He averaged 21 home runs a year and 84 RBIs a year with a .276 average. Good fielder with 2 gold gloves out of 20. One advantage he had was his first couple of years were very good so the cattle crowd went with the hype. Good ambassador for baseball.
If .276/21/84 are good enough for the HOF what isn't. Is it because he played 20 years? If he played 14 should he be in?
For a Gold Glove-level shortstop? Really? If he played 14 years at that production level he'd still be third all time in HR among players who played more games at SS than anywhere else (and both above him have PED suspensions) and 10th in RBI (and everyone ahead of him played more than 14 seasons, with all but one who are eligible in the Hall aside from PED suspension guys). And 14 years is a silly argument anyway: every HoF SS whose career started since 1950 has played at least 18 seasons. The same will be true of the next one (Jeter, 20 seasons, and would be true of Rodriguez as well (22)).
His three rough contemporaries at SS that are in the HoF are Alan Trammel, Ozzie Smith, and Barry Larkin. We'll leave Smith out, as he's there primarily because of his defense. The others, using your metrics:
Trammel: 20 seasons, .285, 185 HR, 1003 RBI. 3 Silver Sluggers, 4 Gold Gloves (and of course he was competing head to head with Ripken for both that whole time). Zero MVPs.
Larkin: 19 seasons, .295, 198 HR, 960 RBI. 7 Silver Sluggers, 3 Gold Gloves (all won after Smith turned 38), 1 MVP.
Ripken: 21 seasons, .276, 431 HR, 1695 RBI. 8 Silver Sluggers, 2 Gold Gloves, 2 MVPs.
Yes, he had the lowest batting average of the three. He also had more homers than the other two
combined and almost 700 more RBI than either. He was probably the weakest defender, but not by much, which is something else considering that both Larkin and Trammel were much quicker.
By the way, that 21/84 career average on HR and RBI: Both Larkin and Trammel each bettered that total in both categories once in their entire careers.