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2023 BBHOF Tracker Summary and Leaderboard

View the full 2023 Tracker with all individual ballots: 2023 BBHOF Tracker

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  1. Here we go again. Three public ballots and no one has voted for Beltran?? The circus is officially back in town. Beltran is obviously one of those guys that’s a no-brainer and anyone with a brain knows it. Are these guys seriously leaving him out because of banging on trash cans?? Grow up losers. The Hand of God is not a baseball writer and I’m pretty sure Beltran had a Hall of Fame career before the janitors left the trash cans in the hallway in Houston. It’s amazing that so many writers think they are determining the legacy of MLB players when all they are really doing is destroying their own legacies as so-called writers.

    • 2700 hits, 560 doubles, 430 homers, 300 SB and almost 1600 RBIs. 20 ballots so far and half of them don’t think this is a Hall of Fame career?? This is where voting privileges should be taken away from certain people. Only an ass or a self-important fool doesn’t put Beltran in hands down. It’s not even arguable for people with brains in their heads.

        • Beltran is clearly a Hall of Fame player. This is just the latest example of the Black Ball Wretches and A-holes Association thinking they are Mount Olympus and wielding their misappropriated powers for evil and not good. They are going to make themselves feel important again by giving him a good old fashioned lashing in the woodshed for being involved in that age old heinous crime of sign stealing and oh yeah, some trash can banging. Hang him from a yardarm boys, you look really powerful now!

      • Beltran it’s one of top 5 most complete switch hitter of all time. He should be a 1st ballot HOF.

        • Well that’s why it’s “back”. It comes around every year. Definitely relaxed but either way Beltran belongs in now, not eventually. You’re right, all those guys and many more belonged in immediately. This douchebaggery of “maybe next year” is pretty stupid. You’re either a Hall of Famer or you’re not, the stats don’t change and the log jam is only due to said douchebaggery.

        • I think a lot of these voters need to have voting privileges taken away which I also said a few years ago.

          • Anyone else wonder how many baseball writers ever engaged in plagiarism, piggybacking on someone else’s takes and pretending they are their own, lying about or completely making up sources, cheating, stealing article ideas or any other ethical tomfoolery in order to further their careers and get where they are now? None? Doubtful. Congress should open up a Mitchell investigation on every writer who has a Hall of Fame ballot in their hands and then we’ll see how many of them want to hand out punishments when voting time comes around.

        • All of their privileges should be taken away. This should never have been left up to writers in the first place because you inevitably were going to end up where we are now. I agree with Common Sense end 2 Cents. Form a committee of the living Hall of Famers. All of them. Let them come up with an accurate listing of hall-worthy stats and then just make it automatic. Whatever stats are automatic that’s it and whatever combinations of stats make it automatic if you’re not one of those 500 home run guys etc. So there’s no ballot and there’s no big list of garbage to argue about. Just guys that hit the numbers and guys that don’t. And then you can have a veteran’s committee take a look at the peripheral guys for possible additional induction but no writers are executives should be on that committee. Players using steroids is such bologna already. Does it help you recuperate faster so you can keep working out? Sure it does. Does it make you a better ball player than you already are? No shot in hell. Bonds was already a great hitter and a great player before he started using steroids. I’m pretty sure most people are pissed off that he got the home run record because he’s an asshole more than they are that he used steroids. Canseco hit a lot of bombs but using steroids didn’t make the guy a .340 hitter. Either way, the steroid argument only leads to speculation and obvious Hall of Fame worthy players being left out with no proof that they actually used steroids. And who really cares if they did?? Why is there no giant investigation into how many players used steroids in the NFL over the last several decades? Do we really think no one did? But it doesn’t seem to keep them out of the Hall of fame. Using a set list of achievements would preclude personal opinions, political garbage and any other on baseball related reasons to keep ruining this beautiful game. If it was about steroid speculation then guys like Bagwell and Piazza who were presumed to have used steroids for many years should have been in the same boat as Roger Clemens who has been cast out with no ironclad proof. If it’s all about winning championships, then you’d have to take an awful lot of guys out of the hole that are already in there. If it’s about individual achievement, then have the living Legends draw up a list of the achievements and be done with it.

          • LOL that steroids didn’t make someone a better baseball player. That’s literally the reason they took them.

          • Education is a great tool. Much better than learning text abbreviations. Steroids can equal stronger but stronger doesn’t equal skilled. Sam Horn was strong as an ox, why couldn’t he hit?

          • Did someone really say lol in a big people conversation? Is this a middle school forum? And steroids definitely do not give you skill, dexterity and coordination you do not otherwise possess.

          • They had those skills, it got them to MLB. Steroids made them better. Go ask Ben Johnson if they help fast twitch muscles. Good lord.

          • Steroids simply replicate the effects of testosterone, allowing muscle to build faster than your own testosterone does. There is exactly zero skill in testosterone so steroids do not in any way increase skill. Argue unnatural strength if you want but no one was boycotting the 98 home run race when McGwire and Sosa were very obviously juiced. The entire country went nuts following that thing and they were heroes so all the hypocritical crackpots running around spouting garbage about steroids and not voting for PED users real or suspected, look like complete clowns. As does anyone who supports that same hypocrisy.

          • “They make you stronger, faster and recover much quicker but they don’t mKe you better” is quite the take.

          • Test replicates test, which is why so many take T. GH,
            Tren and many others go further, which is WHY THEY TOOK THEM.

          • We are all aware of why they took them. Typing in all caps doesn’t change the fact that steroids only make you stronger, not better. If you don’t have the skill to hit a ball they don’t suddenly give you hand eye coordination and change your timing so that you go from Jackie Bradley Jr to Ken Griffey Jr. No matter how many ways you say it, steroids don’t increase your skill. As for why they took them, they increase your strength the same way testosterone does only faster. I assume you have natural testosterone, does it make you an amazing baseball player? How come I’ve never heard of you except on a few episodes of Frasier?

          • Bonus points for knowing Frasier.

            If they wanted to simply increase the testosterone effect, they’d have just supplemented testosterone (which is quite legal, easy to acquire an Rx and a four-digit T test result won’t get you banned). The drugs they got from Balco & etc., were anabolic steroids, which improve performance (not skill, no one has said that), thus performance enhancing drugs, far beyond just increased T. Growth Hormone does a lot more than T, thus most took that, too.

            They make you stronger, faster and recover quicker, AKA “better”, which is why they took them. Dee Gordon took them to recover, Bonds took them to get stronger & along the way his fast twitch muscles improved (see: Ben Johnson), thus skyrocketing his power beyond what he was until he turned 30 (which used to be the age of a slight a downturn in athletic peak for a baseball player). They’re banned from most olympic sports because they improve in almost every category, speed/strength/endurance.

            Their skill sets got them to the majors. They took PEDs in order to physically improve on that. That’s why they took them.

            Beltran should have been a first balloter and sports writers are a collection of dolts, but that is “B”, I’m pointing out “A”, which is the fact that performance enhancing drugs actually DO enhance performance.

          • So I guess we are in a battle of semantics because I consider performance to be the ability to see ball, hit ball. Perfectly time a stolen base or a dive in the outfield to make a game-saving catch. Digging out a bad throw at first base or gunning down a runner trying to steal with a perfect strike. Painting the corners and striking out the best hitters in the game.
            Obviously you are referring to performance in its basic state of physically performing a task. Yes I agree steroids enhance the ability to perform the task better if you can already perform the task in which case, I would still maintain that my point is steroids do not make you a good baseball player if you are not already a good baseball player. Perfect example you mentioned, Dee Gordon. So I’m sure they enhanced the speed he was already blessed with but they didn’t make him a 400 hitter, 30 homer guy or remotely a hall of famer.

            My point is exactly that. So many people are holding steroids against guys who were obviously already Hall of Famers even before they used steroids. Barry Bonds, as much as I and most other people can’t stand the guy, was a surefire Hall of Famer long before he gained 60 lb and five head sizes. Yes he obviously took performance enhancing drugs which increased his strength and drastically skewed some of his numbers. He would not likely have ever hit 73 home runs without it, nor would he have likely broken records for walks or on base percentage since a huge chunk of that came from him being intentionally walked and pitched around so many times. But I guess my real point stems from the fact that, in my upbringing you made mistakes and you apologized and atoned for it or moved past it one way or another. It was not held over your head for the rest of your life. If these writers aren’t smart enough to figure out who was a Hall of Famer with or without PEDs and move past the obvious glaring mistakes that were made then they shouldn’t be given the privilege of voting to begin with.

            I get that there are a lot of people who just can’t see their way past the steroid era. I am not nor will I ever be one of those people. I know this because, the way I’m hopefully only in the middle of my life, I have been alive for 5 decades and in that time I have moved from someone who was once so steadfastly unforgiving when it came to being wronged to someone with far more patience for stupid things like ped use in a sport. Maybe raising five kids does that to you, I don’t know but I do know that there are far more egregious things going on in the world than this nonsense and to withhold and shrinement for a decade or two worth of players who made mistakes while several more decades of players are already in who also made mistakes just seems very trivial to me.

            Hope you’re enjoying Seattle

          • I honestly don’t know why we have come to a place where journalists think their job is to punish people who have accomplished things they couldn’t possibly dream of. Some guys actually came out and said I did it. Other guys have relatively believable stories that are highly possible, illustrating that they may not have known what they did. I went to a doctor about 8 months ago for an issue and they gave me a medication. Like many doctors, they didn’t break down the medical terminology of the medication, they just asked me for a list of what I currently take to obviously ensure there would not be reactions. A few months later I went to another doctor for a different issue and they were going to prescribe me something until they looked at the list of current medications I was taking and realized they would be a problem because the original medication from 8 months ago had a steroid in it. It obviously did nothing to change my life and I didn’t know the difference one way or another other than that the medication was helping me. However, had I been a major league baseball player and a random test popped up I would have failed, having no idea that I had been taking a steroid. That’s really never happened to anyone else, highly unbelievable. But of course it couldn’t happen to a baseball player who took something for one reason and had no idea there was a band substance in it right? Also highly unbelievable.

          • This is how you know you are deep in the echo chamber. It’s not enough to take away the ballots from whole categories of people who disagree with you. When it finally gets into your head that even the people who are supposed to agree with you don’t (the former players have now made it clear through their votes that they also believe in enforcing the morality clause) then you have to strip the vote from those people, too. So you start arguing that HOF status should be decided by a stat list, even though nobody thinks you can understand a player’s career via stats alone, without context, nobody thinks stats capture all a player’s qualities. When you find yourself arguing such a wrongheaded position just in order to avoid admitting you are wrong it’s time to rethink your whole position. Or maybe just give up on the hall and peruse stat sheets instead.

          • As for steroids, everybody knows they make you a better player. It’s a measure of the motivated thinking in this echo chamber that there’s a whole list of people denying the obvious, hiding from the truth behjnd semantics.

            It’s not just that availability is the most important ability. It’s not just that strength is a skill, an important one. Steroids don’t just improve your bat velocity. They also enable you to wait longer before swinging, which enables you to see the ball better before you swing, which improves your accuracy. Steroids help you move faster, which means you can get to balls quicker and make defensive plays you wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise. Steroids improve skill. That they don’t improve it limitlessly, that they don’t transform a schmuck into an elite player, is irrelevant.

            The “writers shouldn’t play god” argument is wrong, because voters are obligated to enforce the morality clause the HOF has laid on them, but at least that argument is honest. When you find yourself having to deny the obvious, deny that steroids make players better (because you know deep down your “don’t enforce the morality clause” position is inadequate) that should be a sign to you that you need to step back and rethink your whole position.

