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

I believe Bonds and Clemens will be elected within 10 years. Once the older voters go by the wayside and younger guys come aboard, their vote totals and level of support will continue to grow.

McGwire and Sosa I doubt it. Palmeiro obviously won't unless it's by the Veterans Committee, now that he's off the ballot.

By the way, Buster Olney is calling for the BBWAA to offer to give up voting (not to give up voting mind you, but to OFFER to give up voting), thereby leaving it up to the Hall of Fame how it wants to define itself. I think that's a great idea.

https://twitter.com/Buster_ESPN/status/421354873720799232

 

You gorge too if you spent a career nibbling at the plate.

 

That's common when you go off the juice.

 

I'm very surprised that Bill James would take that position. Very risky of him, considering his audience.

BW, you have said before that there is no good answer you can think of for why the greatest player of your lifetime is not in the Hall of Fame. The answer seems simple enough to me: He cheated, and was caught cheating. His accomplishments are artificial. (I am, as stated earlier, open to the argument that the BALCO drugs were actually legal supplements at the time, like Andro.)

Even if James is correct, and steroid use is going to become more prevalent as time goes on, that doesn't change the fact that Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Sosa, and Palmeiro, at least, engaged in something that was taboo in sports for decades at the time they did it. Prohibition, by comparison, was stupid. But during that era, the law was the law, and violators knew what they were risking. If PED use becomes blase eventually, perhaps we can re-evaluate the time period. If nobody knew PEDs were considered wrong, which seems to be the revisionist tact, why the secrecy? Why talk about Creatine but not dianabol?

I also don't think James is correct, by the way. While there is a vocal minority in the United States now who are asking outstanding questions about whether doping is really a bad thing in sports - and the next frontier will be gene doping - there is little such debate going on internationally. If you are waiting for the Olympics, for example, to take an "anything goes" stance, you are going to be waiting a long time. I'l say it: Not in our lifetimes. In fact, many of the nations in the European Union, without the Fourth Amendment, don't understand why the U.S. government can't enforce international doping standards in American professional sports.

And as far as Gurnick goes, why is it indefensible to stake out the position that Greg Maddux is no different than Barry Bonds? You have argued yourself repeatedly that we can't tell who was using and who wasn't. You cited, accurately, Neifi Perez as evidence. Gurnick decided he wasn't qualified to figure it out.

 

This drives me absolutely bonkers. Why will Bonds and Clemens be elected, but not McGwire and Sosa?

 

So he voted for Jack Morris.

Just doing the math. They're receiving double more than triple the voter support now and have more years left on the ballot.

 

I know, but that's not the part of the Gurnick logic that BuckDub was questioning.

 

Because they're both significantly better players than McGwire and Sosa?

 

But McGwire and Sosa are pretty clearly Hall of Famers, as well. McGwire, especially, is a no-brainer, were he not tainted by PED use. So why are people choosing to vote for Bonds and Clemens while punishing McGwire? Is there basically a extra high PED bar in place?

"We'll let you in if you used PEDs, but only if you were really, really awesome, since they made it easier to be good at basebll."

 

McGwire and Sosa were one dimensional players who achieved an extraordinary degree of success at home run hitting due to their prodigious use of PED. Their HR totals are historically great, but viewed within context of their times, are insufficient to credit them with being Hall of Fame players. Bonds, though he is a first ballot and unanimous Hall of Fame human turd, did more than hit a historic number of home runs, with and without PED. He was an exceptional all around player who tarnished his career with PED rather than enhanced it with bloated numbers. Clemens, like-wise a first ballot and unanimous Hall of Fame human turd, was a marvelous pitcher with and without PED.

 

We don't know that Bonds hit any home runs without the aid of PEDs. The prevailing theory is he started in the late '90s, but that is far from confirmed.

 

Probably.