2012 Baseball Hall Of Fame: Barry Larkin, Ron Santo Enshrined

I sat down to write an article about how the “small Hall of Fame” idea was dead. That used to be a yearly argument on the Internet: Are you for a small, exclusive Hall of Fame? Or a big, inclusive Hall? Man, how we used to spend a lot of time on that idea.

But the Veterans Committee futzed that dream up before it started, even if it was probably unsustainable to begin with. And the Small Hall-ers instinctively made their own Small Hall with terms like “first ballot” and “inner circle.” Hey, that was kind of smart. There really is a Small Hall if you want to support one, though it’s kind of imaginary. It’s a good compromise.

You can check out the video and gif below.

For more on Larkin’s Reds, visit Red Reporter . For more on Santo’s time with the Cubs, check out Bleed Cubbie Blue and SB Nation Chicago.

Alabama has slightly less than five million residents, making it the 23rd-most-populous state. Mobile is the third largest city in Alabama. The Mobile metropolitan area is home to a bit more than 400,000 people. Mobile sits at the southwest corner of the state, hugging the Gulf of Mexico, and is closer to Pensacola in the Florida panhandle than it is to Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama’s two largest cities. Mardi Gras in the United States was born in Mobile during the City’s French Colonial period. The films Driving Miss Daisy and Forrest Gump had scenes set in Mobile.

And Mobile is the birthplace of more players in the National Baseball Hall of Fame than any city in the world other than Los Angeles and New York. More than Chicago. More than Philadelphia. More than San Francisco. Thirteen states have no native sons in the Hall of Fame. And yet Mobile, Alabama is the boyhood home of five Hall of Fame players.