feel that baseball in general, and Cardinal baseball in particular, serves as a metaphor for struggling against long odds. See Halbertstam’s October 64 for instance, In that regard, Flood is most worthy of enshrinement.

Frankly, he deserves it. He’ll finish as the career leader in wins as a Cardinal manager. He will also finish as the longest-tenured manager in franchise history. He’s managed the franchise to seven postseasons, two pennants, and a World Series championship.

The great Simba is clearly the best Cardinal Catcher of all-time. As a Redbird his line is 0.298 / 0.369 / 0.459 with 1564 games played. This catcher should be in Cooperstown along side Fisk and Carter. Perhaps adding him to the wall of Cardinal greats will increase the visibility of his candidacy for the old-timers committee. That he didn’t receive at least 5% of the vote on his first ballot is a travesty. He is also one of the smartest guys in baseball and is now the bench coach for the Brewers. When Tony finally leaves or retires, could he be our next manager? He’d be on my short list.

And when the day finally comes that Shannon steps away from the booth, I’d like to see a second microphone added right next to that of his long time partner, the great Jack Buck. Does anybody have as much fun talking about baseball as our collective drinking buddy, Mike? In many ways he keeps the stories of the past alive with his connections to the players and managers of the past. When he retires, they should have a promotion at the ballpark where they give away official St. Louis Cardinals Mike Shannon alarm clocks (“Get up, Baby, Get up! Get up! Get up! Ooh, yeah!”) Or maybe a CD collection of the best Shannonisms of his career.

Im not sure how many people will be on board with this, as I’m not sure exactly how he ranks in the hearts of the rest of Cardinal nation (congressional testimony aside).

When I think of Big Mac, and all that he did for our St. Louis Cardinals and Major League Baseball in general, I think of the following things:

Acquiring him from the A’s for peanuts, and having one of my favorite players growing up, now bearing the BOB.
The summer of ‘98, what a magical season that was. (to me, and many others, that HR race saved baseball).
Batting practice moonshots, that turned into, in game moonshots.

Ok, enough nostalgia on my part. This post got me thinking again about the statue, tucked away in some warehouse somewhere, probably under some type of canvas tarp, not to see the light of day. Also, with what the short time Mac spent in StL he was able to amass as far as numbers went. So, I did a little digging, using the links bgh supplied and came up with this:

His avg is only .270, thats .003 less than Ray Lankford, who I have seen mentioned a few times already in this post.

Ok, so he only played in 545 games, had 469 hits in 1739 AB’s (1 hr / 7.9ab). I think this could one of the exceptions to the longevity stance.

For all the Big Mac did for the game of baseball and the Cardinals franchise, by helping put peoples backsides back in seats, I believe he and his number 25 merit consideration for enshrinement on our wall and hall. Cooperstown too, I believe should allow him induction, but that is another story.

Feel free to support of disagree with my opinion, I’d like to know how others feel about Mac.

This was very well done. I loved Willie McGee, but your numbers make it difficult to justify putting him on the wall over the others you have listed. I think McGee will be one of those players that we must resign to remember in our stories. The one accomplishment that I think should get honorable mention when talking about him is that he single-handedly delivered the Cardinals one of the games of their 9th championship. That alone will retain him a special place in the hearts of those of us who grew up with him.

I don’t have much to add to your list. I agree with many above that Flood should be there, but I don’t know if any ownership/organization will ever recognize him. Opening those wounds would make for some very uncomfortable owners’ meetings.

It will be interesting to see if the Cards recognize Shannon for his service time to the organization. He has become as synonymous with the organization as any player/coach/broadcaster that has ever been a part of it. His numbers on the field won’t justify it, but the addition of his time in the booth could very easily warrant it, in my opinion.

I find it interesting that this current ownership hasn’t made a move to put Branch Rickey up on the wall given the Mr. DeWitt’s family history with him. Bill DeWitt, Sr. worked directly for Branch Rickey when he was still with the Browns. Much of his knowledge and management style was developed at Mr. Rickey’s shoestrings. I find it difficult to believe that it is merely coincidence that the current ownership, when faced with the current market-size pressures, has reverted to developing the team from within. Even the positional price slotting that so many derided a few years ago smacks of Rickey, as he was notoriously tight-fisted.

If not for the innovations and management of Branch Rickey, St. Louis Cardinal’s baseball would have ceased to exist before even the first of the subsequent 10 championships were ever won. As Mr. Busch was recognized for much the same reason, it seems very little to ask that Mr. Rickey’s accomplishments and innovations be recognized with his name on the wall.

Whose call is it about whom to memorialize on Busch Wall Street? I assume the team’s, but is there some sort of criteria for inclusion? It would be interesting to devise a wall-of-fame rubric.

unofficially “retired” numbers, with McGwire’s and Kile’s, if you think about it. I don’t see anyone wearing DK’s number for a long time, if ever(or at least while La Russa and Duncan are there), and despite the furor surrounding Mac, I think his 25 is off the list of available numbers, as well.

