- Pedro Martinez
- Randy Johnson (former Giant!)
- John Smoltz
- Craig Biggio
ogc thoughts
This great article by USA Today's Nightingale captured my thoughts almost exactly (h/t to Raising Cain for bringing to my attention): hypocrisy in HoF voting must end
I've been writing about this for many years now, much of the Hall of Fame voting I've been ashamed of for years (how could Willie Mays and Hank Aaron not be unanimous, among many others?), too many men who think they are above the game, and in the end, their stupidity will be acknowledged.
Bonds again getting the snub from around two-thirds of the voters just gets my blood boiling. Use the eyes they were supposedly using to judge baseball players, it don't matter if he cheated, he already had the Hall of Fame talent.
And it could be all for naught, it could be all a big misconception, because there is an alternative theory for the offensive era that has a lot of good evidence backing that stance. I've linked to it before, but here they are again:
Juiced ball
The Not Steroid Era
If the data in these two links are true, then these high and mighty moral sportswriters could be punishing players for taking drugs that did very little for their performance, making them look bad twice-fold in history's eyes: first they were blind to what was happening, with nobody even following one clue, I mean Gary Hart was found to be cheating pretty easily, yet nobody followed up on McGwire when he was caught with the stuff in his locker, and the rumors were out there, so not one enterprising sportswriter thought to follow any of the clues out there?
Then to make up for the fact that none of them were enterprising enough to follow the frequent rumors and was asleep on the job while baseball players were using en masse, they take it out on the players who appears to have used - but as the two links above assert - gained nothing (but acne and possibly shortening their lives) for taking the snake oil.
What would be karma would be if none of the voters who did not vote for Bonds or Clemens end up getting shunned from the Hall of Fame as well.
Here is another great column on the topic from Jayson Stark: http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/12128470/five-things-learned-hall-fame-election
ReplyDeleteHe mentions a great idea for making the HoF voting process better, instead of writers selecting up to 10 players for their ballot, have a Yes or No next to each player, so that the writer can vote for as many or little as he or she wants. It's not perfect (and I've reached the point where I don't think there can ever be a perfect process), but at least an improvement over what we got now.
I like the other ideas he mentioned in the article too, extending the number of years back to the 15 from the 10 that was clearly chosen to punish the accused steroid "cheaters", allowing voters more than 10 votes. At least there are writers willing to stand up and point out their colleagues woeful behavior.
He also wrote a nice column about his ballot and the HoF. I loved his ending:
So I may not be allowed to vote for all the players I believe are Hall of Famers. But I am allowed to vote for the 10 best players -- even if that means voting for men the Hall would like to pretend never existed. I still love the Hall of Fame, as much as I ever did. I just wish I loved the honor of voting for it as much as I did once upon a time.
Forgot the link! Doh!
Deletehttp://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/12115949/jayson-stark-explains-2015-hall-fame-ballot
My man Ray Ratto had another great column about the Hall of Fame voting shenanigans, I love his writing: http://www.csnbayarea.com/giants/hall-fame-voting-process-undermines-its-own-institution
ReplyDeleteOur annual railing about the arrogance and self-involvement some writers possess finally hit "E" for me this year, and I have nothing left by way of argument. I now become what I once detested -- the Defensive Inclusionist -- not because I have seen the light, but because there is too little light to be seen.
And that’s the Hall we’re going to get from now on. In the few years left for the writers’ vote until Major League Baseball turns them out and replaces them with it an Internet Buy-One-Get-One-Free sale (you know, buy $1000 worth of licensed team shmata, get a vote), the Hall of Fame will bring you romantic tales of the worthy unworthy. Now there’s a hoot.
We like to think that therein lies the fun of the ballot -- the endless debate about whose numbers don’t mean what they mean, how many votes are enough, how many players may be influenced to be nice to media members in hopes of a stray vote here or there (the answer so far is none).
But it isn’t. In pursuit of the perpetual talking point that we all think is the real raison d’etre for the building, we have turned it into a Hall of Voters, which is a lot worse than the historical museum it ought to be. And as a voter, I would like to take this opportunity to throw up into this rosebush.
And it won’t change until the vote is turned over to the guys who wear jerseys in their 40s and only vote for their favorite players on their favorite teams in the time-honored tradition of the All-Star Voting ballot box cram.
X X X
And my ballot, if you must know (and frankly, you don’t really need to and shouldn’t care that much): Jeff Bagwell, B.L. Bonds, Roger Clemens, R. Unit Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Mike Mussina, Mike Piazza, Tim Raines, John Smoltz and Alan Trammell. Curt Schilling and Craig Biggio fell from my last ballot not because their deeds deteriorated, but because I ran out of room and had to vote tactically rather than by merit, and while that’s not really that good a reason, it’s the only one I have.