Baseball fans, most of us anyway, believe we know when we are watching a future Hall of Famer. We will watch a player like Clayton Kershaw or Mike Trout and say to our kids or our grandkids or someone who happens to be standing nearby: "Someday, you're going to see that guy in Cooperstown!"
Sometimes we're right: Kershaw and Trout will undoubtedly be in the Hall of Fame. Sometimes we're wrong. In the 1970s and '80s, for instance, people said things like that all the time about Steve Garvey, Pete Rose, Dwight Gooden, Fernando Valenzuela and Dale Murphy, but for one reason or another, none of them has been elected yet.