Because there are ten other candidates they want to vote for, and Johnson was a lock anyway.
No evidence they hurt him.
In other words, it didn’t make any difference at all, he’s just bitchy.
Didn’t he also injure himself as a player from trying to iron a shirt that he was still wearing? Not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.
They call it “strategic voting.”
I sincerely doubt it. Schilling would like people to believe it, but if someone didn’t vote for him for a non-baseball reason, it’s because he is a world-class asshole. Baseball is loaded with white republicans.
They can call it whatever they want, but it’s purely and simply bullshit. I have never, in 45 years of being a baseball fan, seen a Hall of Fame ballot that included 11 Hall of Famers.
People who refuse, for whatever reason, to vote for the likes of Johnson, or Schmidt, or Mays, or Ruth, are, purely and simply, idiots. Babe fucking Ruth was not a unanimous selection to the Hall of Fame! What the hell was that all about?
I agree, personally; I can’t recall ever seeing a ballot where I would want to vote for more than six; typically it’s more like two. But plenty of actual BBWAA voters, and fans, have far more expansive ideas about what sort of players the Hall should comprise.
Oh, except for that original ballot. Take a look. There aren’t 11 guys you’d want in your personal-highest-standards Hall?
In fairness, that’s a different thing altogether. At the time, baseball had 50-60 years of history to choose players from. People in the 1930s were not as dismissive of 19h century baseball as they tend to be today; to a voter of the time, Cap Anson was as present and important a figure in baseball history as Willie Mays is to us.
With a huge glut of candidates, there was a lot of difference of opinion as to how to select candidates, and my understanding is that some voters wanted to go more or less chronologically, and to get to the stars of the 1920s and 1930s later. Which, you know, fair enough; they were dealing with a problem that doesn’t exist now, and nobody’d done anything like it before.
You have to consider the era Ruth played in.
- He was competing for votes with all the greats that had played from the 1870s to the 1930s.
and
- His style of baseball was an affront to the Scientific Baseball which had ruled the game for many years. It was the kind of ball Ty Cobb played, which is why Cobb did better in the initial vote. A bunch of baseball traditionalists would have hated him for sullying the game. Traditionalists have a way of throwing a wrench in the works. Anything ‘new’ is ‘bad’ and since players they are voting on are all ‘new’, relatively speaking, they are automatically worse than previous players. I tend to hold a lot of traditionalist views, but I can understand the flaws of the most strict of them.
That’s odd to see the Baseball Fever site. I’ve been a member there for 5 years now.
At least three members from there are members here.