          • Thank you so much for your illuminating tutorial on steroids. Maybe now for extra added effect, instead of saying stupid things and trying to call names you could go through the list of all the guys who have been pinched for failing tests and break it down for us. But I’ll give you a hint, there are far more names on there that no one even thinks about then there are superstars. So maybe you could use your illustrious brilliance to break it down for us and explain why each of those guys still sucks after using steroids since steroids are such a magic potion for instance success. If you know your history, no one even mentioned steroids when Canseco showed up on the ballot. He had long ago been blackballed for opening his mouth and writing that stupid book. And if we were all so surprised to find out how rampant steroids were then how come years before all this crap came to light, fans were laughing like hell in the stadiums and yelling steroids and every guy that looked like he was on them? No sin and not knowing what you’re talking about but don’t try to be condescending it just comes off as foolish. Spouting bullshit out of your pie hole and trying to demean valid points as idiocy doesn’t win the argument. And I’m sure you know this because you are so smart, but the committee that votes on veterans is not only made up of former players. There are executives and writers on the committee as well. So there we are back at square one again genius.

          • ” explain why each of those guys still sucks after using steroids since steroids are such a magic potion for instance success.”

            Because without steroids they’d probably have sucked even more (again, why they took them). The guys in the minors who take them may (MAY) improve enough to make it on a 25 man roster. the #25 long reliver with a 5.00 ERA may (MAY) be available 4 out of 5 games from the pen whereas without may be a 6.00 ERA guy on the third day or fourth day without them (recovery). That’s why they took them, to get better. The guys who put up HOF numbers were likely all stars before the PEDs.

            They take/took PEDs because of the performance enhancing part of the acronym. If they didn’t work, no one would take them

          • Well I think we all know that’s “why they take them”, but your literal explanation ethe obvious still doesn’t verify the crack-headed notion that PEDs instantly create Hall of Fame careers. Your hypothetical guy who goes from a 6.00 to a 5.00 ERA is still not a Hall of Famer. A guy who only knows the terms wrong headed and echo chamber and keeps throwing them around in order to attempt to pigeonhole people making viable points is the exact product of the society we live in that he seems to be railing against. An extremely common problem today is the inability to see another side. I VERY CLEARLY AND ACCEPT THE EFFECTS OF STEROIDS ON AN ATHLETE. I don’t accept the idea that it creates all of Fame players because it just clearly doesn’t. Probably 90% of the guys who have used peds or not Hall of famers and not just because the writers have kept them out but because they did not put up Hall of Fame careers. It’s not wrong headed, it’s just the facts. Look up any list of guys you want and scroll down it and it’s very clear those other facts. Just like it is a fact that, while analytics may be fun for the nerds to look at, they don’t create world champions. Houston, coincidentally, has a large analytics department and has one a couple of World series. However, everyone brings up Tampa Bay and Cleveland as examples. But they haven’t won any world series. Neither has Oakland. And unless something happened that I missed, winning it all is still the ultimate goal. Just like putting up a Hall of Fame career is still the ultimate goal for a player to get into the Hall of fame. You can blame peds all you want but just like analytics, once such a massive amount of people are doing it, the playing field has now evened out and it can’t be such a blatant excuse.

        • Sign stealing has been going on for many years before Beltran was even born yet he becomes the poster child for sonething thats been long accepted as part of the game

          • Agreed. But apparently the powers that be have decided watching it on video is somehow far more nefarious than seeing it live. Odd, because so many seem to rely on technology over brains these days but I guess not for sign stealing.

        • I guess the black ball writers association should just send a memo to Francisco Tatis and tell him to not even bother playing out his career since at 24 years old his chances of being a Hall of Famer are already gone no matter what he does.

          • What’s kind of the funniest part is that, the writers have turned the Hall of Fame into somewhat of a joke at this point. How many of these guys do you think really even care about getting in there anymore now that it really doesn’t stand for anything. Already filled with guys who were not very good dudes and broke the rules plenty of times and now they are being told they can’t join them? Honestly, I can’t imagine Manny Ramirez is swimming around in his pool of millions, knowing every true baseball fan will know what he did anyway and how amazing he was, worrying about being on a plaque in some building when so many of the guys who belong there will now not be there either. And now the walls will display guys like Scott Rolen instead. Seriously? It’s like when you were a kid and you show up at some kid’s house to find that five guys are in the fort outback made of multiply wood and a dirt floor acting like it’s the coolest place on Earth and telling other kids they can’t come in. You might be a little pissed at first but then when you really think about it, what were you actually being left out of? Who’s the real jackass now?

      • The arbitrary nature of the voting is the ruination of it. Wagner was nasty. Maybe not as long as some guys but long enough, and he was consistently dependable and dominant. This isn’t an opinion, this actually happened, yet there will once again be too many writers in their own ways to acknowledge that and vote correctly. Voting shouldn’t be this screwed up. Certain things are pretty plainly obvious and don’t require your “esteemed opinions” to figure out.

        • Wagner was nasty? He was one of the worst playoff pitchers in Major League history. The guy had a 10.38 ERA in the postseason, and despite what some people say, playoff success matters when a player’s HOF case is very borderline to begin with, which Wagner is. The fact that he completely imploded whenever he was put into a high-pressure situation, and that he was very borderline for a potential Hall of Famer to begin with means that he should honestly be nowhere near the Hall of Fame.

          (If you are just wondering, he was so bad in the 2006 NLCS that Mets manager Willie Randolph decided to bring in AARON HEILMAN instead of Wagner to close out Game 7)

        • I think 422 saves are not done by accident and Wagner was definitely an overall great closer. Probably faltered in some unfortunate moments but 11 playoff innings aren’t very many to say someone couldn’t pitch in the postseason. He had a few decent playoff moments and then the ugly inning for the Mets where Spiezio and Encarnacion both grounded back to back hits past the defense that probably both should’ve been stopped. Either way though, he was overall a Hall of Famer. Only five guys ever saved more games and his other numbers are certainly there.
          For that matter, K-rod is pretty obvious too.
          No one had a perfect career and you can find an Achilles heel for pretty much every Hall career but for these guys, they put up way more than they faltered.

          • 11 innings of playoff baseball ARE meaningful when we are talking about a guy who’s ENTIRE job is to literally CLOSE games. And these weren’t just any old regular season games – these were incredibly important games where losing and performing poorly could result in your team getting eliminated. Personally, relievers in general – unless they were at the level of Rivera, Hoffman, or even Eckersley – don’t belong in the Hall simply because they were worse versions of starting pitchers. There is also no good way of measuring a reliever’s case for the Hall other than really the eye test. Saves aren’t even that useful when it comes to the Hall. Wagner may be sixth in career saves, but you know who is right in front of him? John Franco. And yet I hear no one advocating for Franco to be in HOF. I have already stated why Wagner should not be in the Hall, and honestly, if that’s the case with Wagner, then K-Rod should not even get 5%. Anyway, those are my two cents.

          • How many great hitters in the Hall put up poor post season numbers? Too many to list yet they were instrumental in their teams even getting that far. How many great pitchers have been smacked around in the postseason? I don’t have a problem with saves because the total picture tells me that 86% of the times Wagner was handed the balls, he closed out the game and his team won. Rivera and Hoffman were about 4% higher so that doesn’t really blow the guy away. Also, only Rivera had a better era than Wagner out of Rivera, Hoffman, Eckersley, and Lee Smith. The nature of the postseason is that unsung heroes step up in a magical moment and render a superstar mortal. So when Steve Pearce smokes Clayton Kershaw for a two-run shot and Kershaw ends up with a 7 plus era overall that postseason, is Kershaw no longer a Hall of Famer? I don’t believe that’s the case but as you say, we are all entitled to our two cents.

          • I would definitely argue that John Franco belongs in the hall. So does Francisco Rodriguez. But who would you argue with with? The saber metric wonderkind? Yeah that will get you far. You might as well argue with your steering wheel. Both were well above average closers and in Franco’s case, if you want to talk postseason and you think 11 innings are important well then how about 14? 1.88 era, 10 strikeouts and three earned runs. Pretty good I think. And as for the eye test, I watched Franco pitch countless times and they weren’t too many guys I would rather have come in to finish off a game in that era then John Franco. Eckersley was awesome at that time, Lee Smith and Jeff Reardon but Franco was a badass. As far as closures being worse versions of stardust, highly inaccurate. Smoltz, Lowe, Wakefield, Gordon, Eckersley and Stanley are all examples of guys who put up some unarguable numbers in the pen but we’re also more than capable starters. In fact, I would argue Kerry Wood was actually better in the rotation than the bullpen. Every guy who closes a game is not a washed up starter. For all you analytics supporters out there, what do you think your scouting departments are out there doing everyday? They are “”analyzing” prospects and determining how best to use them. In a case of a billy Wagner or a Todd jones, the Houston scouting department identified both as bullpen guys from the get-go. They made them starters in the minors to build up repetitions and experience quickly but they were never intended to be starters in the first place. For all the arguments that Mariano Rivera was a failed starter, look at his starting numbers throughout his minor league career. They were actually pretty good. He only had about 10 starts in the majors and went to the bullpen where we already know the rest of the story. But he was not by a long shot a bad starter who was never going to make it.

        • Then let’s apply the same logic to Rolen. 159 postseason plate appearances, 5 home runs and a dozen RBIs while batting a scorching .220. Hall of Fame playoff guy? But he must have had good Civil War numbers I guess

        • Even better, Garvey and Berkman. Both easily comparable and better than Rolen in the regular season and to top it off, probably 2 of the best postseason guys ever. Neither one is a Hall of Famer? Oh yeah, they didn’t win the Revolutionary WAR. But they both were instrumental in World Series wins, unlike Rolen who was kind of along for the ride in his World Series.

          • Rolen hit .421 in his second world series and only drove in 2 runs. He scored 5 but there was a pretty solid team effort there. His first series he was completely hitless. And the rest of his playoff performances were pretty forgettable.

    • The circus was always in town- it took Eddie Mathews 5 years (retired 6th all-time in home runs), Roy Campanella 5 votes, Duke Snider 11 years and I can go on-on…Relax – Beltran will eventually get in.

    • Hate to be “that guy” but – this did not age well. Expect him to get in on his 2nd or 3rd try.

      • Age 39, second to final season: .295, 29 HRs and 93 RBIs. What more should be expected at 39? Will he have a better season before his 2nd or 3rd try? I still don’t understand what sense this “not a first ballot guy” garbage makes. You either had a Hall of Fame career or you didn’t. When it’s over it’s over and doesn’t change on the 2nd, 3rd or 10th try. That’s just control freaks trying to justify the privilege of checking off these boxes and portend some great knowledge.

      • Stealing signs? Is that something new? Who are these writers supposed to be, the apostles? This is beyond ridiculous already. Sign stealing is an ancient part of the game at this point and these guys are now just making themselves look silly trying to police everything.

    • In america, everyone has their right to say whatever they want obviously. It’s called freedom of speech. But I sincerely believe there should be a prerequisite quiz regarding the history of the game and it’s Hall of Fame before you come on a place like this or any other form and spew nonsense. With all the guys who took greenies etc while they were still illegal, doctored balls, etc. With guys like Cobb being pretty well known for racism, and guys like Speaker and Hornsby widely rumored to be actual KKK members. Maybe you can’t prove it but how often to those rumors stem from nothing? And if that’s the case, how can you hold rumors against suspected ped users with no proof? The point is, the Hall of Fame is a museum. It’s not the whole of perfect human beings or the best natural athletes ever and never has been. Guys like McGwire and Sosa who were pretty obvious, saved the game when attendance was dissipating away to nothing. In doing so, they probably saved the jobs of many of the guys who decided to punish them for it when this suddenly became a witch hunt. Doesn’t look good fellas. Seems like a case of just saying hey guys that was probably a bad idea but let’s get this thing under control now and bring it to an end the best we can. Especially since MLB was well aware you guys were juicing and had no problem with it because you were saving the game for all of us. Including the entire nation who was cheering you on in 1998 knowing full well you guys didn’t suddenly look like Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno because you discovered milk and spinach. This display of stained dismay and conservative martyrdom is already destroying the country, don’t keep letting it destroy our past time along with it.

