Truth be told, Ron Santo should have been inducted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown decades before he finally got the honor in 2012.
At the time he retired, he was probably one of the top five third basemen in MLB history, perhaps even the top three. Of players who were retired (or near retirement) in 1974, when Santo hung it up, only Eddie Mathews and Brooks Robinson posted more bWAR than Ron did.
There are three primary reasons Santo wasn’t seen as the peer of those men. The first was the relative brevity of his career, which largely happened due to his battle with juvenile diabetes.