2019 Baseball Hall of Fame Ballot

It isn't crazy, but it's far from concrete. The argument that Bonds and Clemens were great before they used is dubious at best because we don't know for a fact when they started using. At one point, the evidence pointed to Alex Rodriguez starting his PED use after he went to the Rangers. That was actually the story he told, claiming that it was the immense pressure of the massive contract he got from the Rangers that drove him to it. Then we found out that he had been using steroids his entire career.

To be fair, I actually buy into that narrative about Bonds starting in 1999, but to accept it as fact? No way.

 

David Ortiz had a .532 SLG in the minors. He once hit 30 HRs in 563 PAs in AAA. Yes, his stats are inflated from playing in Salt Lake and the PCL in general, but his AA SLG was .548 and his A+ SLG was .540. Ortiz was quoted as saying when he made the Twins, the team wanted him to hit like a "little bitch", meaning try to go the other way and not be a power hitter.
His power numbers in Boston did not appear out of nowhere.

 

Perhaps not, but some of them came from a needle. He failed a test for PEDs. You can complain about MLB allowing the results to leak as he has done and you'd be absolutely right, but it doesn't change the fact that he was caught cheating. If Bonds and Clemens aren't in, he has no business making the Hall of Fame. They were both better players and the PED thing should be every bit the knock against Ortiz that it is against Bonds and Clemens.

 

Which will lead to the following and nearly determinative question about every major league player from 1980 forward who is on the Hall of Fame ballot:
Was he as good as Harold Baines?

 

It's no coincidence Mussina was voted in the year after Jack Morris got in

 

Ehhhh. Since 1954, they've been asking, "was he as good as Rabbit Maranville?"

 

It’s the Hall of the Really Good who are Famous

 

Baines never got 7% of the BBWAA vote. Maranville was elected by 82.9% of the BBWAA voters. You can say baseball writers are clueless schmucks, but as a group they haven’t been that wrong.

 

Well, Maranville was a sympathy stampede, elected just after his death.
And the BBWAA in the Fifties was one of the ultimate "insiders' clubs," a bunch of cigar-smoking old white men who'd been covering baseball, and spinning many of the same old legendary tales, since the 1910s, and everybody had a Rabbit Maranville story or three to tell, so sure, why not?

Plus, the 1950s were pretty much the zenith of the era of the big bulky slugger that began with Babe Ruth, while Rabbit Maranville was kind of the symbol of the gritty gutty tobacco-chewing little bitty glove-wizard banjo hitter type, along with some zany wacky "offbeat personality" (aka drunken revels) stories, so in a way he kind of symbolized the golden olden days for most of those old cigar-chewers.

 

The problem with Maranville in hindsight is comparing him to shortstops of the post World War II era.

The guy's peak was in the teens and 20s when great shortstops were not hitters. And since defense from them isn't data driven at all and there are no All-Star appearances to judge as well, he's probably very much of a -- if you saw him you would know. It's a product of his times. He was a five-time top 10 finisher in MVP voting and back-to-back years were he was the runner-up and then third. He is definitely more of a numbers don't tell the story guy.

I wouldn't put him in, but the voters who did in 1954 essentially had 50 years worth of shortstops to compare him to. He was the second the writers put in, after Wagner. That has to count for something.