  2. Anyone who votes for Scott Rolen and not Jeff Kent should be banned from ever voting again. It shows a clear lack of aptitude in judgment of MLB talent.

    • Completely agree. Whenever I hear some idiot writer saying a guy should be considered again next year or this is not his year etc, I think this person should not be voting for Hall of Famers. If a guy is a Hall of Famer, he is a Hall of Famer. He’s been retired at least 5 years so his career hasn’t changed and most likely will not by next year either. Stop trying to sound more important than you are and just vote the damn guys in who deserve it.

      • Problem is that 12 players on this ballot are deserving and most writers only get 10 votes. Another 4 or so have a case enough to get votes but not to win. Worse a writer can select less than 10 or even no one when a ballot is this loaded.Yet last year it was more loaded and no one got in.

        • Interested to know who your 12 would be. I think maybe 9 or 10 deserves to be in but what you said illustrates the point perfectly. If a guy is a Hall of Famer then vote him in. Never mind maybe he’s a second ballot or a 10th ballot guy. That doesn’t even make sense. Either he’s a Hall of Famer or he’s not. Nothing changed since his career ended. If you vote the right guys in as soon as they show up, there won’t be this ridiculous log jam while primadonna writers pretend to have some kind of amazing knowledge that the rest of us are lacking. Ramirez has 555 home runs. Unless he pulls a Gordie Howe and comes back in another 10 years, he’s always going to have 555 home runs. It’s either enough or it’s not but it can’t be enough this year and not last year that doesn’t make any sense. The writers complain about the log jam but they’re the ones creating it by voting from desire and not fact. Both the guys in who deserve it when they show up, don’t vote for the guys who obviously don’t and then your ballot will be empty every year except for the new class that shows up. That’s why this writer voting thing is stupid and it always has been.

          • Damn right bro. Writers have no more knowledge than any solid sports fan. Like many of you, I have followed the game my whole life and I know it inside and out. I happen to build houses for a living because people need somewhere to live but that doesn’t make me know any less about the game than a guy who sits on his ass writing his opinions. It just makes the voters a group of people who think their biases and preferences matter more than what a guy actually did on the field. Stupid.

          • In Principle it should be that easy. The problem is writers seetothinkthat they know each and every case of Cheating. They therefore feel it istheir responsibility to keep the bad guys out. Some will avoid voting for those even tangentially associated with PEDS. This Ballot has 4 of those type all of who wouldbe 1st ballot inductees if not for this suspicion. Then with Carlos Beltran many writers refuse to vote for him because his final season he played for the hated 2017 Houston Astros. The team known for the sign Stealing scandal. Funny thing is those same writers would have voted for Beltran if he retired after the 2016 season. Then we have the curiouscase of Omar Vizquel who until a few years ago appeared to slowly be gathering enough votes to win before his 10 years are up. Then he gets hit with a domestic violence case. Suddenly his share of the vote drops from 50% to about 10%. I hate domestic violence as much as the next guy but for every case we know about there are probably 10 that were swept under the rug. Especially back in the days when reporters kept players secrets. My 10 would be Rolen, Helton, Wagner, Sheffield, Kent,Beltran,Ramirez,Abreu & both Rodriguez’s. If I could add 2 more I’d add Vizquel & either Jones or Pettitte. I agree with you that writers mess this up by playing games. But in theory they at least know the sport. If we opened it to fans we’d have people voting based on things like how the guy fills out a uniform or if the guy played for his team. Others would vote for only the guys who played for their team & maybe guys like Pujols that everyone has heard of. There are a lot of fair knowledgeable fans.Problem is their are ust as many who are biased and ignorant.Writers are clearly biased but few are ignorant. That said the issue that has ruined the voting for my generation is PEDS. No one likes cheating .That said anyone who thinks they know who did or did not cheat is living in a fantasy world. Our knowledge of who was using PED’s is woefully inadequate. For every case we know of there are probably 5 to 10 that were never caught. Making a vote based on someone being caught arbitrary and unfair. Then if we get into amphetamines and the like why were they okay but not steroids? Performance on the field is all we have to go on. The rest is arbitrary. Though I suppose I would vote against a proven pedophile or murderer. My only solution won’t fix everything but if there are more than 10 deserving players on the ballot they should be able to select more than 10. Perhaps completion of a course for the writers proving that all of them understand how to read all the modern statistics like WAR & OPS, FIP & so on would help. But understanding how to use them does not guarantee that they will be used by each writer.

            p

          • Clearly there are a lot of saints out there who assume they should decide the fates of PED users and never let it go. Good for you guys, that must be pretty awesome to have never screwed up and never have had something they past in your life. I’m not one of those people and I don’t personally know any either so I honestly don’t pull my hair out of wing my hands dreading the possible inclusions of great players who maybe did some juicing. It doesn’t give you skill it only helps you build strength and heal faster. Affected outcomes of games? You mean like coking up or downing greenies to not feel injuries or fatigue that otherwise would keep you on the bench for a day or two? Plenty of things are done that arguably affect outcomes of games one way or another. If someone does something heinous like murder, rape, molesting kids etc, they should be banned from the game and the Hall. Everything kind of pales in comparison to real crimes like those.

          • Makes sense Cuff. My thought is a much simpler plan. No writers, no fans. A panel of the best/most accomplished living retired players, preferably Hall of Fame guys, sit down and compile a list. Guys who actually had to do it, telling the hall what a Hall of Fame stat would be. The difficult milestones and also the combination of multiple stats, maybe not the highest but several above average accomplishments by one player. Maybe automatics are 500 hrs, 3000 hits, 300 wins, etc. But then there are combos like 400 hrs, 500 2B, .300 avg, 2500 hits. If the guy hits that combo he’s in. There’s no bias, no popularity, only facts. Then if you want a committee to decide on fringe guys etc go ahead but that would be ancillary to the definite guys. And at least the requirements are decided by guys who’ve done it at the highest level, are already inducted and thereby have no reason for bias when designing the list of necessary accomplishments. And as far as PEDs etc, they either need to ban the guy from the game if you have enough proof or shut the hell up and move on.

          • The Vizquel argument keeps coming around and I just don’t see it. First of all, if he was trying to get it on with a batboy then he should have his face kicked in and the Hall would be so far removed from reality for him, it would completely moot the conversation. Otherwise, if you’re not going to have any run producing power, I think you should probably have a .285 avg, 500 doubles, 3000 hits and be a defensive wizard. The 11 gold gloves are nice but he doesn’t hit any of those other numbers and it might be close to an argument if it didn’t take him 24 years to “not” hit those numbers.

        • Serious response to your latest post about PEDS…many have argued that ‘everybody’ was doing it’ , ‘few got caught or were made examples’ and ‘authority looked the other way’. I agree but I still deep down inside believe the players the used PEDS changed the outcome of games , ruined careers of those that didn’t use and earned millions of dollars they would not have otherwise been paid (thus rewarded handsomely for cheating). Bonds and Company still have their $100’s million. My response to those that say “those substances weren’t banned” – the players KNEW it was wrong…that’s why the hiding in locker rooms and stalls, purchasing thru third parties with cash and unmarked packaging, etc.

          What about the Black Sox? If you read Bronko Nagurski’s autobiography (Monster of the Midway) – he speaks freely how organized crime in the mid-west and east had their hands in ALL sporting events (baseball, football, boxing, wrestling, horses, tennis, golf, etc)…These guys meant business and you didn’t double-cross them. The White Sox were not the first or only to take bribes – but Landis choose to make an example out of them (think a Yankee would have been banned for life?). These players were paid so poorly – most needed to have second or third jobs during the off-season (unlike those that collected millions). If we are so quick to forgive those – that in my opinion affected the outcome of many many games – isn’t over 100 years enough – especially studying the society at that time. Just my two cents – seems that criminals get less time and punished (or pardoned depending who you know) but Joe Jackson and an aging Pete Rose (I know – a different story but sad) get more severe time served than people who kill others.

          Lastly – if baseball is/was holding out for Pete Rose to admit to his mistakes – how come we don’t expect or want the same from PEDS users (besides a few)? If it was banned – then admit it – why so afraid? Guilt maybe?

          • And what would be the point? Rise has admitted it and apologized several times only to be ignored and ridiculed for it some more. Nice piece of shit society we live in now.

          • So back when amphetamines were illegal, those guys didn’t KNOW it was wrong? “Doctoring” the mall has been against the rules for a long time, the guys who kept doing it didn’t KNOW it was wrong? Show on and so forth. So why the big ethical conundrum all of a sudden now? Is that going to clean up the hall? And some guys did admit it only to find out that that was all crap and they have been castigated since then anyway. Also, 2cents is right, Pete Rose has apologized over and over again. Saying he’s arrogant and he doesn’t really mean it is all nonsense. You want apologies and you want to tell the person how to talk? That’s insanity. In spite of his constant apologizing he is still on the outside looking in, with more hits than anyone in this game has or probably ever will have.

          • I hear you loud and clear. I don’t know that I agree anyone truly ruined someone else’s career because, let’s face facts, how much bigger does a performance get by using peds? Realistically. McGwire and most of the other guys referred to most often could already park moonshots in the stands routinely. On the reverse side, guys who couldn’t hit worth a lick, didn’t suddenly become Ted Williams. Obviously bodies got stronger and maybe you hit a ball a little harder, somewhat improve your reflexes, etc. but you don’t become Superman or The incredible Hulk and suddenly have supernatural powers. If you couldn’t pitch around Gary Sheffield then you just could not pitch around him. Peds didn’t suddenly give him the batting eye to Pick-A-Part your amazing arsenal. And for the sake of argument, even if it did, who didn’t give up a big hit to Superstar guys like that anyway? You still face hundreds of guys who were not anywhere near as good so if your career was ruined, it probably wasn’t from being blasted by superstars, it was probably because you sucked anyway. So to relate it to you, suffering Sox fan, when Jose Canseco was in the Sox lineup, okay he was a juicer. If you pitched against him and gave up a blast well then I guess that could be expected on any given occasion. Does it mean you also had to give up big hits to Tony Pena, Mike Brumley, Bob Zupcic and whatever other garbage they trotted out there at that time? I should think you would have been able to get most of those guys out if you were truly a good picture to begin with.

            As far as the punishing goes, I think it’s obviously getting out of hand but I kind of think about it this way, if you were to sit down and pencil out a lineup of the best players in a given generation, odds are, if you were a true fan of the game, many of those guys are going to be on your list anyway. We know it and they know it which means they are remembered for what they did best by the people that mattered most, the fans who understand that it was what it was, MLB knew about it for years and basically sanctioned it by doing nothing and then it became a dog and pony show so everyone who basically continued to have a job because of the 98 home run Chase saving baseball could turn on them in a thinly veiled attempt to add merit to an otherwise useless career of writing about nothing important and pretending to have insight into a child’s game that most of us could break down in an armchair with a beer. I, like probably many of you, played sports and won trophies and plaques. But someone remembering a game saving diving catch or hit I made 30 years ago as one of the best plays they ever saw in their lives, matters far more to me than the trophies that long ago went into a trash bin. I have to imagine knowing you hit over 500 home runs at the highest level of baseball and against some of the best pitchers ever and having millions of people know it, is far more satisfying than being in the Hall of mirrors where not much is mattering nowadays as the list of inductees become watered down by saber metric voting and childish stubbornness.

          • Just pick any 12 really. It actually doesn’t matter anymore since we no longer have voters who know what a Hall of Fame career is.

