I've been fighting the snow and a severe colitis attack the last couple of days, so I apologize for not being timely.

I grew up in Chicago in the late sixties and the seventies.  Unlike many of the people blogging, I actually saw Ron Santo play for the Cubs.  The first baseball game I ever went to was a Cubs-Astros game in which Ronnie hit two home runs in a 5-3 Cub win.

Even though I have been a devout White Sox fan all my life, I have always been a Ron Santo fan.  No one in his era, save for Brooks Robinson was a better third baseman offensively or defensively than Ron Santo.  And for him not to get in the Hall of Fame is a total miscarriage of justice.

This has nothing to do with what the poor man has gone through the last few years, losing both his legs to diabetes.  Back in the day, a player couldn't even admit he had diabetes and one wonders. if Santo had been allowed to wear an insulin pump like Jason Johnson or if they had some of the breakthroughs they have now, then, but that's all water under the bridge.  The fact is, Santo was a damn fine ballplayer, among the best at his position in his era and certainly worthy of the hall of fame.

What keeps him out of the hall is the reality that his Cub team choked in 1969.  Ernie Banks hit 512 home runs.  Billy Williams went on to glory with the A's not to mention his National League Iron man streak.  Fergie Jenkins won 284 games.  But Santo, played for mostly bad teams for his entire career, save for the 1969 group that lost an 8½ game lead to the Mets in September.  And, unfortunately, that's how many of these players who vote remember him.

It's hard to ask a 70 year old man to remember things that happened forty years ago.  But someone should remember how good Santo was as a baseball player and not the goofball baseball analyst he's become on WGN.

It's really a shame.