It’s good to see that complete irrationality is not confined to the HoF voters.
Thanks for reminding me Mac did other stuff. I rescind my rescinding of support of Piazza. If players were so proud of juicing, why did they hide/lie about it? If writers don’t want the responsibility of making educated guesses, give up their voting privileges.
Who said they were proud of it?
Are you talking about making educated guesses about who used steroids? Where is that part of the job description of a Hall of Fame voter?
If they were proud, they would’ve been more open about using. And if you’re voting on players from the 90s and aughts for the Hall, than yeah, you do need to make an educated guess who used
That’s the problem right there: how do you make an educated guess?
Have you seen the pictures of young Sosa, Bonds, Giambi, Bagwell et al? We know how some steroid era sluggers got so big, but does that apply to everyone? Take Bagwell, for example. Can a guy get that build just from nutrition, legal supplements and weight-lifting? I have no idea and I doubt most baseball writers do either.
What about HGH? Did Andy Pettitte look like a guy using P.E.D.s?
And what about the regimens? Steroids were useful to pitchers because they could recover faster between appearances. So some used them not for strength or bulking up.
It’s just a sports museum. Let the best of the era in and hope that testing can someday catch up with cheating. But we shouldn’t hold our breath. Even now, guys are using testosterone and other substances taken orally, which are out of their systems in 24 hours. Or they are using some designer steroid that there is no test for yet. I think there is less cheating now, but still plenty of it. On a related note, I’m enjoying the more pitcher-dominant era. Things were getting boring with only a handful of pitchers worth watching.
Which is why I sympathize with the writers that just say, screw it, and aren’t going to cast a ballot – at least while it has PED users on it.
But, IMO, if they didn’t fail a test or heavily implicated or didn’t admit anything, then there’s no guessing. They’re based entirely on their careers. And even if they did test positive or admit, it had better have been a) illegally obtained and/or b) a violation of the MLB rules at that time.
If Mike Trout had entered baseball ten years earlier, it would be easy to make an educated guess and arrive at the conclusion that the kid was juicing like crazy. No way could he have those kind of WAR totals at the age of 20 and 21. They’re unprecedented.
Mark-your b) note is the only part of your post I disagree with.
And yet you continue to believe that amphetamines weren’t a performance enhancer, and your ridiculous hard-line stance against guys like Bonds is just indicative of your hypocrisy. Hell - amphetamines were even technically against MLB rules since 1971, so you can’t even hide under that leaf.
I’ll ask again: why? And why do we think BBWAA members are capable of making good educated guesses about this? Murray Chass seems to think that wild accusations are a perk!
Just pointing out that at present, we are electing just one candidate: Maddux. Piazza is just over 70%, with a handful of other guys breaking 60. The desire to keep people out of the HoF is obviously not limited to the august members of the BBWAA. Which, I suspect, will end up electing more than just Maddux–
Didn’t ESPN do another (internet-based) poll with roughly the same results–Maddux and Nobody Else? Or am I making that up?
I remain utterly baffled our own poll has Tom Glavine not getting in. You guys remember Tom Glavine, right?
If you ran a straight up poll on this MB on: “does Glavine deserve to be in the HOF?”, he probably gets 95% of the vote.
Problem is that people have 10 votes, and feel that some of their other choices need their support more (either their voter support needs bolstering to keep their momentum up, or they’re nearing elimination, while Glavine will get in anyway).
By way of comparison, with maybe a third of the votes disclosed, it looks like Maddux and Glavine and Thomas will definitely get in. Biggio is a few percentage points above the 75% mark and Piazza is a few points below. The results are supposed to be announced at 2 pm Eastern.
I hope Piazza gets in… it would clear the way for other PED-era players who’s biggest guilt is having excessive back-acne. (No doubt Piazza would be above 90%, if only Roger Clemens had better aim and actually speared him with that broken bat.)
Maddux, Glavine and Thomas get in. Biggio misses with 74.8% !!
Maddux (97.2%), Glavine (91.9%), and Thomas (83.7%) are in. Biggio missed by just a few votes.
And we can probably thank that idiot Ken Gurnick, who submitted a ballot with only one name - Jack Morris. That’s right in one of the most talent-laden HoF ballots in history, he didn’t use 9 of his 10 allowed votes.
Idiot.
Also idiots - the guys that wasted votes on Jacque Jones. Jacque Jones! I’m a Twins fan and I wouldn’t vote for him, FFS.
If it really is .2%, that is probably exactly one vote.
Gurnick’s a fucker.
Biggio missing by 1 vote is a sick joke.
144 people didn’t vote for Biggio, and someone else sent in a blank ballot. He’d have made it with one or two more votes. I don’t know how they officially count this stuff- if Biggio had received 428 out of 571 votes, that’s 74.95%. Would they have rounded up, or did he need 429? On the other hand if blank ballots didn’t count, 428/570 would be good enough. That’s 75.1%.