          • I’ll preface by saying I am not now or never will be one of those people who pretend that the PED era was some kind of blasphemous outrage when the hall is already filled with cheaters, drug users and an otherwise assortment of some pretty shady behavior to put it mildly. So if I had a ballot it would say Kent, Ramirez, Beltran, Sheffield, Helton, Wagner, K-rod, A-rod, Pettitte and Buehrle. I can’t see 12. I’m sure several people would have a problem with some of these, especially considering how few votes Buehrle has amassed. But Buehrle is one of those rare birds in history who actually did some really wacky off the wall stuff that a huge majority of pitchers did not accomplish. Traditionally we’ve looked at pitchers’ numbers for certain things, and while he did better than okay but maybe not unbelievable in some of those numbers, he was a very effective picture for a very long time. Six other guys in history pitched more than 200 innings for 14 straight seasons or better. Those six guys are in the Hall of fame. Four more outs and he would have made it 15 straight seasons which would put him in the company of four people. Also, he pitched over 3,200 innings and allowed 59 stolen bases in his career. I think Doc Gooden allowed 60 in one season once.Buehrle was a master at his own pitching style. And it was truly effective. Effective enough to get him to no-hitters. He gave up hits like anyone but he did not allow many extra bases and he used an amazing combination of pickoffs and inducing grounders for double plays to erase those runners. Not just a little bit but he did this for over 3,000 innings and quite efficiently and quite often. Look it up, it’s truly pretty amazing and rare. Definitely worth immortalizing in my mind. I know a lot of people like Jones, but I have a hard time reconciling a guy like that. I think Dwight Evans was a much more valuable player for a winning team, I think Jones was barely better than Dale Murphy but only in certain categories and I think he mostly reminds me of Darrell Evans who no one thinks is a hall of famer, if they even think of him at all. Compare the numbers for Jones and Darrell Evans and it’s pretty remarkably close. I see Abreu, Rolen, Hunter and even Rollins being close but no cigar. They all had some great attributes and extremely solid careers but I don’t think they are on par with the real Hall of Fame worthy guys.

          • The point is not that 12 are deserving in any given year, but rather that (since voters have differing opinions and a supermajority is required) you have to give voters more votes than there are deserving candidates in order to ensure all the deserving candidates get in. Alternatively you could reduce the vote percentage threshhold.

    • I don’t think Rolen was a bad player at all. But it just goes to show how weird this whole thing is. Jeff Kent easily matches or out produces Scott Rolen in every offensive category. Not to mention he has more home runs than any second baseman ever. Everyone talks about Rolen’s , which was good but once again, Kent had a better Fielding percentage at a position that requires more range and in twice as many chances over the course of his career. Not saying Rolen shouldn’t get in but if he should then Kent definitely should.

      • Rolen and Kent had almost the exact same OPS+ for their careers, so saying Kent was drastically a better hitter is false. They were different types of hitters but nearly equally as good. Kent was a bad defender at second base, if your go to stat to judge fielding is fielding % I’d change that. Rolen played a tougher defensive position and was arguably the best at it through his career.

        • Well I didn’t say drastically better, I said he out produced him meaning his numbers were higher and not just because of longevity but average wise in general. You’re right, they’re ops matches, but while I don’t care much for the modern made up statistics that don’t really change how the game is played, I’m willing to break that down with you. It’s a combination of on base percentage and slugging percentage. So Rolen had a slightly higher on base percentage and Kent made up that difference in slugging percentage. I think as a manager you would rather have the guy with the higher slugging percentage since it is accounted for by his total basis and signifies that he put himself in scoring position or scored more often than the guy with the lower percentage. And in this case, he did it and maintained that average in over a thousand more at bats than the other guy. So that certainly signifies our producing the guy even if it’s not by much. But the point wasn’t Kent being babe Ruth while Rolen is Buddy Biancalana, the point is if Rolen is a Hall of Famer then Jeff Kent is definitely a Hall of Famer as well. I think third Base being more difficult than second base is also a popular misconception. Yes balls come at you faster hence the Hot corner moniker but the position doesn’t require nearly the speed or range and sometimes arm strength that second base does. A second baseman has more ground to cover and more responsibilities between coverage and backup points. Many second baseman or shortstops have been moved to first or third base later in their careers as their arm strength, range and speed die down but you never have a washed up third baseman or first baseman being moved to second base and shortstop. Like most of the numbers that registered quality of play for decades upon decades, Fielding percentage still works just fine for most of us. If a guy makes a play on 98% of the chances he’s given, that’s pretty damn good. Especially when that guy handled twice as many chances as the other guy. Rolen was a great player, certainly not Ruthian or even Mike Schmidt level to compare a guy at the same position, but if those were the only guys getting in the Hall of Fame would be pretty small and who the hell would pay to see that?

          • If fielding% worked it would be fine. But errors are too subjective and don’t really equate to keeping the other team from scoring. And ops is properly weighted so that XBH ARE worth more than a walk or single. Kent was good, but Rolen was better.

          • Fielding percentage does work. It tells you how many chances the player handled it has nothing to do with hypothetical crap and it is not subjective. He either handled it or made an error. What it doesn’t do is take wild guesses as to what some other hypothetical replacement player might have done if he had been put in miraculously the same position as the player who just did or did not make the play. I can’t believe we have actually come to a time in our existence where instead of people accepting reality and either saying I don’t like baseball because I just don’t like it enjoying the game as it was meant to be played, they have made up a bunch of hypothetical nonsense and called them statistics. Is it really believable that several generations of baseball fans enjoyed this game but were all blissfully stupid people who didn’t understand what it took to win a game and all of a sudden this current generation has figured out the key to the mint? If the rest of us were all so stupid all this time, how did we all get this far? I can tell you it wasn’t by sitting around making up new statistics for an age-old game because it wasn’t as interesting as staring at the internet. Any other generation of writers would have voted Kent in long ago if for no other reason but because he hit more home runs than any second baseman ever. That is a worthwhile statistic. Home runs equal automatic runs scored. His and whoever is on base in front of him. It’s that simple. And please don’t explain ops as why Rolen was better than Kent when Kent’s extra base hit total was the higher of the two. This means he was in scoring position more often than the other guy solely based on his extra base hits. Most of us will take that over the guy on first base because that accounts for more runs scored for a team, more runs driven in by that team and more wins.

        • I agree with Truth. Very well stated. But I’d like to add that, instead of comparing Kent to Rolen, comparing him to three contemporary Hall of Fame second baseman works out in his favor pretty well too. Alomar, Sandberg and Biggio are all in the Hall of fame. None of them came close to Kent’s home runs or RBIs. The only one who batted higher was alomar and only by 10 percentage points and, for those who like to argue with modern statistics, Kent had a better ops Plus than all three. Tell me again how this guy is not a Hall of Famer? My guess is his personality didn’t work for the writers, he didn’t become a superstar in his first few years and he often came across as unfriendly and a bit surly. Combine that with being a little bit of a late bloomer and I guess he must be pretty easy to ignore if you want to. And oh yeah, he has more home runs than any second baseman ever! He was a hard-nosed throwback player who obviously like to keep to himself but, unlike many other players we’ve seen over the generations including now, he started slow but was able to figure out where he was going wrong and corrected enough to pile up quite a career.

        • Fielding percentage is the only reliable statistic to judge fielding. I don’t care what the new supposed metrics purport to provide, they are all crap. Measuring how many chances a guy makes a play on it’s all you can’t do. Talk all you want about the new metrics but, determine please someone should get to and if you think you can then you have never played at the MLB level. Till you’re on the field in any situation with a ball coming at you live, good luck determining what should be playable. If the guy gets anywhere near it and flubs it then it’s an error and it was playable but anyone trying to determine feeling prowess based on mathematical possibilities and hypothetical garbage is crazy. All of these new metrics are the same thing, war? Replacement above who? An average number of average players? As determined by who? How do you know the play someone made could not have been made by the so-called average player on any given day? Baseball has way too many intangibles to be measured mathematically like this. It’s all hypothetical nonsense for people who need to feel important and can’t really play. Ask any major league player out there worth his salt and I’m sure he could care less what some nerd says his war is.

        • Sabermetrics, analytics whatever you want to call it translates to “nerds ruin beautiful game because they can’t play it and don’t have the attention span to just enjoy what’s been beautiful for over a century”. Ever wonder why the game was so enjoyable to hard working people for so long with no need to make up garbage stats? Because you’re smarter than they were? Don’t believe it chief. There have always been mathematicians and scholars in the world brother. But they were also smart enough to know watching baseball was the time for relaxation. After using your brain all day and working for a living, analyzing hypothetical nonsense is just not relaxing. Runs driven in equal runs scored. Runs not allowed equal no runs scored. Get more than you give up and you win. Never needed to be more complex than that and it’s gone exponentially, inconceivably and irretrievably beyond ridiculous at this point.

        • Funny how no one ever complained about Kent’s defense while he was playing. 10 big league managers kept trotting him out there instead of finding him a more suitable spot because 10 big league managers couldn’t see what Horrible defender” he was. Good teams don’t start crappy guys. Defense metrics are highly unreliable and suspect. Fielding percentage, errors, your eyes and your brain will work just fine to tell you how good a defender is. If you never got to see him, many of us did and he was more than adequate at second. Definitely nowhere near bad enough to wipe out his offensive accomplishments and records at the position.

    • The Kent argument is not even arguable. Look at the list of Hall of Fame second baseman. Nine guys batted higher than Kent, 9 guys had more hits, 8 had more RBIs, only Biggio, Lajoie and Gheringer had more than Kent’s 560 doubles and none had more HRs. Pretty rare company and not even close to arguable. These are the real accomplishments of a baseball player and not based on hypothetical what-ifs by the new standards but these are the accomplishments of a great player who clearly outclassed his peers in his time. That’s all that matters. And the new voting will matter less and less as it ignores real stats because the Hall will matter less and less. No one is going to go marvel at some plaque explaining war and other garbage and say how great so and so was when all we remember is hearing his name and how his borderline accomplishments were relatively forgettable.

    • Defense is as much a part of baseball as hitting. Rolen was indisputably one of the best defenders ever at his position and put up good offensive numbers. Kent put up excellent offensive numbers and was a defensive liability. Your argument should be reversed.

      • I couldn’t see any possible reason to reverse it, especially since Kent was not much of a liability. Also because I will never be a student of the hypothetical statistics on the table today. I know baseball is please in reality and won by real things, not hypotheticals. Like Rolen making 186 errors in 5,700 chances for a .968 Fielding percentage. Meanwhile, that clumsy old Jeff Kent only made 50 more errors than that while handling 11,000 chances for a .978 Fielding percentage. Sure you can break down whatever nonsense these silly shaver matricians are throwing around but these numbers show what really happened on the field. It’s not even comparable. A third baseman may take some harder shots because of the proximity to the plate but a second baseman has more ground to cover, more coverage responsibilities, needs more range and the arm strength to throw the ball all over the field. Comparing players from the two different positions defensively doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense but if we are going to, let’s be realistic and note that Kent handled almost twice as many chances and only made 50 more errors. That’s really pretty amazing and hardly speaks to this so-called liability everyone seems to suddenly think he was. Either way the point really shouldn’t be that he deserves to be in over rolling, even though his body of work says so, but that he deserves to be in period. His overall body of work falls in the top 10 of Hall of Fame second baseman already in even though we are now ignoring that and using some strange irrational process to elect all the famers instead.

  3. This ballot is extremely simple. Maybe one of the most simple ballots ever. If you are one of those Jokers who is still hung up on the steroid error then it is even simpler but otherwise the clear Hall of famers here are Wagner, Kent, Helton, Sheffield, Ramirez, Beltran and both guys named Rodriguez. Then if you want for a 9 & 10 you can battle it out between Rolen, Abreu and Rollins. Please spare me the Vizquel garbage, playing a thousand years and putting up mediocre statistics is not Hall of Fame worthy. No matter how good you are at defense.

