Wednesday, January 9, 2013

The Hall of Fame Punt

When talk began to filter into baseball circles that it was possible that no recent player would enter the Hall of Fame this year through the writer's ballot, we were surprised.  No matter what you think about the era of steroids and those that are surmised to have taken part, or the others with few rumors, there's no denying that some of the best players from the era were on the ballot this year, with more to come next.  Bonds, Clemens, Schilling, Bagwell, Biggio, Piazza to name a few.  So you would have thought that while the writer's might eschew voting in those with supposed PED pedigree, that some, at least one, of the others would make it.  But they didn't.  And we think that's wrong.  We are not in favor of shutting out the decades of play in any year of the voting, and think at least one, preferably two, and up to three should make it every year.  We would have voted Bagwell, Piazza, and Schilling this year, as we noted in our previous post.  But if others thought to vote for different candidates, that is fine.  But what seemed to have happened, is a whole lot of writers voted for almost no-one, and that will create a logjam of players with very good credentials in the years to come, especially considering the class of players coming into eligibility next year.  It will create a logjam for us.  Because next year, we would be voting for Greg Maddux, Frank Thomas, and Tom Glavine all to get in on the first ballot, which will probably push the others above down a bit in the order.  It's going to be an interesting set of voting years at the Hall of Fame in the next ten years, that's for certain, and we do hope that the ensuing years will see no more shutout years.  Let's reserve that for the real diamond.

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