If you wanna get a nice dose of recreational outrage, here’s one actual Hall of Fame voter’s rationale for leaving Biggio out:
“Those teams” mean the teams with Clemens, Pettite, and Caminiti (and Bagwell, who the writer paints with the same brush).
I guess Jeter is out as well - as Joe Posnanski points out, he played with Pettite, Clemens, A-Rod, and Giambi and had a huge power spike in the late 90’s.
Absolutely true.
I don’t know if this counts as jerkish, but it rubbed me the wrong way:
When Clemens was accused of PED use, Schilling raised a stink about how Roger should give back the 4 Cy Young awards he’d won.
And when Schilling’s 2004 Red Sox teammates Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were named later on as PED users (with the evidence against Ramirez being more definitive than the evidence against Clemens), Schilling agreed to forfeit his World series ring. --Oh, wait, sorry, he didn’t.
A small thing. But it bugged me.
I admit to being a bit mystified as to what that has to do with his performance as a major league baseball player.
As to the argument against Biggio, that’s bloody insane. Seriously, we’re now excluding people because they once knew a guy who knew a guy, and that year he set a career high in doubles? Holy shit.
I quote honestly think many of the people who are entrusted by the BBWAA to vote on these things are complete lummoxes who know about as much about baseball as I do about quantum physics. The linked article by Pat Caputo suggests the thinking of a man who is either intellectually disabled or who’s just trolling. I don’t, and never have, understood the writer’s argument that “I’ll vote for this guy, but not in his first year” (that, BTW, is something nobody said 25 years ago; it’s a recent thing) or… well, almost anything this oaf writes. And Caputo is not an outlier at all; a lot of these guys are just unadulterated morons, or are liars, or have personal agendas that run rampage over their logic.
How does that reconcile with my observation above that apparently no one has ever been unanimously elected to the HOF in the history of baseball?
The only explanation I can think of (and it’s not much) that some people won’t vote people in on the first ballot. Otherwise that amounts to saying that about 5% of voters thought Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner were simply undeserving of being in the HOF altogether (and so on for others, e.g. 16% for Walter Johnson), which is hard to believe.
I should also note that after the first year’s elections in 1936, no one was elected on the first ballot for the next 26 years (until Bob Feller & Jackie Robinson in 1962).
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the voters are usually writers, and as such have a vested interest in controvery, having a take, and making themselves part of the story. These aren’t independent arbiters here.
I think it just points to the fact that you can make an argument against absolutely anybody (see the above Biggio arguments).
I think there should be a new rule - if a player gets voted in on the first ballot with over 90% of the vote and you didn’t vote for him, you lose your vote. If everybody but you thinks the guy is a Hall of Famer, you’re probably wrong. Didn’t think George Brett was a Hall of Famer? Sorry, you’re obviously no longer qualified to vote. We’re gonna give your vote to some blogger working out of their mom’s basement just to piss you off.
I honestly think that while it’s not overtly trolling, it’s something not very far from it. Lots of these guys feel like their vote makes them special, and they get a certain thrill in not voting for players. I can’t explain it, but I’ve read enough idiotic justifications to believe it.
To the above I should add that Joe DiMaggio and Cy Young and some other legendary players weren’t elected on the first ballot altogether.
I understand what you guys are saying, but my guess is that the “first ballot” issue has always been around. If anything it seems to have faded in recent years.
Why would Schilling give up a WS ring because his teammates were accused of using PEDs? That’s a lot different from an individual award. I think anyone accusing of Biggio might as well just consider the entire MLB from about 1987 up to the Mitchell Report as a black hole.
It’s possible (though this wouldn’t explain every year) that some years people might decline to vote for a player they know will be voted in to instead cast that vote for someone they feel strongly about who might be on the fence (for HoF or even elimination).
Though lots of writers are incompetent, so that possibility mustn’t be discounted either.
Hell, since guys are still getting caught, why stop at the Mitchell Report? Let’s never vote anyone in until after the autopsy.
That the suspicion always seems to gravitate toward power hitters is kinda funny. The first 5 players who got nailed with 50-day or longer suspensions were Yusaka Iriki, Jason Grimsley, Guillermo Moto, Juan Salas, and Neifi Perez. Looking at this list, singling out the Astros is especially dumb.