    • Beltran is obvious but so are Kent, Helton, Manny, Ahole, K-rod, Sheffield, Petite and Buehrle. Rolen, Wagner and Abreu are pretty close as well. This is obviously not the “Hall of only the Ultimate Best” and if you lay out the stats of everyone in the Hall, these guys all fall in line with several others already there. So how can the guys already there be Hall of Famers but guys who match or better them are not? Steroids are bullshit already, just another crutch for losers to keep guys out of the Hall with. 1st ballot, 2nd ballot, blah blah blah. What the hell is that? Does the actual building know what ballot it was? How many fans look at a museum and give a damn what ballot it was? One more joke for losers to justify their existence and pretend they know something more than the rest of us. If the guy performed at or near the top of the game for a consistent and reasonable period, put him in. If not, goodbye. I agree with “Relax” above, this is pretty simple. It’s bad enough to have some clown start quoting war and field zone to bunch of knowledgeable guys who know what matters and just want to punch him in the face but now you have “writers” using bullshit “stats” to determine who the top guys are?? What a joke.

    • No matter how many votes you withhold from the steroid guys on this misguided mission of the “woke”, Manny Ramirez, Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens will be the legends remembered and talked about forever. No one in 20 years will even care that Scott Rolen (or the “writers” who put him in) existed.

      • RE: The PED era. Its not woke (whatever the hell that means) to restrict cheaters from a career accomplishment award. I have an idea…Lets give Bernie Madoff a career award for financial advising. GIVE ME A BREAK.

      • Well technically woke would mean the past tense of wake, either way it’s a verb and it’s current use means nothing in actual grammar. But I think we all know what the guy is referring to. I don’t think it really compares to Bernie Madoff who was knowingly robbing innocent people who had no idea what was going on. If you really think no one had any idea what was going on during the so-called steroid era then I’d say you need to give us a break. No one in their right mind didn’t know and until these glorious sham investigations showed up, no one cared either. So everyone who is banging the anti-ped drum as though you just walked out of church and were anointed sainthood, please spare the rest of us the anguish of being embarrassed for you. I knew, you knew and everyone else knew and we all kept going to games and watching them on TV and buying memorabilia. We made jokes about the size of Jose Canseco and others like him and there was no talk of cheating or keeping people out of the Hall under the pretense that we were all being duped by something we were totally caught unaware of. Probably because we already knew there were drug abusers, alcoholics and racists in the hall for decades and that they weren’t in there because of being wonderful people, they were in there because their numbers on the field merited such. Also because it seemed just as silly as the size of NFL players who somehow continue to escape this net of the “clean game” martyrs. Lose the rose colored glasses because that’s the reality of the era and exactly how we all saw it when it was happening. Keeping them out now doesn’t change any part of the game it just makes the people responsible for it look like blowhards and fools. None of us didn’t know it was going on and none of this ridiculous blowback existed until it became a congressional issue and suddenly everyone jumped on board to express their total disbelief in how fooled we’ve all been. Now we will all pretend we don’t understand the effects of marijuana on the brain until it becomes an issue in a couple of decades and everyone will act like they’ve been screwed out of something. It’s just the vicious cycle of American stupidity.

        • You don’t need to feel sorry for me or anyone who stands against PED users being honored in the hall. I am a life-long baseball fan and I can report that I was truly amazed at the physical change in Barry Bonds and to a lesser extent to Mark McGwire. I saw Bonds hit a baseball into the mid third deck in right field at Coors field, a real gargantuan blast.. The longest home rum I have witnessed. McGwire similarly put up incredible numbers year after year. Concurrently I watched Bond get surly with the media as BALCO unfolded. So I was not totally unaware, My beliefs are my beliefs. I am not a martyr. Baseball is not football, baseball has a history of not rewarding players who ‘cheat the game’ for any variety of reason, not the least of which is fans love of comparing stats between eras. Who knows how good any of the PED era players really were or whether they belong receiving any career achievement award, let alone the hall of fame? The SABRE metric fans are comparing apples and orange with the proven PED players. It wasn’t their skill totally that got them to their stat line, it was at least partially a drug.
          They cheated, they knew it, and now they want to hide it, or at least for the fans to let it quietly go away.
          I stand as one of the fans that boos the Astros for banging on trash can lids, and to the entitlement of any player that knowingly used PEDs. Because I pay to go to the game and watch it on a level playing field. That’s why they have a rule book.
          Have all of the PED abusers been caught? No. Are some in the hall. Yes, probably. But I stand firm on the belief that this is a slippery slope of reward for anyone who cheats baseball …which baseball fans have enjoyed since the Civil War. I am against their enshrinement and I will remain against it. They have tarnished the game. In my mind, period, end of discussion.

          • Brown-Sequard Elixir. Look it up. It was the code name used for a steroid cocktail made from animal testosterone. Pud Galvin is the earliest documented user. Look this up, 1925 Babe Ruth became ill and missed games because he injected himself with an extract made from sheep testicles. Mickey Mantle’s doctor injected him with an abstract of steroids and amphetamines to keep him going, causing an abscess infection that ended up having a negative effect on him during the 1961 home run race with Maris. These are only the known cases so highly unlikely to be the only cases. Schmidt, Gossage, Aaron, Gibson, Mays and Stargell, all admitted users of powerful amphetamines. Maybe not illegal now but they were then which means they were knowingly cheating. This must be that history you’re talking about where baseball does not reward cheaters. Sorry dude,, period end of discussion only works on fourth graders. Here in America we have what is called freedom of speech which I know has become a foreign concept nowadays but I too have my beliefs and one of them is I am allowed to speak the truth. Another is I have the right to not accept nonsense as that truth and believe whatever the baseball hierarchy wants us to believe. I don’t really care who says the discussion is over just because they say so which seems to be the predominant notion in today’s so-called cancel culture society. You are free to believe whatever you want but if you actually believe baseball doesn’t have a history of rewarding cheaters then yes, I do feel sorry for you because that is factually faults as I have illustrated here. But thank you for helping me make my point. Baseball has never been a clean sport, not by a long shot and only now have certain factions decided to suddenly hold people accountable and pretend it’s because it tainted the game. Sorry, missed it by about 140 years. So again, I beg you all let’s please stop pretending we are so offended by the steroid era when it is far from the beginning of all of this as many of us have known for a long time. The Hall of Fame is not heaven, it’s just a place with walls and pictures so that people can go and see who put up the best numbers in history over the generations. That’s it. If you want it to be more sacred than that then I guess an awful lot of guys have to be pulled out of there in order to justify keeping the steroid guys out of there. Looks like even the mighty holy Babe Ruth. Sheep testosterone?? And do we believe that’s the one and only time he tried anything? The only guy to put up such ridiculous numbers when he started doing it? Hmmm…

  4. I am not a writer or newspaper guy, just a baseball fan, who appreciates excellent players busting it every game to help his team to win. There are quite a few on this ballot and Scott Rolen is in the Top 5.

    • A true dirt dog. VERY good player but there is a constant change in what constitutes a Hall of Fame career. WAR??? Seriously? It’s hypothetical nature renders it suspect at best and it doesn’t remotely measure anything useful. How many pitchers in the Hall have a better war than Catfish Hunter? (Per 162 anyway, according to this “genius” statistic). Most of them. How many of those guys LED pitching staffs to five World Series championships? Do those teams win all five of those without him? I doubt it. War and other silly things like total zone defense whatever, will tell you that Lou Brock does not belong in the Hall of fame. I don’t think there were too many guys you would have rather had in his time in his position. Luis Aparicio, Nellie Fox, Grimes, on and on. The sabermetrics would have us empty out half of the Hall if we are to take them seriously. Sorry, I’ll take real world results that account for winning baseball games.

  5. Well it looks like the holy roller committee screwed that all up. McGriff should have been in long ago so definitely no argument there but I am still not seeing the Clemens or Schilling arguments. I hope someday the woke world goes to hell and they put people in charge of voting who just say yes or no based on a guy having a great career. Schilling making stupid remarks well after his retirement doesn’t erase the career the guy had and Clemens was one of the greatest of all time. There were always suspicions, though unproven, surrounding Bagwell and Piazza yet they are both in the Hall of fame. To this day there is still no proof Clemens used steroids but somehow everyone has decided he did. Whether he did or not is irrelevant, no proof is no proof. And even though several people are going to say “we all know he did it”, that’s still just crap because we still have no proof he did it. I’ve never been a Yankee fan but I still think Mattingly keeps getting the shaft by the way.

  6. The early vote is always amusing. A-Rod has actually LOST 2 votes so far, yet is still at 59%. That’ll be going down, down, down as time goes on. (I still don’t understand the dude who dropped him for K-Rod, the only player he voted for this year. Was sure he accidentally picked the wrong Rod, but nope…)

    • I’d love to see a list of how many people realistically ever, sat down and watched the game purposely because Scott Rolen I was in it. And then of those people, how many thought to themselves, “wow I can’t believe it I’m watching an actual future Hall of Famer here”. This guy doesn’t come close to any of the benchmarks so too negate that we are now going to vote based on war and gold gloves?? How ridiculous. I guess when that doesn’t work because somebody comes along they don’t like who actually meet those standards, we can come up with something like QUF. Quality of uniform fitness. And we will judge them based on how well they wear the uniform as opposed to some hypothetical guy who might be 4 in shorter and 65 lb heavier and shows his stirrups.

  7. At this point in time, Rolen is not getting the extra votes he needs to get in this year. Could just be an early selection bias thing, but I also wonder if the BBWAA is getting tired of seeing Harold Baines and the like being elected via vets committee, while Bonds/Clemens get “less than 4 votes.” Maybe there’s no more desire to keep nudging the top candidate(s) toward 75%. Is this their way of saying F[ART] YOU to the Hall?

    • Let’s stop getting lazy with the Harold Baines comments – here are some names the Vet Committee voted-in…feel free to replace Mr. Baines’ name with any: Dave Bancroft, Roger Bresnahan, Max Carey, Rick Ferrell, Joe Gordon, Travis Jackson, Tony Lazzeri, Bill Mazeroski, Eppa Rixey and Ray Schalk…Heck I will even throw-in Reese and Rizzuto (what if these guys played in Cleveland?)

      • Asshole. It’s called freedom of speech. I will talk about Harold Baines all day and you can’t do a damn thing about it.

      • On most of these guys you are right but on 3 of them I very much disagree. First Max Carey led the NL in steals 10 times finishing with 738 steals over 2500 hits, a .360 OBP & 1,500 runs scored. Max Carey played more than half his career in the dead ball era so his lack of power stats is understandable. Joe Gordon played 11 seasons & lost 2 seasons to World War 2. He still made it into 9 All Star Games, won MVP 1 year, & won 5 World Series with 2 teams. His counting stats are low but he was a dominant player. Tony Lazzeri was the guy Joe Gordon replaced when his career ended. Lazzeri was by the standards of his day a power hitter. Most guys did not manage double digit Homers in the 20’s & 30’s. Lazzeri did it exactly 10 seasons and drove in100 seven times. He also had lower counting stats but in his time he was considered dominant. Today he’d have a ball with all these band box stadiums. The rest look weak to me.

      • Baines may have taken four score and seven years to do it but he did pile up at least arguable numbers and I can definitely see the case for numbers+ long term dependability. Bresnahan was ridiculously pedestrian, even in the dead ball era so he must have had pictures of someone. Mazeroskl is also a puzzle, but also a perfect reason to ask, ” and Jeff Kent is not getting in??”. Rixey averaged about 75 strikeouts per season, with a “respectable enough” ERA and was barely a .500 pitcher, so yes, by the standards of your list, Baines is fine. He just happens to be the most recent example of questionable voting that’s fresh on everyone’s mind while we stare in disbelief at Clemens, Schilling, Sheffield, Mattingly and several other obvious guys not getting the votes.

