The Bizarro Hall of Fame: Introducing the Class of 1995

In the coming weeks, One More Dying Quail will be profiling the 182 current members of the Bizarro Hall of Fame, an organization that currently exists only in my mind. It was created in the wake of Major League Baseball’s infamous Steroid Era as a way of honoring those players whose careers were perfectly mediocre: the only requirement is that a candidate be listed on the official Baseball Hall of Fame ballot and receive zero votes.
Class of 1995
Doyle Alexander – He won 194 games in 19 major league seasons, but Alexander is best known for being involved in the August 12, 1987 trade that sent him from the Atlanta Braves to the Detroit Tigers. He was outstanding for the Tigers down the stretch, leading the team to the American League East division title with a 9-0 record and 1.53 ERA, but the Braves undoubtedly got the better end of the deal: they received prospect John Smoltz, who went on to become a key starter and reliever during the team’s run of fourteen division titles in fifteen seasons.

Greg Gross – The runner-up for the 1974 National League Rookie of the Year award (the winner? Cardinals outfielder Bake McBride, who we’ll see again when the Class of ’89 rolls around), Gross mixed in an utterly amazing statistic with an otherwise average stat line that season, stealing twelve bases and being caught twenty times. Outstanding. Five years later, he was traded to the Phillies as part of an eight-player deal that included another 1995 Bizarro Hall of Famer, Manny Trillo. He lasted ten years in Philadelphia and seventeen seasons in the majors by becoming a reliable hitter off the bench, with 143 career pinch-hits (none of which were homeruns – he had only seven round trippers in his career).

Rick Rhoden – A career .239 hitter, few pitchers were better with a bat in their hands than Rhoden, who won three straight National League Silver Slugger awards in the mid-1980s. Ironically, he did not win in 1977 or 1982, the two seasons in which he set career highs with three homeruns and twelve runs batted in. He also performed well on the mound, earning two trips to the All-Star game and finishing fifth in the 1986 National League Cy Young award voting.

Manny Trillo – Trillo was an above-average second baseman in the late 1970s and early 1980s, appearing in four All-Star games and winning three Gold Gloves and two Silver Sluggers. He also finished third in the voting for National League Rookie of the Year and won the Most Valuable Player for the Phillies in the 1980 National League Championship Series.

(Coming soon: The Bizarro Hall of Fame Class of 1994.)

(All Hall of Fame voting results were obtained from the official web site of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Statistical information included in postings for the Bizarro Hall of Fame was, unless otherwise noted, originally compiled by Baseball-Reference.com.)