FTR, I do believe that Clemens used PEDs (see my comments upthread), and was probably using them when he won the 4 Cys in question.
And you’re right, there’s a difference between an individual award and a team award.
Ramirez and Ortiz did have amazing years for Boston in '04 (Ortiz, 139 RBIs and a .983 OPS; Ramirez, 130 RBIs and an OPS over 1.000). Ortiz was playoff MVP. We’ll never know how much of their performance was PED-related, any more than we’ll know how much of Clemens’s later success was due to drugs. Maybe whatever they took that year, if indeed anything at all, added just a few percentage points to their already-staggering OPSes. Maybe Boston would’ve been the wild card that year anyway; there weren’t too many other contenders. Maybe they would’ve won the Series anyway. On the other hand, maybe not.
But I’m not seriously suggesting that Schilling should’ve given his ring “back.” The issue for me is consistency. Schilling got some positive press (and I think deservedly so) because he was one of the few outspoken players regarding PEDs when the original Mitchell report came out. Unfortunately, when players on his own team were implicated, he shut up. Of course it’s easier to complain about somebody who pitches for the enemy than someone whose homers help you win games. But it’s not intellectually honest or especially admirable.
Now, maybe that’s wrong; maybe he did publicly castigate Ramirez and Ortiz just as he had Clemens. But I never saw it or heard about it if he did. Am I holding him to an excessively high standard? Maybe. But hey, I like my side’s political leaders to condemn corruption and shenanigans on both sides of the aisle, not just the enemy’s.
None of which, of course, has anything to do with his Hall of Fame case.
I agree with you that the system was fucked and a lot of people share the blame. (I really don’t feel responsible as a fan for not knowing much about steroids, obvious as it all seems in hindsight.) But you can blame everybody and everything, and the fact would still remain that some people chose to cheat and break the rules and the law and some didn’t. Saying the whole system was bad doesn’t mean we can’t make any kind of judgments or draw any lines. If I were a member of the BBWAA I might find this a lot harder because it’d be possible I’d been willfully blind or had actively promoted some of this stuff. But since that’s not the case, I have little trouble saying no to people who I know were flagrantly cheating.
By the way, with 80 votes cast, we still have nobody at 75%.
Yes, the first ballot issue has always been around.
Here’s a great little article from 1971 (link below) complaining about the writers’ propensity to not vote for great players the first time they appear on the ballot. Written by an HOF voter of the time, the piece cites Berra and DiMaggio as players who were unaccountably forced to wait. “If a man is a Hall of famer,” the author writes, “then he’s a Hall of Famer. Why bar his way simply because he’s up for election the first time?”
There’s also a cute quote from another writer, Jack Lang, about what would happen if God were on the ballot.
Rome News-Tribune - Google News Archive Search.
And according to a search I just did on Newspaper Archive, anyway, the phrase “first-ballot Hall of Famer” was in general use (as a predictor for players such as Carew, Carlton, and <ahem> Pete Rose) as early as the late seventies, if not earlier.
There have always been the odd collection of weirdos. Perhaps a few writers had a first-ballot-veto bug up their ass, plus you’ve got racists, personal vendettas, stupidity, and other silliness. But it’s only recently that the “no on the first ballot” crowd actually became a substantial number.
Obviously I was talking about those who acquired and used PEDs illegally.
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Besides is could have been charged with a felony really any sort of standard? I’m pretty sure Miguel Cabrera could have been charged a felony at some point during his drunk driving escapades (an activity I would consider way more dangerous then taking steroids) Are we keeping him out of the hall?
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No, it’s not a standard. I didn’t say it was. My comment about felonies was an aside. But those who use PEDs, legally or not, and play baseball are cheating. They have an advantage that the players who don’t use those substances (presumably the majority) don’t have. Should that be a standard?
There’s been considerable evidence introduced to this point that actually the exact opposite is the case. You’ve not addressed this.
Bagwell (prototypical first baseman), Raines (one of the top five leadoff men of all time), Piazza (the best major league hitter to play a majority of his games at catcher), Schilling (just…Schilling), and Biggio (3,000 hits and some of the best peripheral stats of all time) for me. Thought about Lee Smith, but nah.
