Neat breakdown of whether Albert Belle should be in the Hall of Fame or not brought to you by SportingGurus.com (via Baseball Think Factory). The article asks 15 semi-rhetorical questions attempting to chip away at the case. After that the writer gets into some comparisons to Andre Dawson, Dick Allen, Jim Rice, Kirby Puckett and a few others.

Something to whet your appetite:

Well, my opinion is that, based on pure performance, he stands at the front of the line of fairly recent outfielders that aren’t already in, ahead of Andre Dawson or Dale Murphy, and certainly far, far ahead of Jim Rice. Well, Dwight Evans is probably still ahead of him; I didn’t do a Belle-Evans comparison, but if you believe WARP3, Evans’ career is right up there with Yastzremski’s or Reggie’s, both in career and peak value. It’s certainly true that the wrong Red Sok is going into the Hall of Fame next year.

Albert Belle could really, really hit the living snot out of a baseball, and though his career was shortened by injury, his peak was long enough to be worth considering. If Belle had been able to go through a normal decline phase, say, through his age 34-37 seasons, he may have reached 500 home runs, and he would likely have amassed enough WARP3 (or Win Shares, or whatever you want to use) to finish with a career that looks a lot like that of Yaz, or Gwynn, or Al Kaline–and those are serious, no-questions-asked Hall of Famers.