Back when ESPN.com had message boards (which were shut down 5 years ago), in the early 2000s there was a subforum called “Is Harold Baines a Hall of Famer if he gets 3000 hits?” This was in addition to the team boards and a few others like minor leagues. With maybe one exception, this stood out as an oddity and there was never much of any discussion there, just weird posts that were often troll-ish. Knowing how those boards were usually maintained, that subforum was probably still in existence a few years after Baines played his final game.
Bumped for tomorrow’s announcement of who gets in the HOF.
According to ballot trackers, Rivera is a slam dunk and Halladay and Edgar are almost certainly in. Mussina is a probable yes.
that’s hard to argue with. Edgar isn’t in my top four but what the hell, and the other guys are clearly a yes for me. If Mariano Rivera isn’t a Hall of Famer you may as well shut the place down.
Clemens, Schilling, Bonds and Walker will all probably miss but not by much, and you never know. No one else will be elected.
Dunno about Walker, but I wonder if Clemens, Schilling, and Bonds have had to wait, not so much because of any questions about PED’s, than because they’re all miserable a-holes.
The three people who didn’t vote for Junior Griffey, and any who don’t vote for Mo, should all be stripped of their membership. I mean really.
I mean I kind of get it when you’re limited to 10 and you feel strongly about guys who are just on the cusp. You know Mo’s getting in, but Larry Walker needs every vote he can get. Now, if someone votes for fewer than 10 and Mo wasn’t one of them, yeah strip his membership.
Last night, Nathaniel Rakich of 538 summarized several HOF predictions re Mussina here:
Since then, @sarsdell upped his prediction for Moose to 75.5% of all ballots, @ScottLindholm upped his to 75.6%, and @Porlos411 edged down to 73.3%.
Sounds like Mussina’s very much on the bubble here.
A friend just texted me the following list, which I have not fact-checked (but he is not the sort to send bad data):
Career WAR, 2019 HOF ballot:
Barry Bonds (1st half of career): 83.6
Mike Mussina: 83.0
Curt Schilling: 79.6
Barry Bonds (2nd half of career): 79.2
Roger Clemens (1st half of career): 73.3
Larry Walker: 72.7
Scott Rolen: 70.2
Manny Ramirez: 69.4
Edgar Ramirez: 68.4
Roger Clemens (2nd half of career): 65.7
Roy Halladay: 64.3
Which as far as I can tell means two things:
(1) If Barry Bonds had been eaten by an angry hippo in the winter of 1996, roughly two years before anyone contends he took any performance enhancing substances, he’d still have had a better career than anyone who will be elected to the Hall of Fame today and probably would have been in on the first ballot back in 2001; and also
(2) Scott Rolen had 70.2 career WAR? Holy crap.
Mariano, Mussina, Edgar and Halladay make it. Mariano at 100%.
4 of the 5 I named and the 4 I wanted to see get in. Nice!
Very happy to see Mo finally end the 100% BS. If a HOF’er is a sure thing, no doubt HOF’er, he should get 100%.
And the first to get 100%. Even Ruth got 95.13 and Hank Aaron got 97.83
Brian
Schilling goes up above 60 persent, which says he gets in eventually, especially if you look at the new pitchers coming on the ballot in the next few years. Walker looks like it will be touch and go. I’m surprised Pettitte didn’t get more support.
“more people have walked on the moon than have scored an earned run off of Mariano Rivera in the postseason.” - Derek Jeter
Thanks to the baseball writers for not having some prig ruin unanimity for Mo.
Schilling probably gets in next year. Jeter is the only slam dunk over the next two elections, so maybe some of the backlog gets cleared up. Things get exciting again in 2022 when ARod and Big Papi make their first appearance on the ballot.
I’m excited for Mariano and Mussina. I guess Mussina goes in with an Orioles cap?
Its pretty close between Yanks & Os for Moose. The Hall will let him choose. No clue which cap he will pick.
It was close. Bill Ballou of the Worcester Telegram went public early enough to get it explained to him how wrong he was.
Shocked, shocked I am that it was a Boston writer who didn’t want to vote for him. (Even in changing his mind he doesn’t seem to fully understand the facts, still harping on saves being a flawed stat. Well, okay, how about his microscopic ERA? Incredible playoff numbers?
The absurdity of writers not voting for people like Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Cal Ripken is at least just trivia because they’re in the hall anyway. Still, it’s just so stupid.
Of the 250 or so players in the Hall of Fame, how many should have been unanimous, in the sense that
- There is simply no rational argument against their enshrinement, and
- They became eligible long after the initial logjam the writers faced in the first decade or two of Hall voting?
It’s gotta be at LEAST fifty, right? At least. Ripken, Aaron, Mays, Frank Robinson, Mike Schmidt, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Griffey, Jim Palmer, Ted Williams, Stan the Man, Bob Gibson, Yaz, Clemente, George Brett, Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Joe Morgan, Wade Boggs, Warren Spahn, Pedro, Ozzie, Reggie, and more I am sure I can’t recall. There was never any excuse for NOT voting for Greg Maddux and Stan Musial.
I guess if you live in California, it’s understandable that you might conflate Boston with Worcester. Try it around here though, and you’d be laughed out of the state.
It is completely ridiculous. Why now, anyway? Rivera was great, but he wasn’t the greatest baseball player of all-time. I think part of it was his personality; even those who hated him kind of liked him too.
Apparently, Hall voting and the applicable rules changed over the years but have been somewhat consistent since 1962. Joe Posnanski wrote an article five years ago about the 20 players who should have been inducted unanimously since then. It’s mind boggling. Nine writers didn’t vote for Hank Aaron. Twenty two neglected Stan Musial.
Nobody serious thinks he was. Someone had to be the first, if only to break the idiotic cycle of voters leaving worthy players off the ballot in order to preserve the streak of no unanimous selections.
The refusal to unanimously select players was a bug, not a feature.