Seven deserve Veterans election

On Sunday in Indianapolis, the Hall of Fame's two-headed Veterans Committee will convene, with one subcommittee voting on managers and umpires, and the other voting on executives. Each committee member will be asked to consider 10 candidates, and vote for no more than four of them.

This is tricky work, and particularly for those charged with evaluating executives, as there are so few executives in the Hall of Fame that it's hard to know what is a Hall of Fame owner or general manager, and what isn't. Still, I'm happy to give it a shot, and I would happily vote for four executives …

Executives

Gene Autry is famous today for two things: owning the Los Angeles/California Angels from their inception in 1961 until 1996, and for singing "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" (for a stretch in the 1930s and '40s, he was also America's most popular movie cowboy, and during World War II Autry served his country with distinction). Still, Autry's teams never played in a World Series, and he doesn't seem to have had any great impact on the sport otherwise. Verdict: No

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