I think it is sitting in back yard of the guy who did the statue with a tarp covering it from the elements. I think he lives like an hour south of St. Louis. I think there was a story in the Post about it a while ago.

but have been a Cardinal fan for 40 years. Thought I’d throw in my two cents.

I agree wholeheartedly that Bottomley, Medwick and Rickey are worthy of having #’s retired and being enshrined on the left field wall of Busch III.

Bottomley not only had the longevity and the numbers – not to mention HOF status – he also enjoyed huge popularity with Cardinal fans in the 1920s, according to Bob Broeg. From what I’ve read, it sounds as though he was as well liked as Red Schoendienst and Ozzie Smith in recent years. Ken Boyer, who is conspicuously and inexplicably not in the HOF, enjoyed enormous popularity with St. Louis fans, but is nearly as forgotten now as Bottomley, as the memory of his playing days continues to shrink as the years pass. Nevertheless, his popularity (combined with his untimely death from cancer) had as much to do with his number being retired as did his performance on the field. Since Sunny Jim Bottomley only briefly wore a uni #, he could easily be enshrined on the LF wall with an "StL," a la his teammate Rogers Hornsby.

Medwick’s numbers speak for themselves. He had a major impact on this team in a relatively brief (for his pre-free angency era) period of time, particularly in his MVP-Triple Crown season of 1937. It should also be noted that Medwick (along with Hornsby) is one of only two post-1900 N.L. Triple Crown winners. If Branch Rickey and Sam Breadon didn’t have a penchant for trading away players just as they were reaching their prime, Ducky would have worn the Birds-on-the-Bat longer than he did. And if he hadn’t been beaned in his first year with the Dodgers, he would have remained a productive Major Leaguer longer, too.

Rickey’s accomplishments with the Cardinals (and baseball in general) are legendary, and it’s a little surprising that he’s never been properly enshrined by the organization he built into a perennial powerhouse from the late 1920s through the ‘40s. Perhaps it’s because his achievements with the Dodgers – most notably breaking the color barrier – have skewed the general public’s perception, virtually erasing from their collective consciousness his years with the Cardinals. But his contributions to this franchise overwhelm those of A. A. Busch, whose "85" graces the wall.

Retiring Willie’s #51 is more problematic. I love Willie, but he wasn’t the impact player the other Cardinal number retirees were, he probably won’t be elected to the Hall, and quite a few players would/should fall in line ahead of him. The same goes for Lankford.

Flood and Simmons were mentioned above, along with some of their noteworthy achievements, and both should probably be in Baseball’s Hall of Fame as well as on the Busch III LF wall. If not for Johnny Bench, Simba would have surely been considered the premier NL catcher of the ‘70s. He had more hits and doubles than any HOF catcher, and drove in more runs than any except Yogi Berra. In the 1960s, Flood (7 Gold Gloves – McGee had 3, Lankford none) was called the best center fielder in the Majors by no less of an authority than Willie Mays, and he hit over .300 six times in 12 seasons with the Cardinals (compared to four in 13 for McGee, one in 13 for Lankford). Flood likely would have added a couple more .300 seasons to that tally had he played out his career.

When you’re considering all-time great Cardinal outfielders, the recently departed Jim Edmonds, with 6 Gold Gloves as a Cardinal, should be near the top of any list of number-retiring candidates as well. He’s 7th in career slugging pct. as a Cardinal, 6th in OPS, 3rd in at-bats per home run. He also had two 40-HR seasons, which ties him with Mark McGwire for second place in that category, behind Pujols’ four.

And then there’s Frank Frisch, perhaps the Cards’ second best all-time second baseman after Hornsby, a .312 hitter while with the ‘Birds, the ’31 MVP and a 2-time World Champ – earning one of those rings as player-manager.

You can see how considering one deserving candidate leads to another, then another. So the process must be a difficult one for whoever makes these decisions. You need to exercise some restraint, otherwise you cheapen the honor (and clutter your OF wall), or you end up like the Yankees, who, IMO, have simply retired a few too many numbers. But at the same time you don’t want to leave anyone out who’s worthy.

That said, and to the original point of this fascinating thread, Bottomley, Medwick and Rickey certainly deserve to be honored alongside the rest of the Cardinals with retired numbers.

I didn’t even mention Pujols because he’s an obvious shoe-in. In fact I would even go so far as to say that, if he were to (Heaven forbid) retire or be traded tomorrow, his stats to date are already more than wall-worthy. Let’s hope he adds many more stellar years to his Redbird resume’ before his number 5 is finally taken out of circulation.

In addition to Edmonds’ stated exploits, he was the only Cardinal to participate in every one of the team’s 21st century postseason appearances through 2006 – and was a key factor in getting them into each of them. He finished in the top five in MVP voting in 2000 and 2005. I’m just trying to look the other way while he’s with the Cubs…

I meant 2004 (re: Edmonds’ top 5 MVP voting).