The Nemesis
Semper Tyrannus
It's not pretending the playoffs don't exist, it's not using the playoffs to prop up the case of a person who wouldn't otherwise get nearly the same attention.
I also kind of laugh at "it isn't the hall of statistics" when a great many cases even in the old days were built on statistics that the old guard were comfortable with instead of new ones. 3,000 hits, 200 wins, 500 hrs, whatever else.
stats matter until they don't
context matters until it doesn't
'value' matters until it gets used to defend a player not deemed good enough in other regards.
character matters until it doesn't
It's a moving target that means whatever the people voting players in want it to mean in order to get the players they want in.
Lance Berkman has a WS win, is a noted playoff performer, and had a Morris-esque case of "hall of the very good who you might argue HOF merits on" for his regular season career. He's very much in the mold of Jack Morris' HOF case.
He dropped off the ballot in his first year.
Orel Hershiser has MVPs in the WS, both LCS, a Cy Young and ticks some traditional compiling stat boxes like 200 wins.
His best performance on any HOF ballot was just over 11% of the vote. He later fell off the ballot and was eventually re-evaluated by the Veterans Committee and denied there (the same Veterans' committee that elected everyone's favorite dead horse of a "how the hell is he in the HOF?" candidate, Harold Baines.
Carlos Beltran is considered by some to be a borderline candidate who might not make it even if you ignore his potential contributions to the Astros' sign-stealing scandal. He was a great playoff performer.
Gary Sheffield was a strong playoff performer too, especially LCS/World Series games. he also notched 500 dingers and nearly hit .300 for his career while averaging 100 RBIs a year (I acknowledge that RBIs are a garbage stat for gauging personal performance but the HOF likes it, so here we are). He'll likely never come close to sniffing the HOF because reasons and probably also in part because he was kind of a knob.
HOF credentials get dressed up in this "I know it when I see it" vagaries with regards to any aspect of potential value as a means of protecting the fact that it's horribly inconsistently applied and is subject to the whims of people who will screech loudly about what the criteria aren't without being able to define what they are in a meaningfully repeatable way.
