2013 MLB Hall of Fame Screechfest

Bonds and Clemens? Piazza and Bagwell? Absolutely... Palmeiro, Sosa and McGwire? I'd be stunned.

 

I think you can easily defend voting for Bonds and Clemens. I think you can easily defend not voting for Sosa. It just doesn't sound like he defended his picks very well.

I suppose you can defend voting for Walker and Lofton. It's not like a vote for Jim Deshaies.

 

Lofton's better than probably 10 or 12 guys in the Hall of Fame, though most of those were Frankie Frisch-era "I'm gonna put all my Giants and Cardinals teammates in Cooperstown" Veterans Committee selections.

Still, he deserved more than to drop off the ballot after one year.

 

And Albert Belle is better than Tony Perez.

 

Palmeiro has 3,000 hits That can't be ignored. Sosa and McGwire are shaky but between the two, I believe Sosa gets in first.

 

The Hall of Fame is not sainthood. It's an award, same as the MVP. The "sportsmanship" clause is a fig leaf created to allow writers to exercise power without baseball justification. In point of fact baseball-reference.com kind of makes the Hall irrelevant. Anybody with Internet access can see who the damn best players were. Sooner or later, the Hall will admit the Steroid Era greats. It may be after they're dead, because spitefulness is one of the main character traits of the national pastime, it may require the BBWAA to be removed from the equation (a done deal in my lifetime, I think), but it will happen. A museum that rewrites history isn't of any use to anyone.
Bonds and Clemens aside, at least two guys who obviously qualified, Bagwell and Piazza were kept out on no grounds but the malicious rumormongering that so often makes baseball press boxes a pain in the ass to be in.

 

Ty Cobb also conspired to fix a game.

 

I think what bugs me is that you have a couple of different bodies involved that could make a definitive statement, - outright banning of admitted steroid users, 10 year suspension in eligibility, require that steroid use must or must not be considered in evaluating their candidacies or some other concrete clarification of what they are voting on.
Perhaps the writers know what they are doing. Drawing one last line of defense to seek some final justice over the steroid era - but maybe the stat heads can save us and develop some formula to determine what a player's performance level would have been without the juice.
I don't shed tears for those who didn't juice and are now getting held up from admission because of the confusion. They knew, made their choice not to say anything, perhaps benefitted from having a user on their team - that's the breaks.

 

And what's worse is that starting next year, they will be putting at least one, if not two, player in every year for the next five years based on future eligibles. So 2013 is going to look like 1996 in retrospect.

But it doesn't change the fact that there are several hall of famers on this ballot. And they couldn't elect a single one, let alone a couple of guys.

Morris has maybe a five-percent chance to get in on the last ballot. He needs to hope that a bunch of new voters don't enter the pool and every Dale Murphy protest ballot becomes him by default — and even that would just be a 4 percent increase. He got absolutely no bump because of PED backlash ( a whopping three more votes with four less ballots).

And I take Rosenthal to task for villifying the "Internet" for the case against Jack Morris, especially after he said that there were five or six Hall of Fame players on the ballot. If that was the case, how the hell could you not put any in?

Clemens and Bonds had a difference of eight votes.

I'm surprised Schilling got a higher percentage than Clemens and Bonds. I'm a little shocked Sosa was so low. He and Palmeiro are really close to getting dropped next ballot.

I really thought Bagwell and Piazza would be in the 60s, especially Bagwell after getting 56 percent last time. I thought he'd get to 65-70 range.

Tim Raines is getting elected in 2016. He's going to pass Bagwell in percentage and be third behind Biggio and Piazza in the pecking order.

I am still amazed that the level of support Mattingly gets. I can't believe that Sandy Alomar Jr. got 16 votes and Kenny Lofton could only manage 18.

 

Dan, how do you know they knew? Nor is injustice ever excused by "the breaks." I'm not that concerned about the players, or the Hall or baseball, I hate what this vote says about an organization of which I'm a member and sports journalism as a profession.

 

I suspect that if the anti-roiders keep blocking guys like Piazza and Bagwell when there's nothing more than "suspicion" of sluggers, it will boomerang into making enough voters dismiss the issue entirely. I say this because their supporters can get outraged over their exclusion despite the lack of evidence against them, and throw in their lot with the known roiders like Bonds and Clemens to make the issue irrelevant.

 

The last time there were no living inductees was 1960, and they canceled the Hall of Fame ceremony.

Here's the news clipping from that day, courtesy of Dayn Perry on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/daynperry/status/289154637892833281/photo/1