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Hall of Fame and Other Items

Posted on January 13, 2009 at 8:23 AM
Filed Under: General Baseball | St. Louis Cardinals
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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2 Comments

2 Comments | Leave a comment

I was curious to see Rickey's final numbers. I actually expected more people toss him in the steroid speculation. After all he was a teammate of McGwire and Canseco. He was stealing 30+ bases at 40+ years old. In this day and age, I thought more people would make that jump to performance enhancers. But stolen base records aren't as important as home run records.

I have no idea if Rickey used anything or not and I don't care. To me the best of the era get in. Rickey deserves to be there. However, so does McGwire and we see what the speculation has done to him.

A couple of thoughts...

(1) I think that 15 years is entirely too long for someone to be on the HoF ballot. I wonder if the HoF committee will look to ever change that length of time in the future. I'm not sure what the right amount of time should be (maybe 5 or 8 years?) but 15 years seems awfully long. I'll never understand how someone can go from getting 30% of the vote their first year to getting in on their 15th and final year on the ballot.

(2) With regards to the players associated with the steroid era I wonder how much of a snowball effect there will be. Right now it's just McGwire on the ballot. But soon, assuming that trend stays to form and suspected steroid users do not get in on first try, the ballot is going to have a ballot of would-be-otherwise HoFs like Mac, Palmeiro, Sosa, Bonds, and Clemens. So once you get that many on the ballot will there be a straw that breaks the camel's back?

I don't see all of them just all of the sudden getting inducted in the same year. Maybe you'll see one of them, say Bonds, first make it and then that'll open the flood gates for the rest to get inducted in the years that follow.

My one other perspective on the steroid-associated players is that voters will never want to vote any of them in when highly revered players NOT associated with steroids (rightfully or wrongfully) are on the ballot. For instance, in 2014 when Greg Maddux is on the ballot no voters will want his induction to be surrounded by the hype of the first steroid player being voted in. I believe most voters would deem that "unfair" to Maddux. But in a lot of year there are going to be first timers (Alomar, Griffey Jr, Big Unit, Glavine, Piazza, Ivan Rodriguez, etc.)... so how will they ever "fit" the steroid players in?

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2009 Top Hero: Albert Pujols (28)
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