This guy sure played a mean game of baseball

The numbers below represent the average 162-game season for some retired major league baseball players.

Nos. 1 (Willie Stargell), 2 (Harmon Killebrew), 4 (Hack Wilson), and 5 (Tony Perez) are in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Many people believe No. 3 should be in the Hall of Fame. Those numbers belong to Jim Rice.

No. 6? Take a look at those numbers. In his average season, this man had 40 homers, 130 ribbies, and slugged .564. The pitchers were afraid of him. The problem is, so was just about everyone else. This year was his first appearance on the ballot and he came perilously close to being knocked off it forever. If only 16 fewer people out of the 520 who voted had not included his name on the ballot, he would have fallen under the required 5 percent needed to remain eligible. This man received 40 votes, or 7.7 percent. How can that be?

Some of you may have guessed the answer already. The player in question is the Pariah of Pariahs, the ultimate Mr. Persona Non Grata. It is, of course, Albert Belle.

It was the great subplot of this year's election. Story A was the business at the top involving people such as Jim Rice, Bruce Sutter, Goose Gossage, Andre Dawson, Bert Blyleven, and Jack Morris. Story B was Albert Belle. I, for one, was absolutely consumed with curiosity about how this would turn out.

We all knew this would be the ultimate morality test case for the electorate. Most of us pride ourselves on being, well, objective. We tell the world that personal feelings have nothing to do with our vote, pointing to the easy first-ballot election of such mediaphobes as Steve Carlton (95.6 percent of the vote) and Eddie Murray (85.2). But in the case of Belle, it was more than merely not talking to the media or something petty like that. Albert Belle was an entirely different matter.

It may have been best summed up just two days ago by Teddy Greenstein in the Chicago Tribune, who began his column as follows: ''He got only 40 votes, or one for every 10 that Bruce Sutter received. So why do I still believe that Albert Belle got way more Hall of Fame support than he deserved? Because I covered him in 1998 when he played for the White Sox."

Belle never did anything to me personally. But I can tell you that in my 38 years here, I have never observed a more negative aura cast on a locker room or clubhouse than the one created by Belle when he played for the Indians from 1991 (his first full year) through 1996. That should have been a happy workspace. The Indians were very good and their manager, Mike Hargrove, was a 100 percent people person. But the room was always tense because no one knew when Belle might erupt.

But until crunch time came, no one knew just how much the Belle persona would outweigh the Belle numerical résumé. Now we know. The answer is, just about completely.

''I thought he'd get about 25 percent of the vote," says Sheldon Ocker, who covered Belle for the Akron Beacon-Journal. ''So I was surprised it was that low."

Shelly Ocker did not vote for Albert Belle.

''I didn't think he played long enough, plain and simple," Ocker says. ''And you have to take into context the times in which he played." In other words, '90s numbers were much easier to put up than '40s, '50s, '60s, or '70s numbers.

The career longevity is a legitimate point. Belle had 10 productive seasons before being forced into retirement because of a hip condition at age 34 at the end of the 2000 season. He had, for example, 2,074 fewer at-bats than Stargell, 2,294 fewer at-bats than Killebrew, 2,372 fewer at-bats than Rice, and 3,925 fewer at-bats than Perez. But he also had 1,093 more at-bats than Wilson, who was placed in the Hall by the Veterans Committee almost exclusively on the basis of his 56-homer, 191-RBI 1930 season, a campaign widely regarded as the most irrelevant and aberrational year for offensive statistics in the history of the game.

However short Belle's career was relative to such Methuselan sorts as Perez (23 seasons) and Killebrew (22 seasons), no one can deny that it was dynamic. In those 10 productive seasons, he made five All-Star teams while leading the league in RBIs three times, total bases three times, and extra-base hits three times. At one time or another, he also led the American League in runs, OPS, doubles, home runs, and even sacrifice flies (twice).

There is little doubt he would have won the MVP over Mo Vaughn in 1995 -- when Belle became the first man to hit 50 homers and 50 doubles in the same season -- if he weren't so universally loathed.

None of this fazed Paul Hoynes of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. He, too, covered Belle and he, too, left his name off the ballot.

''His numbers were good," Hoynes says. ''I thought if he played one or two more years at a high level, I'd have to vote for him. But he didn't. He was a bad guy. And what goes around comes around."

Belle was an equal opportunity abuser.

''It wasn't just us," recalls Hoynes. ''He would sit there and dare somebody to talk to him. He would abuse the clubhouse guy, the PR guy, everybody."

More Teddy Greenstein: ''He was even a menace to Sox employees. He once cursed out a broadcaster for having the gall to enter the trainer's room to get an aspirin. And he belittled hitting instructor Von Joshua by forbidding him from discussing his swing with reporters."

''He just liked to bully people," maintains Ocker, who says he was happy to vote for Rice. ''He wanted to scare people, just for sport. And he got about 10 percent worse every year. In the end, he only had two teammates who'd talk to him. But Kenny Lofton gave up on him and began blasting him to the press. And Wayne Kirby gave up about halfway through his last season."

What was truly scary about Belle is that he was smart. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was a rational thug. As Ocker says, ''He enjoyed being mean."

All true, says Terry Pluto, columnist for the Beacon Journal. ''But I voted for Albert anyway. I don't care that he was an SOB. I saw nine years with 100 RBI. In his time, he was the most dominant hitter in the American League. Mike Hargrove told me last year that he might not want to invite Albert over to the house, but he belonged in the Hall of Fame."

Pluto knew he'd be in the minority. ''But I figured he'd get about 20 percent, not 7," he says.

I must point out that Pluto is an exemplary person whose devotion to causes and whose commitment to principle puts the rest of us to utter shame. ''If Albert dropped an f-bomb on me, I just shut the notebook and walked away," Pluto reports. ''I could always talk to Dennis Martinez. He wanted his name in the paper every day."

Pluto also gets around. ''Maybe I'm a little soft on Albert because I saw him in the minors and he had a foot-in-the-bucket swing," adds Pluto. ''I saw how far he had come to become a great hitter."

It's a biblical saga. Albert Belle has sown, and now it's harvest time. He could reap only 7.7 percent of the vote, and the only hope a man in that circumstance has of getting in is via the Veterans Committee, far, far down the road. He'll have to depend on -- how funny is this? -- friends.

How'd I vote? Put me down as a negative. As far as I'm concerned, he and Pete Rose can form their own Hall of Shame.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com.