    • I actually believe it’s the opposite when it comes to Harold Baines: his election/induction in 2019 is one of the biggest reasons why all the sabermetric darlings (Rolen, Helton, Wagner, Jones) are getting so many votes. Everyone who has followed the Hall of Fame balloting for a few recent years have noticed that there has been a massive tug-o-war between the traditionalists and the analytic crowd. With the induction of Harold Baines, however, the analytic crowd now has a ton of “ammunition” and reason to induct anyone that they want (and let’s be honest, they would induct everyone from K-Rod up (as of 12/23/22) if they had the power to do so). The reason why Rolen is struggling to gain votes is simply that everyone who has already voted in past years has already made up their minds about Scott Rolen. Rolen essentially has to rely on new voters to get into the HOF (and persoanlly, I don’t think he belongs). In addition to that, another reason why the “Sabermetric darlings” are getting so much support is that the past three years (including this year) have been very weak outside of the steroid guys and Curt Schilling (steroid users don’t belong either). I guarantee you that Rolen and the like are going to lose votes in the next two years due to the ballot getting stronger once again.

      • Interesting counterpoint! While I’m a Rolen supporter, I do get what you’re saying. I never thought of him as a “polarizing” candidate, but I think you can argue that he really is, due to his borderline merit case (not due to PED’s or personal issues) So it makes sense that the battle lines are already more or less drawn. Also, thanks for presenting your side rationally, rather than shoving it in people’s faces. I appreciate that.

      • Both sides make sense but both are also ridiculous reasoning for writers to keep deserving guys off the ballot. Personally, I think the vets committee missed on a few once again this time but obviously this is the new crappy world we live in where players play to win and nerds justify their existence with garbage numbers that don’t mean much. Baseball is too unpredictable and filled with spur of the moment intangibles to base everything on bullshit mathematical equations. Runs and preventing runs win games. Guys that do those things the most often are the best players. You don’t need nonsensical analytics to tell you who the best are/were and they don’t mean anything when you overpay clowns at computers to tell you how to build your team only to watch Steve Friggin Pearce carry Boston through the World Series. 29 teams wasting a ton of time and money on analytical garbage every year for the most unlikely candidates to pull off the unexpected and matter the most hardly strikes me as a worthwhile investment. Therefore, electing former players based on what “math” says they should have done as opposed to numbers that actually win games all year would seem to be just as big of a waste. When guys are great, they are great. I don’t think the Hall can be only for the ultimate players or there would only be about a dozen guys in it. But it shouldn’t be determined by hypothetical crap designed to make people who don’t have the attention spans to enjoy the real game feel better/important either. It’s a beautiful game and the guys that do the most to make it that way the most often are generally going to be the guys who come out most deserving in the end. That’s who should be elected.

      • Actually the analytics crowd hates Harold Baines and Jack morris & a bunch more that got in because they were friends with guys on the veterans committee. They do not want to put everyone in they just have a different list of guys they want to put in than the Traditional fans have. Both agree on the no doubters like Rickey Henderson & Albert Pujols. The difference is the Traditional crowd argues for questionables like Ken Boyer, Ron Santo, Luis Tiant, Dave Concepcion, Bobby Grich etc. . Meanwhile the analytics crowd argue for Questionable with WAR numbers that can’t be questioned like Scott Rolen, Bobby Abreu, Jeff Kent, Johan Santana, Curt Schilling, Tommy John & the like. Both crowds have their points though the traditional crowd will disappear because they are all over 50 now. The analytics types will get the final say. That said the Veterans committee will be from the Traditional crowd for at least 20 more years or longer.

        • Maybe over 40 Cuff, and the only people I’ve ever heard talk about baseball in terms of these dry-hump stats are on these forums or some silly ESPN show where the dorks wear pants that are too tight and a bow tie. (Does the younger crowd not have mirrors anymore?) Anyway, I can also say I’ve never heard my kids or any other kid say “oh man, so and so has the best war in the game!”. You guys can have all the saberbullshit you want, and fill the hall with it but eventually the hall will be empty because these clowns are not actually going to pay money to go look at the plaques of so-so players with made-up, hypothetical statistics they are voting in and those of us who you have dying off soon certainly aren’t going to waste money in this day of inflation to have to explain to kids why they are looking at plaques of guys they’ve never heard of instead of the guys who actually accomplished difficult feats. Say all you want about it but there is no necessary “stat” involved in “sabernonsense”. If it doesn’t show you that a guy like Beltran or Kent are obviously Hall of Famers then it certainly doesn’t show you much. How many people lead the league in war etc and win MVP of the LCS or is World Series? Sounds like really important stuff!

          • By no means am I a big fan of all the made up numbers that are usedby the analytics crowd. WAR is clearly an obtuse made up statistic. That said RF or Range Factor is an important stat for analyzing a players defensive contributions in a team setting. It tells you how Many chances a player successfully handles per 9 inning game. You can use it to compare players at the same position. That said it often reveal roles within a team. For example a rightfielder who handles a high RF will generally lower the RF of his teams centerfielder. Meanwhile a slow rightfielder will increase the RF of the centerfielder. This is generally true about adjacent players like a 2nd base and Shortstop. Not every stat the analytical crowd uses is obtuse or useless. Many attempt to quantify a players defensive or offensive contribution. Some make sense others are questionable. WAR does show that guys like Kent & Beltran are Hall of Fame caliber. As do the massive counting stats both compiled while playing. The problem is that many writers vote based on feelings rather than numbers of any kind. Kent never felt like the star that he was so many don’t bother to look at his numbers. Sadly the Veterans committee will have to elect him because most are former players. They know how rare Kent’s numbers are for a 2nd baseman. WAR is supposed to be wins above a replacement player. problem is a replacement level player is well below an average player. And the numbers calculated can be questionable. OPS is simply on base percentage + slugging average. This double counts every offensive number except walks, hit by pitch & sacrifices of either kind. So it makes Ichiros single effectively double the worth of a walk by Rickey Henderson. To me that seems silly. I don’t think either crowd is totally wrong. That said they both should pay attention to each others way of thinking & learn from it even if they can’t accept all of it. Some great players have lower counting stats because they played on more bad teams than good. That is a good example of the type of player that did not get in before sabermetrics. Both ways have their downside as well. Counting stats put Harold Baines in because he played forever. Yet he was never even the 2nd best player at his position. But how do you argue with 1,628 RBI’s. You can say that in 22 years he drove in 100 just 3 times but it sounds silly. That he never scored 100 runs & had a mediocre slugging average hurts his case but 1,628 RBI is a lot. Then one might say why not Carlos Delgado and his 1,512 RBI? in 17 years he drove in 100 nine times and topped 90 3 more years, scoring 100 five times. Sounds better than Baines but voters never thought he was that type of player. Well you get the idea. Both sides have a point and both are wrong about some things.

          • I get it and I think you’ve done an admirable job of breaking down the use of such a statistic. However, such stats if you want to call them that, I’ll still subjective to me. I don’t know if you played baseball or not but I did for a long time and in the case you make regarding to adjacent fielders, I can tell you I had games where I reacted in less than an instant and ran from center field to make a diving catch behind the left fielder who was still relatively in his position but not backing up enough and I could see it. But then I had games where my knees were sore or I was just exhausted and I couldn’t have remotely made that play. So that’s statistic to me is useless because it can’t possibly gauge, nor can any of the statistics meant to forecast so to speak, a player’s performance, how someone is going to play on any given day. The intangibles are so vast and unpredictable that I find such attempts at guessing to be useless. I might as well be playing a board game at that point. Real stats, or as so many like to call them now, counting stats, tell you exactly what happened and after a few seasons, give you a pretty good idea of what you can most likely count on any given player providing based on his history. His real proven history. Honestly, I don’t understand the need to believe in analytics or to even waste my time thinking about them. I was given scholarships in mathematics so it is certainly not due to a lack of ability to understand them, in fact maybe that contributes to my skepticism toward them and my feeling of how useless they are. Everyone can believe what they want to believe and like what they like. I like the game just fine when it’s played by guys who are out there physically doing things and I don’t really need to turn it into and academic exercise because it doesn’t bore me to accept it for what it truly is, a game of intangibles and surprises that make it the most beautiful game in the world. Unfortunately not everyone really loves the game that way or they wouldn’t feel the need to do homework assignments instead of just enjoying it. And then we would see the deserving guys getting in still the way they always did. What saddens me the most is you can’t even share that with your kids anymore because these losers are taking all of the beauty out of the game. In the real world, it makes perfect sense that Jeff Kent hit more home runs than any second baseman ever. That is enough to make him a Hall of Famer all by itself in my book but you’re right, while he was playing he didn’t ever feel like a really engaging, likeable superstar. He just looked kind of stoic with his pornstar mustache and I don’t think most people gave him a second thought so his numbers kind of crept up on us. But they are definitely there and now they are being unfortunately ignored.

          • PTSA-You make some good points below. I played a lot of hardball as a kid & a lot of softball as an adult.I’m a huge fan and really did not give Sabermetrics 2 thoughts until about 2011 when I turned 46 and got into a blog group on MLB where I ran into a bunch of people who used them and I learned them just so I could understand what these people were saying. some like RF I use because over 162 games all the daily things even out. Before RF and DRS we had guys winning Gold Gloves with their bats. We had a DH win at 1st base back in 1999. Guys like Jeter who had range about the size of a bread box won Gold Gloves. Great player, leader etc but his fielding was below average. But he had a good fielding percentage because he handled what was hit at him. How many guys got on base because he did not react quick enough isn’t a stat. But RF tells part of the story of who gets to more balls and prevents hits & runs. But I would not list an RF on a plaque. Counting stats tell what happened. The problem is they do not tell you why. Or what did not happen. A guy like Rod Carew would have scored a lot more runs if the hitters behind him were better. Same with Tony Gwynn. I myself use a stat to calculate how many bases per plate appearance is responsible for. I created it myself to tell me who was most effective at producing bases which are the building blocks to runs. Other guys had low RBI totals because they had few people on base to drive in. Batting Average is technically a made up stat. So are On Base percentage and slugging percentage. But they are attempts to gauge how well a player does his job. They tell you something about the player. But years back I remember Hal Morris of the Cincinatti Reds. Always hit for a great average but had trouble driving in runs & scoring them. his runs produced per 162 games was terrible. He played for years because he hit .304 lifetime. He hit .309 for my favorite team & all I kept thinking was, When are they gonna Bench this guy and put someone out there who help the team score? So I made up my own stat that counts everything a player does offensively. You add Total Bases, Walks, Steals, Hit by pitch both kind of sacrifices together and get a number that tell how many bases a player acquired or caused other players to acquire. Divide that by the number of plate appearances & you know how effective a player is offensively. Whether the guy is on a pennant winner or a cellar dweller. Most decades had 1 player who consistently out performed everyone else in his league, Ty Cobb in the teens. Ruth in the 20’s.Foxx and Greenberg after that. Mantle for a while. No one in the 70’s though Jackson did the most in the AL. Rickey Henderson should have won 8 MVP awards between 80 & 90. But hey I still use counting stats too. They matter. It’s just that they don’t tell the whole story. Anway I wont waste more of our time. It matters to me who is best and soe of the madeup stats help me figure that out. But if they do not measure what a guy actually does on the field what is the point. So WAR and OPS etcetera are not things I use. But I will never say well this guy had a higher WAR in 1967 or any other year. Someones bases produced ratio I will note because it measures everything a player can do offensively.

