2016 Baseball Hall of Fame Nominees

The number of potential Griffey non-voters (as well as the three who did vote for Mike Sweeney) are down to 184.

 

This is my thinking as well. You go with the obvious choices and build your ballot from there.

 

IF..........really really big IF Rose ever gets on the ballot..........what percentage does he get?

 

Never happening

 

He'd get at least two votes -- there were two known write-ins this year

 

I have no sympathy for Rose. None.

He was a great baseball player, everything you could ever want in one. As an opposing fan you hated to see him come to town. What his Phillies did to my Astros in the playoffs... sigh.

Thing is that he came up old school. Everyone knew that MLB did not like players betting *on anything* because they might get behind and owe a lot of money that could be repaid by fixing games. Black Sox and Shoeless Joe. That was bedrock, everyone knew it, it was beaten into them from the minors on up. It was a part of the culture.

Above that, because they knew that some guys were going to gamble anyway, was the single commandment "You never bet on baseball. Period. It will be your ass if that happens and it is found out."

Then above that was the great and inviolable commandment, "YOU NEVER EVER BET ON YOUR OWN TEAM'S GAMES."

Pete bet on his own team, IIRC both as a player and a manager. As a manager it's almost worse, because trying to make the score come out to meet his wager he'd make decisions, particularly regarding relievers, at the expense of the next game. He managed to his wagers, not for the good of the team. He can say "Yeah, well, I never bet against my own team" all he wants. It's like saying "Sure, I killed her, but I never cut her head off afterward." It does not matter. You're already in death penalty territory, the fine points just don't weigh enough to get you back out.

He can sign autographs outside the hall till he drops, like Moses gazing at the Holy Land.

 

This. Every single word.

And the thing I always trot out, too, is that the Reds finished second in their division four of the five seasons he was their manager. They won the World Series the year after he was banned. You can't convince me that's a coincidence.

 

I have a ballot and I did feel there were 11 HOFers on there. I struggled with how to decide who to leave off that would have the least impact.

One of the ideas I considered was leaving off Junior since I knew he was going in anyway.

It would also have highlighted the ridiculous limit of 10 and maybe pushed it to be changed.

In the end, I decided that, since no one else had yet admitted to not voting for him, I was not going to go down in history and the one who kept him from being unanimous.

I ended up leaving off Mussina because I figured he would be so comfortably between 5 pct and 75 pct (the only lines that matter) that it wouldn't matter if he had my vote.

 

The limit of 10 is ridiculous? I know the glut of PED guys has bogged down the list but I just can't agree with that. I think it should be lowered so the standards are higher.

 

The standards are pretty high to begin with.

Here are the holdovers: Jeff Bagwell, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Trevor Hoffman Jeff Kent, Edgar Martinez, Fred McGriff, Mike Mussina, Tim Raines, Curt Schilling, Gary Sheffield, Lee Smith, Sammy Sosa, Billy Wagner, Larry Walker
Add in these guys: Manny Ramirez, Vlad Guerrero, Ivan Rodriguez, Jorge Posada

That's double the number of 10 and you can make an argument for any of them.

 

I don't disagree that there are arguments to be made and there is a large number of PED suspicion/evidence inflating that list, but I have very high standards for Halls of Fame, if you haven't noticed. I just want the best of the best. And then argue it fron there. And there are many guys there I would argue against.

 

How high is the standard when you are talking about putting in the top 300 of 10,000-plus players? That's pretty exclusive