I see that the blockheads who vote for the baseball Hall of Fame have managed to stiff Scott Rolen again; he picked up a little over a third of the ballots, and that's all.
Rolen had a long career. He was a big contributor to championship teams. He was a GREAT glove man at 3B, though not quite as good as the best ever, Brooks Robinson. He was a GREAT batsman for a third baseman, though not as good as the greatest 3B ever, Mike Schmidt. Rolen was better with the glove than Schmidt, who was excellent, and he was better with the bat than Robinson, who was no slouch on offense. He drew walks, was a very good and aggressive base runner, hit for power (more than 300 HRs), and for good to very good average. He was as good a hitter as HOF Paul Molitor, who stuck around longer and racked up a few of the "counting" statistics (3000+ hits), but who was nowhere close to as good as Rolen with the glove.
Rolen is easily one of the top 12 third basemen of all time; Baseball Reference has him at 10th. Baseball has been around for 150 years. It should be no big deal to name one player at one position every 10 years ...
The problem with Rolen has to do with the eyes and not the mind. The "eyes," so to speak, catch what is easy to notice at first glance. Or they "look" for some prominent thing that seems to define excellence at a position, or in an art, etc. That is why, as Bill James wrote long ago, players who are better than everybody else at ONE thing are overrated by comparison with players whose excellence is more broadly spread about. And players who shine at the "defining" thing are overrated by comparison with players who do not, but whose value, lying elsewhere, is overlooked because it doesn't seem to go along with the position or the activity. For example: first basemen are supposed to be big bruisers like Boog Powell, who hit a lot of home runs but aren't expected to do a whole lot else. So we don't see a skinny guy who doesn't do that as one of the best first basemen ever: a guy like Keith Hernandez. A shortstop is supposed to be a skinny guy who does back flips, rather than a bigger and (somewhat) slower fellow who is still good with the glove but better with the bat, and that is why Alan Trammell was underrated for so long, and it is STILL why 2B Bobby Grich is not in the Hall of Fame. (And those guys who are almost identical and who are just a tad less than Grich: Lou Whitaker and Willie Randolph.)
We may say that people who do things, some of them good and some of them bad, will be overrated by comparison with people who mainly prevent bad things from being done; offense is overrated relative to defense. People who are easy to define are overrated by comparison with people who are hard to define; so Byron for a long time was overrated by comparison with Wordsworth....