          • I think it’s pretty cool that you have gone so far as to make up your own statistic. While we obviously will never agree on everything I certainly can appreciate your appreciation for such statistics. I was very good at math as I stated earlier but I did not like it. It was just something that I happened to be good at. I use math all day everyday building houses and fixing things for people now and I have more than enough stress between that, raising kids and everything else in my life so I guess what I have always loved about baseball aside from just the physical aspect of it is the simplicity of it. I like stats like batting average because, though I guess you could argue it’s made up like every other stat, it is a pretty good gauge of what a player will do on “average”. I get where you’re coming from with trying to measure a player’s ability to account for runs but that’s where I view a lot of the modern metrics as inaccurate barometers. I think there is a lot of coincidence in baseball and a guy like Hal Morris may not have had a lot of RBIs but he also spent a pretty good chunk of his career coming to the plate after guys who sucked and didn’t get on base. But that’s also the luck of the draw to me, because there were plenty of times where he hit and no one was on base for him and obviously vice versa. But to me the statistic like batting average with runners in scoring position tells me how well he fares in those situations. Either way I still wouldn’t discount that guy because he was a proven hitter and I have to imagine if he slotted into a lineup behind Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner and even Rickey Henderson he would probably have had a better RBI count because he was still going to hit eventually. But I guess you get there one way or another with either side of the statistics. My biggest problem I think is that there are too many people with the responsibilities of voting for the Hall of Fame now that only see the modern side of it and have completely discounted the reality of what a guy actually did. It was always supposed to be about actual accomplishments, not hypothetical ones. A guy like Jeff Kent as a stat sheet filled with actual accomplishments that merit Hall of Fame induction. Aside from the PED issue, which I think has gotten ridiculously out of hand since only two guys on this ballot with Hall of Fame numbers were ever suspended for it and the not so dependable Mitchell report is really the only other source for accusations, there are as usual multiple guys not getting anywhere near the votes they should. The more we have blinded riders voting, the more this will happen and it’s ruining the game from that standpoint. You and I can clearly have a two-sided conversation in this regard and appreciate each other’s standpoint but there are far too many guys who just don’t seem to understand the realities of the game and only want to pound the table in regard to modern metrics, as though they tell the whole story and they just won’t see their way past it. It’s becoming extremely unfortunate in an era where so much of our society has already gone that way. Every generation faces change but in the age of the internet where every idiot has a platform and every other lazy idiot finds it easier to agree than to be on the opposing side of History and count for something anymore, it just seems like Doom is impending and it’s trying to take the beauty of our greatest pastime with it. But anyway, good stuff brother!

          • I see what analytics are attempting to accomplish but I don’t see them actually having any real bearing on the game. Take for instance this RF you guys are discussing, what’s the basis? You are describing something that is based on plays a guy should make or chances he takes that maybe out of his range. So who gets to decide how far away from your actual position you should be able to make plays or at least attempt them? The arbitrary stat decider? No one is standing out there with that guy watching that ball move and putting themselves in the moment with every intangible involved so how can we possibly state a definitive constitution of range? Taking into account what? The velocity with which the ball reached the position at which point the arbitrary stat decider thinks the guy should be able to make a play? That’s crazy. What if the ground is wet? What if the ground is really dry and soft? What if the player has a shorter fibula than the hypothetical replacement player or the guy playing the perpendicular position to his? What if attempting to make that play, while exciting and provisional of highlight real materials, runs the risk of an injury that could put him out for 2 months? I’d much rather have the smart player who is going to keep his bat in the lineup by not risking severe injury by diving 25 ft so that he can raise his supposed “RF”. Determining a hypothetical range based on mathematic probabilities or possibilities is a pretty ludicrous way to determine someone’s fielding prowess. Just because some guy can get to those balls and another guy can’t means he is not as good of a fielder? I guess theoretically you could make that point in an extremely basic way but, once again, it certainly does not break down as a statistic worth judging someone’s career with because of all of these factors I just mentioned. Not the least of which being the injury factor. Ozzie Smith was a wizard and probably had the skeletal makeup of a worm to be able to do the things she did and not get hurt but a 6′ 3″, 210 lb shortstop might obliterate his rib cage doing the same things that Smith did easily. But if we looking at the long-term effects of such a scenario, you could probably live without Ozzie Smith’s bat in the lineup if he was injured whereas replacing the production of an Alex Rodriguez would not have been so simple. So he should risk taking himself out of the lineup, whether it’s for a week or a year attempting to raise his “RF” so he doesn’t get screwed by the analytic Hall of Fame voters? I’ll take the guy with the solid Fielding percentage, low error count and trust my eyes to do the rest. And most analytics can be busted in half this way whereas there’s no arguing 500 doubles or a .300 batting average because they are based in reality, not based on what the arbitrary stat decider thinks they could or could not have done.

  8. Let’s be honest, no one outside of Beltran belongs in the Hall of Fame, and Beltran isn’t even a first-ballot guy to begin with. I don’t know why everyone gets so up in arms about a blank ballot. It is perfectly reasonable to not think anyone on this ballot is a Hall of Famer. The two strongest statistical players on the ballot (A-Rod and Manny) were both suspended for using steroids. The next strongest candidate (Carlos Beltran) was named as being the ringleader of one of the biggest cheating scandals in MLB history (this as not as bad as the steroid thing though, however I can definitely see voters not voting for him because of this). Who does that leave:
    a) A third baseman with barely over 2,000 hits and less than 350 home runs, despite playing in one of the most offensive eras in MLB history.
    b) A first baseman with less than 400 home runs and a pretty pedestrian slash line despite playing in pre-humidor Coors in his prime, and also being far worse on the road versus at home.
    c) A reliever who pitched less than a thousand innings and was the anti-Rivera in the playoffs (terrible with a whopping 10.38 ERA).
    d) An outfielder with less than 2,000 hits, who spent the last 5 years of his career getting fat and lazy while collecting a massive paycheck to do nothing and take a roster spot, and later was arrested and pled guilty to domestic violence.
    After that, you get to the players that REALLY don’t belong. And yet, according to some people on the Internet, if you don’t vote for any (if not ALL) of the above four players, you deserve to have your voting privileges taken away. Why is that? One word: SABERMETRICS.
    For some reason, people nowadays completely dismiss or even invalidate traditional counting stats because “they don’t paint an accurate picture”. Yet they believe in stuff that is all completely in the subjective. That’s’ the thing about Sabermetrics – they are based in hypotheticals and other subjective measurement (I mean WAR is literally based around a hypothetical replacement player -what does that even mean!). Counting stats and other traditional stats, are tangible. You can’t change someone’s amount of hits, RBIs, home runs, or strikeouts, wins, or innings pitched. You can’t really change the measurement of the slash line or ERA. These, for the most part, are set in stone. Sabermetrics are constantly changing with new ones getting created every day. And don’t get me started on advanced metrics for fielding; you literally cannot trust any of these from before 2015 (and for Scott Rolen, you can’t use his Gold Gloves in his favor if you complain that Gold Gloves are a bad way to measure defense (*cough*Jeter*cough*)).
    Anyway, these are just my two cents. Case in point, small hall voters and supporters should not be villainized because they didn’t vote for X, Y, and Z. Noticed how I never said outright that these were terrible players – they had their flaws, but they were still very good players (maybe not Andruw Jones in his last 5 years though). However, this is the Hall of FAME that we are talking about, not the Hall of Very Good. Only the best of the best should get in, otherwise, it will get watered down to the level of other hall of fames. And let’s face it; that’s what makes the Baseball Hall of Fame so special; its level of exclusivity. Anyway, thank you for listening to my TED Talk.

    • Most of this rings true to me as well as obviously several others who have made the same points about the uselessness of so-called saber metrics up and down this board. I’ll never be a big “punish the steroid guys forever” talk of guy because I’m a realist and in that reality, we all have screwed up and will continue to do so till our last days. Plenty of guys have unnaturally stayed in the game so to speak weather it was through steroids or any other drug of choice to numb the pains that would have kept regular guys on the bench for a while. If Pete Rose is the only guy who ever bet on baseball out of the 20,000 guys who have played this game then I will eat my foot because anyone who believes that it’s from another planet. And guys from Pud Galvin to Mickey Mantle have been mixed up in steroid suspicions over the years yet none of you are calling for them to be pulled out of the Hall of Fame. If your answer is no one ever proved mental used steroids to fight his abscess infection, well no one has proven Roger Clemens used steroids for anything. We only know about both cases through he said she said so why would Roger not go in? I also agree with an earlier point on this board about sign stealing. It has happened for generations but because it was done with a video camera in a possibly more organized fashion, it’s no longer gamesmanship? People used to stand on the sidewalk and hail a taxi cab by hollering louder than the next guy. Now they punch it into their phone and an Uber shows up. Should those people not get a ride because they are using technology? I’m not a technology guy at all but don’t sit there and use it to improve something you did differently and then say it’s different for someone else. As with most things in this day and age, I think that was much ado about nothing. I remember a few guys on last year’s board discussing the same difference between Hall of Fame and hall of very good. Fame does not necessitate ultimate talent. Therefore it has to be a hall of very good or there would not be very many people in it. Let’s face this honestly, there are probably about a dozen guys maybe a dozen and a half in the history of the game who were so amazing all the way around that they would be the best ever. Therefore, anyone after that would have to be a lesser talent in which case you are now no longer in the crosshairs of the best or ultimate talent, you are now in the territory of second best to those guys or “very good”. And like I said, I’m not opposed to that because otherwise you would get ripped off the price of admission at the hall to see about 20 guys plaques in there that were the best ever. Better than the best and near infallible. Willie Mays and Peewee Reese were not remotely equivocal talents. Would anyone in there right mind put Harold Baines in the lineup when it mattered most over Ted Williams or Babe Ruth? I sincerely doubt it so there is a huge gap between the best and the rest already in the Hall of Fame and that’s just the way it has to be or the home would be pretty empty. I do think that when you get down to guys like Scott Rolen, it starts to get pretty fuzzy because if he spent 10 years on ballots with 10 or 12 other guys whose talent levels were those of guys like Ken Griffey Jr all the way down the line, he wouldn’t even be in the conversation. He is there now because of the lack of simple choices and the need for error-prone humans to make themselves look good or feel good by stepping on the necks of the guys who made mistakes. Just my two bucks but I hope it was well spent.

  9. Ryan please remove Kirby from the comment board if he’s only here to harass people.

    • Ryan please remove analytics and writers from baseball they’re causing us to use profanity and vulgarity.

  10. If Ozzie Smith is in the hall of fame then Omar Vizquel should be there as well. We are not only talking about 11 gold gloves, but Vizquel had almost 3,000 career hits, which is a benchmark. Also Vizquel’s batting avg. .272 was better than Ozzie Smith career batting avg. .262. The arguments against Vizquel about things he did that couldn’t be proved are probably the heaviest thing that goes against him, again, those are allegations that couldn’t be proved. Ozzie played more all star games, why, well because people loved his flips and he was a nice guy and he also won a ton of gold gloves, but Vizquel won 11 gold gloves too. Then, again, if Vizquel was not good, why the guy has many gold gloves? If he wasn’t that good why did he played for 24 seasons? In fact Vizquel even hit more home runs than Smith (80 – 28) That’s not even close. So where is the argument? Ozzie Smith War 76.9 versus Vizquel 45.6? That’s probably what they’re looking at. Take a look at his stats Vizquel was not only a better hitter, but he had more power than Ozzie as well.

    • Smith got many more MVP votes throughout his career, and won a World Series. He was an integral part of the memorable and successful Cardinals teams of the 1980’s. Furthermore, Smith’s OPS+ is higher than Vizquel’s, He averaged 37 stolen bases a season, to Vizquel’s 22. And, yes, he was charismatic. That matters. Smith is a slam dunk HoF. Vizquel may be elected by a Veterans Committee a few decades from now, but it’s not certain. Smith was a great player, Vizquel was a very good player. What has happened in terms of their HoF candidacies is entirely reasonable.

