With fellow first-timer, 300-game-winner Tom Glavine, it looks like there are three no-doubt Hall-of-Famers added to this year's ballot.
But what about the rest of the ballot?
Jeff Kent and Mike Mussina are two more additions who I think have pretty strong Hall cases. Kent ranks among the best-hitting second basemen of all time. Mussina didn't collect as many wins or pitch as many innings as Glavine, but you could argue they were better innings.
How much traction Kent and Mussina -- or even Maddux, Thomas and Glavine -- receive really depends on how the BWAA approaches the backlog of candidates on the ballot.
Among the holdovers are Craig Biggio, Tim Raines, Alan Trammell, Edgar Martinez, Curt Schilling, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. I mention those players by name because they are the players I would vote for if I were a BWAA member. And if you could include more than 10 players on your ballot.
That's ignoring Rafael Palmeiro, Jack Morris, Lee Smith, Larry Walker, Fred McGriff and Don Mattingly. None of whom I'd vote for, even as a Big Hall supporter, but are other guys who have a strong statistical case (Palmeiro, Walker) or support from other corners (Smith, Morris).
How is it so many obviously qualified guys are getting left out?
If it were just a matter of the BWAA voters being stingy with who gains entry, that would be a good explanation. Except the voters have enshrined guys like Jim Rice (not that good), Tony Perez (also not that good) and Kirby Puckett (not good for long enough).
Part of it might also be a reluctance to render any verdict on baseball's Steroid Era, particularly with regard to Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro and others.
This is another area where the logic gets fuzzy. Some of those players are suffering the steroid stigma when the evidence of PED use is flimsy and anecdotal at best (Bagwell, Piazza). Sometimes it's downright convoluted ("I think Bagwell was a 'roider, and that Biggio guy must have been, too!").
Other writers feel like it's just a great opportunity to grandstand, so submit ballots with no selections, thus demonstrating they don't really take the vote all that seriously. At least not seriously enough that we should pay attention to their nonsense. Just abdicate the duty if you don't want it.
Perhaps it will take a Veterans Committee to sift through some of these candidacies once more time has passed, though for my part, I don't think you can whitewash any steroid era, or pretend like it never happened.
The games were played, and for the most part they were with none of those players violating any MLB rules. They can't be replayed with any retroactive standard in place.
Though baseball, by and large, hasn't tried to follow professional cycling down that rabbit hole to nowhere, stripping its former champions of hardware with the largest effect being to taint the entire sport, the Hall of Fame seems willing to let column-writing voters test the institution's relevancy.
So it goes, I guess.
What's hysterical is that some people are actually debating whether Frank Thomas is first-ballot worthy. Really? He's a no-brainer. There seems to be this idea that anyone who hit home runs in the 1990s has to wait, because, well, dammit, people used steroids in that era. It's completely asinine that Bagwell and Piazza haven't been enshrined yet, and it will be asinine if Thomas isn't chosen this year.
ReplyDeleteBiggio had over 3,000 hits, for crying out loud, yet people didn't vote for him because he played with Bagwell, and some voters have already tried and convicted Bagwell of steroid use despite a lack of evidence against him. Biggio somehow became guilty by association. Absolutely ridiculous.
And Edgar Martinez belongs in the Hall, too. To hell with these idiot "purists" and their loathing of the DH. Martinez is a seven-time All-Star with a .312 career batting average and a .933 career OPS. He hit over .300 10 times, including seven seasons in a row. Only an idiot doesn't recognize Martinez's greatness as a hitter.