2015 Baseball HOF ballot released

The voters will have no one to blame but themselves when the voting system is changed dramatically in a couple years.

There are certain players that if you don't vote for, you should need to explain your justification and pointing out that Dimaggio had to wait two years to get in isn't enough.

 

The problem isn't a few random horrible non-votes, it's the way MLB kicked the PED issue can over to the voters plus the 75 percent requirement. There is no consensus within the electorate over whether or not guys like Bonds, Clemens, etc. should be in or not (I am for it, for what it's worth). But while there aren't enough votes to elect the steroid era guys, there are enough to keep them on the ballot for the next year. The resulting backlog has and will screw other candidates. I didn't like leaving Trammell off this year, but was he as deserving of a vote as Bonds? Not to me.
MLB didn't have the stones to either disqualify the steroid era guys or make a statement they should be judged without reference to the issue. So we have the worst of both worlds.

 

It is a cop out.

I understand both sides of voting for the guys who used or not voting the for the guys who used, but then I see someone like Piazza getting 60 something percent and Clemens and Bonds are back in the 30s and it shows how voters just don't have a clue.

All three are known to have used PEDs. How do you justify voting for Piazza and not Bonds or Clemens?

 

Is there evidence against Piazza or whispers?

 

Don't be OOP.

 

If I choose to believe it or not, you don't see how that can be a rational line of demarcation for voters? And I would put Braun on the evidence side (and Ortiz, and Pettitte etc.).

Are you lumping Bagwell in with Piazza and Bonds?

 

I think the argument against Bagwell is circumstantial, but I don't think too many people truly question whether Piazza used.

 

From Pearlman's book...

And then there's this, from Jeff Pearlman's book, "The Rocket That Fell to Earth:"

As the hundreds of major league ballplayers who turned to performance-enhancing drugs throughout the 1990s did their absolute best to keep the media at arm's length, Piazza took the opposite approach. According to several sources, when the subject of performance enhancing was broached with reporters he especially trusted, Piazza fessed up. "Sure, I use," he told one. "But in limited doses, and not all that often." (Piazza has denied using performance-enhancing drugs, but there has always been speculation.) Whether or not it was Piazza's intent, the tactic was brilliant: By letting the media know, off the record, Piazza made the information that much harder to report. Writers saw his bulging muscles, his acne-covered back. They certainly heard the under-the-breath comments from other major league players, some who considered Piazza's success to be 100 percent chemically delivered. "He's a guy who did it, and everybody knows it," says Reggie Jefferson, the longtime major league first baseman. "It's amazing how all these names, like Roger Clemens, are brought up, yet Mike Piazza goes untouched."

"There was nothing more obvious than Mike on steroids," says another major league veteran who played against Piazza for years. "Everyone talked about it, everyone knew it. Guys on my team, guys on the Mets. A lot of us came up playing against Mike, so we knew what he looked like back in the day. Frankly, he sucked on the field. Just sucked. After his body changed, he was entirely different. 'Power from nowhere,' we called it."

When asked, on a scale of 1 to 10, to grade the odds that Piazza had used performance enhancers, the player doesn't pause.

"A 12," he says. "Maybe a 13."

 

That's not exactly a failed drug test. It's accusations by others, significantly including no teammates, without supporting evidence. "Everybody knows" is just saying nothing.

 

I don't care who used and who didn't. The era was filthy so I choose to look at who dominated the era. Some form of PED's have been around the game for decades. If the the pious BBWA want to try to decipher which were worse than others than so be it. Hank Aaron and Willy Mays would be suspended for 50 games these days for what they have admittedly taken.

 

That's part of the problem. I don't think McGwire or Sosa had failed drug tests. Who on the ballot other than Palmeiro has a failed drug test?

I think a lot of the people who are voting for Piazza believe he used. He gets a pass, but Clemens and Bonds don't.

 

I like the domination factor and I would vote for Clemens, Bonds and Piazza based on that.