It’s rather flabbergasting (to me, anyway) that NO ONE has a 75% majority as of this posting. Bagwell is closest with 59 votes (71.95%).
It’s possible that the steroids issue is skewing things in more ways than one. Because even besides for the fact that some people are being held back by suspicions that they themselves used steroids, these people also make others look bad by comparison.
IOW if most of the leading players of an era took steroids, then what’s left are mostly not the leading players. So the former don’t get in because they took steroids, and the latter don’t get in because their performance can’t measure up to the ones who took them.
If you’re looking for someone who performed like Barry Bonds without the steroids, you’re going to be looking forever.
Just a thought.
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The problem with some of the examples cited is that the rules and conditions have not always been the same as they are now, and so the attitudes of the voters were not, understandably, the same.
Joe DiMaggio, for instance, was made to wait not because that many people had a first-ballot bug up their ass but because the rules were completely different at the time and he was in a long, long line. Back then there was no five-year waiting period, so DiMaggio was on the ballot the year after he retired (he retired in 1951 and was on the ballot in 1953) and appeared on the ballot with a regiment of Hall of Famers, because they still hadn’t caught up. On the ballot his first year of eligibility were Herry Heilmann, Paul Waner, Al Simmons, Dizzy Dean, Bill Dickey, Bill Terry, Gabby Hartnett, Joe Cronin, Hank Greenberg, and two or three dozen other guys who ended up in the Hall. Of all the people who got a substantial number of votes not a single one was on their first ballot EXCEPT DiMaggio.
In fact, for that time, DiMaggio’s voting in early ballots was noticeably fantastic. I actually cannot tell if he was eligible in 1952, but in 1953 he got far, far more votes than anyone else who’d been on the ballot for the first OR second time. His 44% was just amazingly high for a guy that early on the ballot. In 1954 same thing; 69% of ballots and I cannot see any other player who moved up that fast. In 1955 he was elected. DiMaggio and Mel Ott were the only players between 1950 and 1960 elected in their first three years of being on the ballot (unless 1955 was his fourth year; either way, nobody else got in on their fourth, either.) The writers at that time weren’t disqualifying Ott and DiMaggio on purpose; they were, understandably, trying to work through a huge backlog of players. Remember that they’d only had the Hall for 15 years or so when DiMaggio retired, but they had generations of baseball players to wade through. So the “get to guys when it’s their turn” thing was different; it wasn’t that all those writers had a first-ballot principle, it’s that they had a principle of trying to push names up the ballot to get people in. If you look at the voting results at the time it’s amazing how many great ballplayers they had to pick and choose from.
Today you don’t have that excuse - well, maybe until this year, when there seems to be a lot of really good cases on the ballot. Now it’s purely a “first ballot no way” attitude that just is not the same as it was in 1954, because until, arguably, this year, there hasn’t been a backlog of HOF-worthy players on the ballot in decades. If you go back just 10 years, the 2002 ballot has only eight guys on it with a career WAR over fifty (Blyleven, Ozzie, Trammell, Gary Carter, Tiant, Dawson, Keith Hernandez, Tommy John) so picking a first balloter was easy (Ozzie went in his first year, as he should have.) In 1953, there were TWENTY guys with 50 WAR on the ballot, plus a lot of guys who at the time were regarded as legitimate Hall of Famers who weren’t above that arbitrary number like Dizzy and Rabbit. It’s no wonder they tried a push-to-the-top method.
It’s entirely possible that the “we have to work our way through guys” position has, over time, morphed into the “people should not be elected their first year” position. Actually, it’s probably. The backlog of players was entirely dealt with by the mid 1970s, in part because the VC went bananas, and I think maybe guys are holding onto a twisted version of what was once a logical strategy.
OK, that’s a much better argument, and you’re making a fair point. Thanks. That may also explain the fact that no one was ever elected on the first ballot from 1936 to 1962.
That said, if you look at how many people were elected on the first ballot by decade it looks like this:
60s: 4
70s: 5
80s: 10
90s: 10
00s: 10
This is not consistent with your claim.
Possibly you can explain this too. But I think you need some serious evidence for your claim, which does not seem to be supported by any evidence.
What is the basis for your claim?