2023 Baseball Hall of Fame Class

Contemporary Player Ballot is out.

Albert Belle, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Don Mattingly, Fred McGriff, Dale Murphy, Rafael Palmeiro and Curt Schilling


Good luck with that list

 

Time to fix the joke that is a Hall of Fame without Bonds. I'm not saying it will happen, but it should.

 

Not saying the should get the vote, but my gut says Murphy and Mattingly get the nods. They were “clean” and injuries detailed both of their careers.

 

I think it’s going to be McGriff and Schilling

 

I still don’t get Mattingly’s exclusion. One of the best hitters of his day.

 

We think they were clean. We don't know that anybody was clean.

 

Hence my quotation marks, which I first learned about in seventh grade when the teacher air quoted large parts of the JFK assassination story to us. I didn’t know what she was doing, but by her voice and the gestures I realized something was off.

But I digress.

 

My bad. I missed the quotation marks. The whole thing just annoys me. Bonds was an ass and I don't doubt that he used PEDs, but those home runs still went over the fence and he still belongs in the Hall of Fame. So does Clemens.

 

All of them do. Unless they actually failed an MLB drug test. Then they should be left out on stupidity alone.

 

Sweet Lou snubbed again

https://www.freep.com/story/sports/...baseball-hall-of-fame-vet-ballot/69627773007/

 

Shorter peak than you'd think - six AS games, one MVP - and the Hall of Fame standard at 1B is really, really high. Of his 10 comparables on B-Ref.com, only 2 are in the Hall - Kirby Puckett and Tony Oliva - and the rest are "Hall of Very Good" guys of varying quality.

 

Not to beat this dead horse, but that's the way I've always looked at it. They might have taken the enhancements, but the hitters still had to have the eye-hand coordination and hitting knowledge to square up on MLB pitching and deposit the balls over the fence. And the pitchers did not succeed just out of pure athleticism.