It’s that
time of year again. Cooperstown fever is
in full strength and several eligible and worthy candidates are lined up at the
gate waiting for a series of baseball writers to consider them amongst the top
ten names on the ballot, and put them into the hall for eternal
enshrinement. We have known for about
five years now that this class would be the dooziest of doozies, sporting names
like Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Frank Thomas, Jeff Kent, Mike Mussina, and a ton
of steroids era holdovers like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Mark Mcgwire,
all of whom no one assumed would be in by now.
As this date grew closer, we learned a few more names would hang around
due to ineptitudes from previous years: Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza, Edgar
Martinez, and Jeff Bagwell, just to name a few, not to mention the ever-present
Jack Morris and Lee Smith.
Yesterday
the final votes were announced. If you
haven’t by now, you can scroll down to my previous entry where I predicted a
large class, perhaps the largest in history, where everyone from Jack Morris to
Greg Maddux get what they deserve and are finally deemed worthy of
enshrinement. I realize now that when I
made that post I was naïve; I put way too much trust in the baseball writers
overcoming previous assumptions and the craptastic system in which they must
determine legacies.
We should
have seen this coming, frankly. Eight
years ago when Mark Mcgwire made his hall of fame ballot debut, we all should
have realized there would be an albatross haunting the other names from then
on. While Mcgwire had hall of fame
credentials with his 500+ homeruns and legacy as a power hitter, Mcgwire was
also a proven steroids user, and it should be no surprise that tons of baseball
writers feel the steroids era bashers should not make the hall. Add a few more years, a few more steroids era
names like Clemens, Bonds, Palmeiro, and Sosa, and a few more garbage votes by
the baseball writers who will support players with 500 homeruns, 300 wins, and
3000 hits regardless of steroid use, and suddenly the ballot is clogged. Oh, but it doesn’t end there.
Along with
these guilty steroids era names are the possible steroid users, the ones no one
can be 100% sure of and as long as there is a doubt, they will never gain
enough support. This category includes
Jeff Bagwell, Edgar Martinez, Mike Piazza, and Larry Walker. Now, it is true that none of these players
have reached the 500/3000 milestones, so that alone can keep them away, but how
long must we hold them back for unproven allegations?
So we have
the steroids users, the unproven steroid possibilities, and who else? -the “ballot hangers.” This is a term I coined when I was a kid for
every Dale Murphy, Tommy John, and well, Don Mattingly that hung around on the
ballot for a long time just to run their 15 years without enough votes-you may
recognize Jack Morris has become one of these players-and hope for success in
the Veteran’s ballot. Now, before you
say Jack Morris was simply not good enough for enshrinement(he was), I want you
to look at players like Bert Blyleven, Jim Rice, and Goose Gossage, all of
which got into the hall after spending way more time on the ballot than they
deserved to. Blyleven and Rice each got
into the hall with their final year of eligibility while Gossage finally got
his due in his ninth year of eligibility, after several weak ballots followed
one another. If you seriously consider
the credentials of Blyleven, Rice, and Gossage unworthy of the hall, then you
would consider them casualties of weak classes, the terrible stretch of time
between the 1999 Ryan, Brett, and Yount class and the steroids entries where
most of those elected were first year no-doubters and whoever followed was a
pageant of sad saps hoping for their chance.
Because of this sad sap pageant, names like Blyleven, Rice, Gossage,
Dawson, Perez, Sandberg, and Larkin got into the hall. This is a good thing as it allows the writers
to consider a time period and a player’s personality, rather than just their
stats and awards.
Last year’s
ballot should have been the biggest indication of this year’s bottleneck
however. Here we had a clean
professional player by the name of Craig Biggio who hit 3000 hits over a long
career in Houston and upon arrival on the ballot, could not hold enough votes to
make the hall. That is a player with
3000 hits who was a perennial all star and could not get into the hall of fame
in his first year of eligibility. This
is sad.
So five
years ago, when we knew about Maddux, Glavine, Thomas, Kent, and Mussina coming
for the ballot, we did not know the next five years would be filled with the
inability to elect a deserving 3000-hit player, the need to stockpile steroids
users on the ballot, the need to stockpile alleged steroids users on the
ballot, and the remnants of ballot hangers, some of which should have been
elected by now. Keep this in mind when
you consider that every baseball writer has a maximum of ten votes.
With ten
selections, where a large section of the voters are doting out their votes to
the stat king-steroid users who are still taking up space, and someone out
there even gave a pity vote to Jacque Jones, and someone else wrote in Pete
Rose’s name, how the hell did I expect so many names to get in? Were baseball writers to think, “Maddux will
get enough votes no matter what, I’ll leave him off my ballot in favor of Mike
Mussina?” Or were they to think, “Glavine can wait a few years, this is Jack
Morris’s last shot?” The numbers of
course indicate that the answers to those questions are both no, but why are we
putting baseball writers into this position anyway? Seriously, whoever did not
vote for Maddux should have their head examined, but how do you vote for such a
surefire hall of famer while the underrated all around good baseball names
flounder in the lack of space on your voting ballot? This is a dilemma that leads to the end of
the era of Blyleven and Rice. This is a
dilemma where only the elite will make it in, and even Barry Larkin would
barely garnish 20% on this ballot.
Here is the
full results with gain/loss from last year:
If you didn’t
realize it up there, there were only three names elected this year: Greg
Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas.
Craig Biggio fell short by two votes while Mike Piazza fell short by a
few more, and the new names of Mussina and Kent garnished barely 20% of the
votes. As for everyone else, not
including the no chance newbies from Moises Alou down, their vote totals
FELL. Every single one of them saw their
vote percentage decrease by a significant amount, we’re talking at least 5% in
just about every case. Who saw the
smallest decrease, you ask? The stat
king-steroid users: Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens had a combined loss of 3.74%
which is even less than the third lowest loss (Don Mattingly at 5% loss). Who had the biggest loss? Lee Smith at 17.85%
who, with three years left of eligibility, may as well already be trying to
please the veteran’s committee.
These loss
totals show that the votes for the steroid class seem to hold relatively
constant while the votes for old timers towards the end of their ballot careers
falter as a result, unlike in previous years when they prospered towards the end. Stock piling these steroid-riddled names on
the ballot is dangerous, as long as there is a ten vote maximum, as certain
baseball writers will consistently vote for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens
instead of Jack Morris and Lee Smith.
Also, withholding the unproven steroids accused from the hall will most
certainly ensure certain writers to vote for Jeff Bagwell and Edgar Martinez
over newcomers like Mike Mussina and Curt Schilling. And finally, withholding all these names from
the hall affects one player the most, the 3000-hitter 100% clean player who has
no MVPs or World Series wins to his name, but was the face of a franchise from
1988-2007: Craig Biggio. When Maddux and
Glavine, both condierably better than Biggio, share a ballot with Bonds and
Clemens, both with better stats than Biggio but corrupted by steroid use, and
Bagwell and Martinez, both worthy candidates shrouded by allegations of
corruption, how does Biggio stand a chance?
If there
was not a ten vote maximum, Cooperstown would be enshrined with Maddux,
Glavine, Thomas, Biggio, Morris, Piazza, and maybe even Bagwell while players
like Mussina, Schilling, and Kent would get the vote totals they deserve, oh
and Greg Maddux would have had a shot at 100% of the vote, like he deserved. Its time to change this terrible ten vote
maximum rule.
