Alan Trammell

Alan Trammell played shortstop for the Detroit Tigers for 20 years and did everything well enough that the writers somehow overlooked him for decades. He turned double plays with Lou Whitaker longer than any keystone pair in history, won a World Series and its Most Valuable Player award, and hit like a star in an era when shortstops were not supposed to. He was the best player on a champion and the robbed runner-up for a Most Valuable Player award, and his case sat ignored until a committee finally fixed it. The veterans elected him to the Hall of Fame in 2018.

The Boy From Garden Grove

Trammell was born on February 21, 1958, in Garden Grove, California, and the Detroit Tigers drafted him in the second round in 1976, signing him away from a college scholarship. He reached the majors the next year, a slight 19-year-old shortstop with quick hands and a steady glove, and he never left. He wanted one team and one city for his whole career, and he got the wish. "I'm not going to go anywhere else," he said, and across 20 seasons he never did.

Trammell and Whitaker

The defining fact of his career was the man beside him. Trammell and the second baseman Lou Whitaker made their major league debuts on the same day, September 9, 1977, at Fenway Park, and they played the middle of the Detroit infield together for the next 19 years. They turned 1,918 games into the longest-running double-play combination in the history of the game, two players so linked that fans spoke their names as one. The partnership was the backbone of every good Tigers team of the era, a daily act of coordination that outlasted managers, teammates, and trends.

The 1984 Champion

Detroit's championship season was Trammell's masterpiece. The 1984 Tigers started 35-5 and ran away with everything, with Jack Morris anchoring the rotation and Trammell anchoring the lineup, and they finished the job in a five-game World Series over San Diego. He was the Most Valuable Player of that Series, batting .450, and he won Game 4 nearly by himself, hitting two two-run home runs off Eric Show to account for all of Detroit's runs. The slight shortstop drafted eight years earlier had become the best player on a title team.

The MVP That Got Away

His finest individual season came in 1987 and ended in an injustice. Trammell hit .343 with 28 home runs and 105 runs batted in, carried the Tigers to the division title on the season's final weekend, and put up the kind of two-way line that usually wins the award. The writers gave the American League Most Valuable Player to Toronto's George Bell instead, 332 points to 311, a result that aged worse every year. Whitaker scrawled the verdict on the clubhouse scoreboard himself. "To Alan Trammell, 1987 AL MVP," it read. "From Lou Whitaker."

A Shortstop Ahead of His Time

Trammell hit when shortstops were expected only to field, and he did both at a level few at the position reached. He finished with a .285 average, 2,365 hits, 185 home runs, and 236 stolen bases, won four Gold Gloves, and took home three Silver Sluggers as the best-hitting shortstop in his league. He was the American League's quieter answer to Cal Ripken, a complete player whose value the traditional statistics of the day undersold. The modern game, which prizes exactly the two-way shortstop he was, would have understood him instantly.

Back in the Dugout

After he retired in 1996, Trammell came back to manage the team he had played for, taking over the Tigers from 2003 through 2005. The timing was brutal, as the 2003 club lost 119 games, an American League record, a hundred-loss disaster that no manager could have saved. He coaxed the team to a 29-win improvement the next year and stayed in the game as a coach afterward, the franchise man who kept giving Detroit his time even when the roster gave him nothing.

The Snub and the Fix

The Hall of Fame nearly forgot him. Trammell spent his full 15 years on the writers' ballot and never cleared 41 percent, his balanced excellence falling between the cracks of a system that rewarded louder numbers. In December 2017 the Modern Baseball Era Committee corrected the oversight and elected him alongside Jack Morris, his 1984 teammate, and the two went into Cooperstown together in 2018. He wore a Tigers cap, and Detroit retired his number 3, the honor finally matching the career, two decades in one uniform at the hardest position to play.