Hall of Fame and Other Items

C70 thought about writing this entire post in third person since C70 thought it'd be a way to honor Rickey Henderson for making the Hall of Fame, but C70 can't do that quite as well as Rickey.

Obviously, Henderson was the type of player that the Hall of Fame was made for.  It's still a little surprising that 5.2% of the populace didn't put him on the ballot, though.  Will this idea that no one deserves to be unanimous ever die?  If you aren't willing to vote for someone because it's his first year on the ballot, are you really a qualified voter?

Jim Rice also made the Hall after 15 years of trying.  There have been plenty of debates on whether he really deserves to go in.  Not something I'm really prepared to talk about, since most of his career was before my time and so I've not paid a lot of attention to the arguments since.  I will note, though, that I wonder if a smaller-market person with the same stats would have made it in since it took him so long.  Maybe, maybe not.

The most Cardinal-related news out of the voting, besides that Lee Smith didn't get in, was that Mark McGwire actually lost votes in the last year.  How do you do that?  It's not like there were Clemens-like revelations coming out about him.  McGwire's sat out in California minding his own business.  If you'd already decided to ignore the controversy around him, why would you change your mind now?

The Hall voters can get away with this right now, but in a couple of years, they are really going to have to take on the steroid era.  When you can't tell which players were using and which weren't, when you can't say it was just big sluggers bulking up but also the pitchers they were facing, where are you going to draw the line?

McGwire starting hitting home runs the day he made the majors and never stopped.  Did he use illegal steroids?  I don't know.  I know most people think he did and I know Mac's not done much to counter that impression.  His disasterous Congressional appearance may be the single biggest reason he's not in there.  But he never was proven to use, nor linked as closely as Barry Bonds has been to them.  So there's at least some room for doubt.

No matter, some day soon people are going to have to figure out what they want to do about that era, or there will be a number of years that nobody makes it into the Hall because most everyone on the ballot has some suspicion one way or another.

Shifting gears, there's not much going on in the Cardinal realm.  Last week's flood of news seems to have dwindled back down to a trickle.  The Cards lost out on Kenshin Kawakami, a pitcher I thought they might really have a chance of bringing in.  The Braves seem to have gotten quite aggressive after John Smoltz took off for Boston, perhaps waking them up a bit.  Other than that, we continue to wait and tick off days on the calendar.  32 days and counting until spring training.  Will anything happen in the meantime?




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