Baseball Hall of Fame ballot released

Catcher is the most demanding position on the field. Apples and oranges.

 

not a chance in hell

 

Well, actually, I thought you did. The whole debate started because another poster referred to a voter friend of his and said he held the Hall to high standards when voting.

All I was saying was, it's the individual voter's right for the Hall to be whatever he or she wants it to be as long as they base their vote on the criteria presented. So no ship can ever sail as far as that goes. You asked how you were supposed to start, in 2009, to hold the Hall of Fame to a standard it's never been held to before?

That's how.

Maybe I misinterpreted and you weren't saying voters who have that standard are hypocritical or something. That was just how it came off to me. In any case, agree to agree/disagree and confuse each other in the process.

 

Waylon, I agree with you about McGwire. The context of his performance (the homer/steroid era) makes him a marginal Hall pick IMO. I voted for him because I won't do MLB's dirty work for them. They want to ban the steroid guys, Bud should man up and do it himself.

 

Yeah, I always would have thought Alomar was considered the better of the two.

 

No, I never said they were hypocritical. But I do think that any voter who consciously chooses to start holding a "higher" standard -- rather than whatever standard they're using now -- is only being egotistical, especially if it's a backlash against some perceived "lowering" of historical standards that never existed in the first place.

If some voters want it to be the Hall of Unquestionably Great From Now On ... sorry, it's too late for that. The Hall of Fame is what it is, like it or not.

 

Haven't gotten all the way through today's comments, but wanted to chime in on a few things.

I am a HOF voter. I have had a ballot for four years. This year I voted for Alomar, Blyleven, Dawson, Larkin, McGwire and Raines.

1. It seems silly to denigrate an entire body of 539 voters because 73.7 percent of them voted for someone instead of 75 percent. Really, if five more guys had voted for Blyleven and eight more had voted for Alomar, would the "process" be any better or the electorate any "smarter"? It's just a fluke that these guys came up just a bit short. You gotta draw a line somwhere, and in this case that line is very high. It's not easy to get 75 percent of people to agree on anything.

2. Nothing about filling out a Hall of Fame ballot is easy. Almost all the guys on there had very good careers, so you are drawing a fine line. I voted for 6, but it's not easy to justify why I didn't vote for the next four or five. They are that close. Like I said, you gotta draw a line somewhere. Bottom line is that I respect anyone's opinion about the HOF as long as they respect the opinions of others. I can't stand people who insist that their view is the only truth.

3. I believe anyone has the right to turn in an empty ballot if they don't believe there are any worthy candidates. If you are doing it as a statement or to draw attention to yourself, not so much.

4. I agree with those who have said it's silly to hold back on voting for someone on the first ballot. If you don't believe Roberto Alomar is a HOFer, that's fine. But if you believe he is, but not till next year, I have a problem with that. Still, it's not a big problem, because the guy is going to get in either way, and 10 years from now no one will remember. Paul Molitor was a first-ballot HOFer. Ryne Sandberg wasn't. In the end, it's not a big deal.

5. It's great that the baseball HOF stirs such emotion. You don't see this with other sports.

 

Ahhh. So you ARE saying a voter should base his or her vote on previous votes then.

And that's completely wrong.

If a voter has a higher standard than another voter past, present or future, it is not holding it to some new high standard. It's holding it to THEIR standard. I don't understand what's so confusing about that.

The criteria is:

Playing record
Contribution to team(s)
Character
Integrity
Sportsmanship

That's the only aspect of voting that is uniform here. If a voter does NOT use that standard, if a voter rewards an old player they covered or wants to mete out justice to a player he or she doesn't like, then yes, that is arrogant or egotistical.

But it is not in any way egotistical for a voter to create his or her own standard based on the criteria simply because the folks before have had a DIFFERENT standard. A Hall of Fame voter does not have to live up to your perception of what the talent level is or should be or anyone else's. That's why they get to cast their OWN vote. Sheesh.

 

Here's Conlin's reason he didn't vote for Ryan in 1999.

"I learned a hard lesson in 1999, the year Nolan Ryan fell six votes short of unanimity. Don't know what the other five guys were thinking and don't care. But I was making a dumb political statement that had nothing to do with Nolan Ryan. I was trying to make a point that because Don Sutton had missed the magic 75 percent his first three elections with the same number of wins as Ryan in fewer seasons, there was no urgency to elect Ryan on the first ballot, either.

I still get 50 e-mails a year referencing me - quite correctly, I now agree - as the dumb bleep who didn't vote for Nolan Ryan."

 

I am scared to death that the BBWAA is going to be too vindictive to vote in Barry Bonds, possibly the greatest baseball player who ever lived.

The credibility is slipping with Alomar's exclusion, but it will be shot if Bonds is left out.

 

I still disagree with this reasoning. A guy is either a Hall of Famer or he isn't.

I understand that some people feel differently about the first ballot business.

 

Why? The only reason he is even in the discussion for greatest ever (which he's not, btw) is because of steroids. He probably would have been a Hall of Famer without them but he didn't start putting up video game numbers until he started juicing. How does it impugn the integrity of the Hall to exclude a (very, very probable) cheater on the first ballot?