2024 Baseball Hall of Fame thread

Here's the Post-Dispatch's Derrick Goold's ballot and his explainer for each vote.

Goold: My imperfect, completely debatable, properly defendable Hall of Fame ballot

 

Good story. Abreau is one of the most underappreciated players of his generation.

 

That was all because he got to rest his legs. I haven’t looked at month splits prior to 2020 but his power went down as the year would go on. It was clear his legs were not there.

But he had as good of a career as anyone could have dreamed to have. He was one of the top 2 catchers when he played. He just found he wanted to watch his kids more then he wanted to deal weird killing his legs.

 

Well played, Mauer.

 

I think this guy might be a little off-base here.

 

Fuck Sheffield.

 

PED stuff and assholery aside, if Sheffield isn't a Hall of Famer on the merits, almost nobody is.

 

Couldn't field a lick and played in the most offensively potent era of all-time. He finished with 0.2 WAR more than Bobby Abreu, who is barely hanging on to the back end of the ballot. Sheffield wouldn't have made it in even if he didn't "accidentally" take the cream, which absolutely nobody believes. He's the raging asshole version of super nice guy Andy Pettitte but with more than three times the support. Sheffield would probably be in if he'd only played for a couple teams and could count on some yearly hosannas from writers in those markets, a la Jim Rice (who is probably the worst HOFer selected by the writers). But he bounced around for eight mostly smaller-market teams.

 

On merit, Sheffield probably does deserve it, but I don't have a vote and never will, so I can revert to irrational fanboy biases!

Will he get in via the vet committee? No idea how he's perceived by his peers. Some probably detest him. Some, because there's a sizable sub-set of baseball players who are mental midgets, are probably drawn to him because he's a flaming asshole.

Anyway ...

DREAMS REALLY DO COME TRUE!

 

He's going to be a very interesting case study for the PED era and the Era committees. The unrepentant users--Bonds, Clemens and eventually A-Rod and Manny--are never getting in this way under current HOF chairman Jane Forbes Clark, who ensures the electorate will never have anything close to 12 pro-PED players. I strongly suspect any future chairs will have a similar philosophy, though I guess it's possible at some point.

But Sheff could be a way for the Hall to passive-aggressively acknowledge the PED era. Even if you don't believe he "only used the cream once," he was fairly obviously not nearly up to his eyeballs in the shit like Bonds, Clemens, A-Rod & Manny. He has also played the game as a candidate by taking some accountability for "only using the cream once" and doing a spate of interviews that make it clear he wants to be in the HOF. That's big to Jane & Co. They want to be begged...but in a subtle, restrained way, not like A-Rod conducting the most obvious image rehabilitation tour in history. Bonds & Clemens, to their credit, are as unrepentant in their assholishness as they were as PED users, so they won't play the game by begging to get in. Gotta respect that. And Manny may not even know there's a Hall of Fame.

Voting in Sheffield could be the Hall's way to say "What? We're not ignoring the PED era. Look! There's a plaque honoring the fifth-best user of his era right there!" That would be a classic Hall move on par with not voting in Marvin Miller while he was alive and only after he and his estate said he didn't want to be elected. It will be interesting to see what happens in 2025, when Sheffield will almost surely appear on the Contemporary Baseball Era ballot.

 

I don't think that is a lock. There are enough guys to fill it they could just leave him out. Of course they put Bonds, Clemens and Palmeiro on the last one but not McGwire.

I wonder if they put Bonds and Clemens up there just to see what the vote totals would be. They could leave them off as well after seeing that they weren't close.

 

Troy Tulowitzki is Hall of Fame eligible.

(Sound of Silence begins playing)