Not a sore spot, I was one of the vocal minority. Pujols is our second-greatest player and he can do whatever he wants. He had the good graces to leave on top and I will never forget his third home run of Game 3.

This is the only part of your post that I agree with, fair warning. Here goes nothing... (all numbers and statements about numbers from baseballreference.com)

Fielding is a measurable category. Not like hitting or pitching is, but getting there. (If you aren't a fan of sabermetrics you may not like this.) Now, Trammell was a damn good fielder. But Smith is quite possibly the best fielding shortstop of all time, in terms of zone, range, . There's Belanger, and there're shortstops from back when we didn't keep track of enough statistics to tell us anything. It's an argument. But it's one that Trammell isn't in.

(And to pile on to that, I suspect that even now we don't quite understand the impact a great-fielding shortstop has on a team. Shortstop is where the most balls get put in play in the infield, and on a team with a certain pitching staff the benefits of having an Ozzie Smith can't quite be quantified. But you can ignore that part, because I don't have numbers to back it up.)

But what I take major umbrage with is your insistence that Trammell was better in "every major offensive category." Basically, Tram has Oz on power. Homers, RBI, slugging, OPS. Expected. He was known as a slugging shortstop (unfairly, given his fielding numbers). But Oz hit just as many doubles, had a relatively similar OBP (.337 to .352), stole about 600 bases at an 80 percent clip (and was additionally better on the basepaths in general), and when you adjust his percentage numbers for league and park, they go up, and Tram's go down. And, perhaps most importantly (especially given what sort of team the Cards were when they had Smith), Oz had a roughly 2:1 BB/K ratio, which is very good, and Trammell's was slightly below 1:1. I consider that an extremely major offensive category.

So my point is not that Oz was a better hitter than Trammell; clearly not the case. You have only to look at things like OPS+ and power/speed number to get the gist of how much better he was at the plate, if not on the basepaths afterward. My point is that Ozzie is actually a pretty underrated hitter, and the whole story of his offensive impact isn't told through his career 30 home runs or whatever it was. Further, Smith is a measurably better player and was elected to the Hall because of that (not because of his famous showmanship, nickname, successful team, etc).

Incidentally, the guy you should be using as your Hall argument is Barry Larkin. Bill James once ranked shortstops, and he ranked Larkin 6th, Ozzie 7th, and Tram 9th, despite Larkin and Trammell having eerily identical careers.