2024 Baseball Hall of Fame thread

This is the part that intrigues me. What is the rationale for those three votes for Wright? Do they not take the ballot seriously?

 

I assume it is because he had a hall of fame peak and injuries are the reason he ended up falling short, so you throw him a token vote

 

That's a pretty good answer. Wish they wouldn't do that. Don't believe your vote means something more than it does. You don't need to "send a message" with it.

 

I'm almost sure one of the votes is from a former Mets beat writer who wanted to reward Wright for a HOF-caliber peak as well as for his unyielding class while captaining a complete shit show of an organization. As far as these things go, it's harmless and has some merit. Wright's not going to get enough votes to stay on the ballot and the likelihood of these votes keeping Helton/Wagner/Sheffield is extremely small. It's not giving the worst guy on the ballot a vote for shit's sake. As far as ballots go, that's a far better one than Bill Ballou's annual disaster.

 

The rationale for one of the Wright votes is explained here by Marc Narducci

https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2023/12/marc-narducci-my-hall-of-fame-ballot-3.html


New York Mets third baseman David Wright was on a HOF trajectory before spinal stenosis ended his career. Wright’s last full-time year was his age-31 season in 2014.

His counting stats, which included 1,777 career hits and 242 home runs, will be used against him, but Wright had an impressive nine-year peak, where he earned seven All-Star berths. The seven all-star games matched last year’s HOF inductee Scott Rolen.

From 2005-2013, Wright hit .302/.384./.505 with a 138 OPS+. Wright averaged 23 home runs, 90 runs and 93 RBI. During this time, he won two Gold Gloves, two Silver Slugger awards, and finished in the Top 10 in MVP voting four times. After this period, he would play just one more full season, 2014 when the decline began.

His final career numbers were .296/376/.491 and a 133 OPS+. Only seven HOF third baseman have a higher OPS+ than Wright.

Should Wright be penalized for suffering what turned out to be a career-ending injury, that ended his full-time status after his age 31 season?

It can be argued that durability is part of being a HOF player and that is a good case, but Wright was the face of the franchise, a perennial All-Star and a strong two-way performer.

We can see both sides of this argument, just as we can for Utley and to a degree Mauer, but these players did enough to make it onto this ballot, even if their excellence was shorter than some would like.

 

My guess is, since they get 10 picks, they feel obligated to use them all.

 

When I had a vote, I always used all 10 picks. I almost never felt one or more was a "wasted" pick in the sense it's used in this thread. I saw an interesting anomaly the other day. MLB Network was running this canned film series on the best nine players at each position since 1947 and the PED guys were included. Manny Ramirez was on the list of left fielders and Barry Bonds actually was number one in that category. These are guys the writers will never ever vote into the Hall, yet the sport's own network had no issue citing them as historically great players, which they were. It's a case of the baseball writers being more royalist than the king.

 

Or a case of them massively inflating their own self-worth by appointing themselves as baseball cops. A former co-worker had a vote and had a particularly dumb baseball take (I forget what it was). He also was smug and thin-skinned whenever anyone dared to question his baseball opinions. Just because someone's done the job for 40 years doesn't make their takes automatically valid, or interesting.

 

I once wrote that the fans should have the Hall vote and the reaction from baseball writers I knew was practically violent.

 

I'm much more anti-Manny than I am anti-Bonds. The latter should be in without a second thought. Manny is a living screaming embodiment of the morals clause.

 

Voting's going great:

 

At least you can't accuse him of moralizing. He's got the known steroid cheats AND he added a child abuser.