Frankie Frisch was a great baseball player. He had a lifetime slash line of .316/.369/.432, had 2,880 hits, stole 419 bases and struck out only 232 times in a 19-year career. He played in eight World Series with the Giants and Cardinals and won four of them, the last as player/manager. He also managed the Pirates and Cubs, the latter from 1949-51, with a bit less success.
Frisch was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1947, but his influence over the Hall reverberates today. Frisch was named to the Hall of Fame’s Veterans Committee in 1967, and became the most influential man on that committee — not for the better, as Joe Posnanski wrote in 2013:
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