Maddux, Glavine, Thomas elected to Baseball Hall of Fame; Biggio just misses

Biggio was two votes, since they wouldn't have rounded up apparently. There was one blank ballot submitted.

And Mattingly falls off the ballot in the next vote, so Manky can save his tears for then.

 

Kind of surprised Jeff Kent was pretty much overlooked.

Not many better 2B during my lifetime.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/k/kentje01.shtml

 

He made few friends (not that that should matter).

 

Exactly. It shouldn't matter.

 

And yet it does. Way too much.

 

It doesn't. I can't think of anyone who didn't get in because he was dickish to the media.

I don't understand why McGwire gets 1/3 of the support of Clemens and Bonds. Like them, he is a no-doubter without PEDs.

 

50 percent of ballots were full. 22 percent were full in 2013.

 

It's long, long Bryan Curtis. But the very last item of this treatise really nails a lot of things.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/10261642/mlb-hall-fame-voting-steroid-era

 

Mustaches matter.

 

I don't agree with Le Batard, particularly this passage:

I hate all the moralizing we do in sports in general, but I especially hate the hypocrisy in this: Many of the gatekeeper voters denying Barry Bonds Hall Of Fame entry would have they themselves taken a magical, healing, not-tested-for-in-their-workplace elixir if it made them better at their jobs, especially if lesser talents were getting the glory and money.

Is this really how we should make this determination, by comparing players to a hypothetical, fantasy situation we might find ourselves in, and figure out how we would react? What "hypocrisy" does Le Batard see except for that which he has conjured?

He also leaves out some key details. Is the elixir illegal? Does the elixir cause frightening side effects? Does the elixir come with a decades-long track record of being a known no-no in the workplace?

Whatever. A pro athlete could shoot an umpire in the head over a called strike three, and we all know that Le Batard would be the first to rationalize it.

 

The public admission, I suppose.

But yeah, the argument that McGwire's career doesn't merit induction even if he'd never used PEDs is ridiculous. True, most of his value was in hitting home runs. You could say the same about Harmon Killebrew and Ernie Banks.

 

He is?