2015 Baseball HOF ballot released

Very true. I think HOF voters in football and baseball can get on power trips about who gets in and making certain guys wait.

I think one way to make it better would be to have a couple rounds of cut downs and then vote on just 10-15 guys each year.

Also, if you put in 5-6 guys each year, I don't think you would get undeserving players in, I just think you wouldn't have to deal with the absurdity of making guys wait 12-15 years to get inducted.

 

Comparing a straight ERA & WHIP is misleading because of all the years Schilling spent in the NL. Mussina never left the AL East, back when it was still the AL East.

 

Yeah, but they do put 5-6 guys in each year. They also have more players to deal with, since NFL active rosters are almost twice the size of those in MLB.

I think one of baseball's problems is that you get a list of so many names and some of these voters wind up wasting their votes on guys who will never get in, but they want to keep on the ballot for another year or some other nonsense.

It would seem more effective to me to give them a list like this:

Cut the list to 20.
Cut the list to 10-15.
Vote on the most deserving 5-6.

I'd rather see a final list like this,

John Smoltz
Randy Johnson
Pedro Martinez
Barry Bonds
Curt Schilling
Jeff Bagwell
Craig Biggio
Roger Clemens
Edgar Martinez
Mike Mussina
Alan Trammell
Tim Raines
Mike Piazza
Lee Smith
Jeff Kent
Fred McGriff
Gary Sheffield

than one with Eddie Guardado and Brian Giles on it.

 

I don't have much of a problem with the setup. I could live with the cut-off to stay on the ballot be 10 percent. First-timers at the bottom of the ballot are gone in the blink of a vote.

I have one big problem -- The 10-vote limit was going to be an issue at some point and the Hall refuses to budge on it. When it was put in place, there were 16 teams and 400 players. How voters are choosing players from a pool of 30 teams and 750 players. That alone means there are going to be more candidates and yet the cap on 10 remains. It makes no sense. Even if they would have compromised to 12 picks it would have made people a little happier.

 

Michael, I've been having a helluva argument with a couple of colleagues. They insist that Dick Allen belongs. I love Dick, Rich to those who knew him back in the day, but his body of work doesn't qualify. His first six years, yes. After that, the booze and the pressure wore him down, in my opinion.
On another note closer to the subject, I look a phenomenal player like Tim Raines and while I'm not a big fan of his, Jeff Bagwell, and I can see those guys falling short for years to come. The system needs to be changed but I don't think the way Pro Football does it is the answer.

 

Drip, every year since I became a voter, I get an email from my brother arguing that Dick Allen belongs in the Hall. There's a case for his selection the latest iteration of the old Veterans Committee. He was one hell of a player with a short career.

 

And comparing wins is even more misleading because they played for different teams. And comparing innings when both had long careers is relatively meaningless because it is no longer about excellence at that point. I acknowledged there were criticisms to be made about all of those statistical comparisons, but the bottom line is that Mussina is comparable to Schilling at best during the regular season and the postseason is dramatically in Schilling's favor.

If you want to go down the rabbit hole with adjusted statistics, which include opinions mixed with fact, you are more than welcome to to take that trip. I'm sticking to things that actually happened, and in that arena, Schilling's postseason accomplishments clearly gave him the better case for the Hall of Fame when compared to Mussina.

 

And you can kiss the Randy Johnson unanimous vote out the window as well. Garry Brown picked only six names and Big Unit wasn't one of them. His ballot: Bagwell, Biggio, Edgar Martinez, Pedro Martinez, Piazza and Raines

 

Another voter whose ballot should be revoked. Of course, it won't happen, but there is no way he can make a decent argument that Randy Johnson isn't a Hall of Famer and he can't make the excuse of a full ballot. Johnson's case is as strong or stronger than every player on that ballot.

 

Another fun fact is that last year he voted for Schilling last year when he voted for nine (Maddux and Glavine and Morris were his other four last year. He didn't vote Frank Thomas) but took him off this year.

 

If we needed any more proof that the guy does not deserve a vote, the fact that he failed to vote for Thomas certainly qualifies.