2015 Baseball HOF ballot released

Rusty, if you don't see Biggio and Piazza as true Hall guys, your standards are too high. Then again, I have a friend, a lifelong Yankee fan, whose standards for the Hall have him saying he doesn't think Jeter deserves it. I think his Hall would have like eight plaques in it.

 

Piazza yes, Biggio I can see an argument against.

 

I don't vote for Biggio. He'll get in and I won't mind, but he will do it without my vote.

I like to see dominance and longevity, with the former being more important.
I think Biggio's case is more heavily based on the latter.

It doesn't mean he sucks. It just means I put him in the top 2 percent of players instead of the top 1 percent.

 

I don't remember who it was, but there was one voter who apparently voted for 10 guys in a 20-year span. He was one of the guys who didn't vote for Nolan Ryan and that was when this came out. In the 1990s, he voted for Seaver, Schmidt, Carlton and Brett. The only year he ever voted for two players was in 1989 when he voted for Bench and Yaz.

 

I'll give Ken Gurnick props for sticking to his conviction: He said after Morris he wouldn't vote because he viewed everyone else as in the steroid era and he wouldn't vote for anyone from that time. MLB.com released their ballots and he didn't have one.

 

He has chosen to represent the worst extreme of everything that is wrong with the Hall of Fame voting process, but at least he is consistent in doing so.

 

From Michael Silverman's Hall of Fame Article, Rich Gosselin explains his no on Pedro:

http://www.bostonherald.com/sports/...f_fame_projection_pedro_martinez_looks_like_a

Asked to explain his ballot, which did include two first-time players, Johnson and Smoltz, Gosselin replied in an email that Martinez is not the first-ballot type.

"I'm judicious with the term `first-ballot Hall of Famer,' '' wrote Gosselin. “Not all Hall of Famers are created equally in my eyes. A select few are deserving of that first ballot honor. I vote on the Pro Football Hall of Fame as well and I'm just as judicious there. I don't vote for many first-ballot candidates. It doesn't mean I don't think they are Hall of Famers. This is a selection process -- not an all-or-nothing vote on one player, one year. I'm just very select with those I vote on the first ballot. I reserve those votes for the extraordinary. Randy Johnson with his 300 wins and five Cy Youngs was a first ballot in my eyes. Pedro is certainly deserving of the Hall of Fame, but not in my eyes on the first ballot."

Asked to explain what statistics and analysis he relied upon to vote for Smoltz and not Martinez, Gosselin sent back the following.

“I thought what Smoltz did was extraordinary -- he dominated at both the front and back end of a pitching staff,'' he wrote. “He was a multi-time all-star as both a starter and a closer. At different times in his career he led the league in both victories as a starter and saves as a reliever. He won 213 games. How many more games would he have won had he not spent three seasons in the middle of his career as Atlanta's closer? And an elite closer at that? He returned to the rotation and again became an all-star.”

 

And to be fair, at least by not voting Gurnick doesn't hurt the percentages. Returning a blank ballot does.

 

Good old Wins

 

There's an anonymous vote out there that is just Raines and Trammell. Officially the winner of worst ballot.

 

Biggio is good to go -- He's a plus eight on holdovers so far: 13 adds offset five drops -- and 10 of the 12 first-timers have him. He'd be at 76.4 right now if nothing else changed and he could have eight holdovers drop him and get in right at the line.

 

The night before: 183 ballots, which is 32 percent of last year:

98.9 - Johnson
97.8 - P. Martinez
86.9 - Smoltz
84.2 - Biggio
75.4 - Piazza
————————————
63.9 - Raines
62.8 - Bagwell
51.4 - Schilling
43.7 - Bonds
43.7 - Clemens
35.0 - Mussina
28.4 - E. Martinez
23.5 - Trammell
20.2 - Smith
16.4 - McGriff
14.2 - Kent
9.8 - Sheffield
7.7 - Walker
6.6 - McGwire
————————————-
4.9 - Sosa
4.4 - Mattingly
1.6 - Garciaparra
1.6 - Delgado
1.1 - Pete Rose (Write-In)