Lou Whitaker Marquee

He and Alan Trammell came up together in September 1977 and were Detroit's double-play combination until he retired in 1995 — no pair has played more games together at those two positions. They won the 1984 World Series, in which he was the leadoff man, and neither ever played for another club.

Nineteen seasons gave him 2,369 hits, 244 home runs, 1,386 runs, 1,197 walks and a .276 average, with Rookie of the Year in 1978, five All-Star selections, three Gold Gloves and four Silver Sluggers. Only five men have more hits in a Detroit uniform, and every one of them is in the Hall of Fame.

He got 15 votes of 515 in 2001 — 2.9 percent, below the five needed to stay on — and was gone after one year, twenty years before Trammell was elected by a committee. That committee looked at him in 2020 and gave him 6 votes of 16, needing 12. The gap between how the two of them have been treated is not explained by anything in the record.