    • Have to agree here with baseball fan. If you look through Ozzie Smith’s postseason stats, they don’t really add up to much so being part of those teams is hardly the highlight of his career. He was obviously a likeable guy, a great fielder with some speed and a decent bat in the lineup. This explains the 15 All-Star appearances because it certainly wasn’t for his offensive prowess. Also that was definitely a time of All Star popularity contests. But here is another perfect example of what happens when there are not many astounding choices and they want to put people in. For a career of that length you would rather see a .290 average and 3000 hits, maybe 500 doubles. 2400 plus hits do not average out to very many per season divided by his seasons and therefore the only offensive statistic that really remotely jumps off the page under Ozzie Smith are stolen bases. So while I agree Vizquel beat him slightly in the offensive categories, neither of them was a Hall of Fame offensive player. Vizquel was a good defensive player but he couldn’t do backflips so apparently that makes him not as likable. Either way, I don’t think either of them belong there so adding one just because the other is in doesn’t really correct the original error. But then there are plenty of other guys in there with really questionable merits so I guess who really cares at this point?

    • Honestly if they’d just stop the silly crusade against the “PED” users and put the right guys in, I could care less who else they tack on after that. It’s just a museum that’s supposed to be filled with the history of the game. Now it’s become a place that I don’t blame a guy like Schilling for saying “the hell with it, take me off the ballot”.

  11. You know, I have a few theories on why guys like Rolen and the bunch are getting so much support this year than in the past.
    The first is the rise of “sabermetrics”. Many of the top guys cases on this year’s ballot are based heavily – if not entirely – in sabermetrics. Meanwhile, traditional counting stats have been all but thrown out the window. This is why guys with terrible counting stats (Rolen, A. Jones, Buehrle, etc.) are getting much more support than they deserve, whereas guys with weaker sabermetric cases, but have great counting stats (Kent, Vizquel) are not getting that much support (of course, both these guys have some off-field issues, but that’s not the point).
    This corresponds with the next theory; older voters are either retiring, dying, or otherwise losing eligibility, while more younger voters are replacing them. It is no secret that older voters tend to take traditional stats and the “fame” part of “Hall of Fame” more into account when voting, while younger voters tend to base everything in sabermetrics. With more of these younger voters, it is no surprise to see guys like Scott Rolen skyrocket in votes in the past few years, while guys like Omar Vizquel drop like a rock (and yes, I know the allegations against him are the main reason why this is happening, but the sabermetric crowd already hated Vizquel long before they came out).
    The third theory is the fact that we in the immediate aftermath of “Ballotgeddon”, the time period for the Hall of Fame between 2014-2020. Before 2014, the norm for the writers’ ballot was that only 1 or 2 players got inducted per year. It was pretty rare to see 3 players get inducted in one year, and completely unheard for 4 players in a year. However, starting in 2014, that was no longer the case. Here’s how many players got in from the writers’ ballot each year in that timeframe:
    2014 – 3
    2015 – 4
    2016 – 2
    2017 – 3
    2018 – 4
    2019 – 4
    2020 – 2
    However since then, the ballot has dried up in terms of “Hall of Fame players”. Since 2021, there have been some players that did put up Hall of Fame numbers, but were either;
    A) Connected to steroids (Bonds, Clemens, etc.)
    B) Busted for PEDs (A-Rod, Manny)
    C) Jerks to the media (Schilling, Kent)
    D) Involved in one of the biggest non-steroid cheating scandals in baseball history (Beltran)
    Once you take those guys out of the equation, who does that leave as the best players on the ballot? Scott Rolen and Todd Helton. Both these players were great players during their careers, but do they really deserve to be Hall of Famers? To traditionalists, the answer is clearly no. However, to the sabermetric crowd, it is an overwhelming yes. Both these guys have great “sabermetric stats”, but their traditional stats are not Hall of Fame worthy. However, the threat of another “no one gets in year” is on a lot of people’s minds. There is the very realistic possibility that we can go from have 3-4 guys getting into the Hall each year to having only one player (David Ortiz) get into the Hall in 3 years. And, with the Veterans’ Committee only electing Fred McGriff to the Hall, the threat of only McGriff on the stage in July is very real, prompting guys to start voting for guys they didn’t for in past years.
    The fourth is simple: many voters believe that they are REQUIRED to vote for 10 players on the ballot. This is obviously not true: you can vote for UP to 10 players on ballot, but can vote or less or not for anyone. However, these guys are getting mixed up with the diehard sabermetric crowd who truly believe that there are 10 Hall of Famers on the ballot.
    Finally, there’s the theory that no one talks about. This theory is specifically about Scott Rolen and not anyone else. The reason why Scott Rolen does the best amongst these voters is not for anything that Rolen did on the field, but rather for what he represents. As we all know in 2019, Harold Baines was elected to the Hall of Fame. To the sabermetric crowd, this was seen as a “win” for the “traditionalists” (ignoring the fact that no true traditionalist would ever vote for Harold Baines, or the fact that the Veterans’ Committee has a long history of electing questionable players into the Hall). The sabermetric crowd, despite having minor victories with Mike Mussina in 2019 and Larry Walker in 2020, needed someone that could counteract Baines, someone that the traditionalists would never vote for, but someone borderline enough that a good portion of voters would put on their ballots. Enter Scott Rolen. As I stated before, Rolen’s traditional counting stats were very weak for a Hall of Famer on the writers’ ballot. However, he has great sabermetric stats, with WAR being the biggest factor. A Rolen election would be a massive W for the sabermetric crowd, and would give them enough of a reason to start electing far weaker candidates because their “sabermetric stats” are good, eventually turning the Baseball Hall of Fame into the Basketball Hall of Fame (a place were a just-decent-enough player can be a serious Hall of Fame candidate).
    Anyway, these are my theories. Do you guys agree or disagree with me? Feel free to start a discussion.

    • Clearly a huge part of what’s ruining the game for real people. It’s unfortunate that somehow the progression of American society has not only stopped but regressed over the past 20 years in the face of all of the “amazing technology” that rules people now. Truly a “drink the Kool aid” moment in our history and it’s now affecting things that once we’re steeped in pride and tradition like baseball and it’s Hall of Fame. It must really suck to be part of such a mindless, heartless generation with such a drastically warped view of reality. This is what living in the internet has done. Good night and good luck.

    • Well, clearly “WAR” has a greater influence with baseball fans with each passing year, and it is a useful tool.
      It’s also true that this year’s ballot is pretty uninspiring. No man on it really feels like a Hall of Famer. (For example, will anyone ever tell his kid or grand kid, “I personally saw Scott Rolen play!” Unlikely.)
      It’s perfectly fine to go a season or two without electing anyone to the HoF. If Fred McGriff is the only inductee on the stage this summer, that will be perfectly fine.

      • Well I don’t think WAR, a hypothetical line of nonsense, is a useful statistic since it is exactly hypothetical, I agree 100% that no one watching Scott Rolen play baseball was ever thinking “Wow, this guy is a Hall of Famer”. He simply represents an option to vote for in place of the steroid guys. Yes those guys made a mistake but they weren’t the only ones to have ever done it they were just the scapegoats when suddenly the beginning of the “woke” generation decided it was a problem. Why don’t we hear anything about steroids in the NFL? Because no one is doing it? Yeah right. Let’s accept it for what it was and stop being martyrs. There are definitely Hall of Famers on this ballot and if we can’t ever get past this overblown nonsensical steroid thing, then we have bigger problems than steroids.

        • The NFL? You have the wrong website for that sport. Personally, I could not care less about that league, except insofar as it corrupts American higher education and leads vulnerable youth to pursue what for 99.8% of them is an absolute dead end in life.
          The steroid guys were terrible, both ethically and for MLB. None of them should be inducted into the HoF.
          As for Rolen, he was a talented player, although often injured, but not a worthy HoF’er.
          There’s no reason the HoF needs to be a “big tent” institution. Only the very, very best should be members.

          • Funny I’ve always been an avid reader of sports information and the like and I don’t recall anyone during the steroid era complaining about all the awesome bombs that were flying out of the stadiums. But let’s all keep pretending to be completely disappointed, astounded and feign total disdain for something that no one cared was happening when it happened. And anyone who says they did is a liar.

          • I don’t care about the NFL either. The point is it’s a professional American sport and if Congress was so worried about steroid use staining the landscape of baseball then why wouldn’t they be worried about it anywhere else? And just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean no one else does and where are all the people that will be chiming in on how horrible the steroid users were when it does become a big deal years down the road? Funny this is exactly what baseball looked like during the steroid era and now you won’t come out of the woodwork since the Mitchell report etc with this garbage banging your drums and blowing your horns as though anyone had anything to say about this when it was going on. What a bunch of nonsense.

          • Aside from the fact that only a rod and Manny on this list were ever suspended for ped use. Even the commissioner came out and stated that the Mitchell report could not be dependent on as fact because of too many possible issues. How can a report like that be depended on to completely alter the history of the game?? If they weren’t suspended then they didn’t test positive and if the report is not reliable then why are we using it as a Bible?

  12. Beltrán no fue a casa Blanca con Houston a saludar al presidente por su trato a PR en Maria. Fue el único jugador mencionado por robo de señales. CASUALIDAD? Juegue usted.

  13. I know they all have 0 votes, but Arroyo, Ethier, Hardy, Weaver, and Werth are all on your list but missing from the spreadsheet.

  14. Experts in MLB are saying that there is no urgency for some players to make it in this year, but that’s not accurate, next year there will be a logjam of great players and many good players as well. Yeah, maybe they are not all hall of famers, but there will be discussion about some of those candidates. Adrian Beltre, Joe Mauer, Chase Utley, David Wright, Victor Martinez, Bartolo Colon, Jose Bautista, Matt Holiday, Jose Reyes are some of those names. Then on the 2025 ballot there will be Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, Feliz Hernandez, Dustin Pedroia, Ian Kinsler, Troy Tulowitzky, Curtis Granderson among other candidates. So yeah, if some players don’t make it in this year, that’s it for them.

    • That’s because experts in MLB are a myth. What exactly makes them experts? Did they go to MLB college and get a degree in MLB ology? I have long maintained that many of us know just as much and more than the so-called experts just by being lifelong intelligent fans. You’re right the log jam will never end, and the largest part is due to a combination of bad judgment on the part of these so-called experts. If we are suddenly going to scrap all wheel statistics and vote based on God knows what, this mess is not going to end. Beltre and Ichiro should easily be shoo-ins. Sabathia, Mauer and Utley are pretty damn close. Colon piled up some numbers but let’s not forget he also had that ped issue which so many writers will gladly use against him. I think Pedroia and Wright are two peas in the same pod. Guys who were probably building solid Hall of Fame cases and had their careers derailed by extremely unfortunate injuries. They were both awesome players for what they brought to the table but through no faults of their own we’re not able to cash in on longevity. In the old days, how great they were for the amount of time that they did have would probably have been enough when more writers used common sense and reality to vote but I guess we will see if that ever happens again.

  15. Let’s make some way too early HOF predictions for up to 2027.

    BBWAA Ballot
    2023 – None
    2024 – Adrian Beltre
    2025 – Ichiro Suzuki, Carlos Beltran
    2026 – CC Sabathia, Todd Helton
    2027 – Joe Mauer, Scott Rolen
    (Yes, I know I said that Rolen does not really belong in the Hall, but I admit that his induction is inevitable)

    Vets Committee (I honestly have no clue who is even on the ballot)
    2024 – Theo Epstein, Billy Beane, Charlie Manuel
    2025 – Maury Wills, maybe Ken Boyer
    2026 – Jeff Kent

    • Doesn’t Bruce Bochy get in during that timeframe or did he reset his clock by taking the Rangers job?

      • I would assume Bochy will not be eligible yet because he will be coaching again. I may be wrong but, unlike a case of LaRussa, who waited several years to coach again, he has now taken a job before his eligibility even kicked in. As far as the rest of those guys are concerned, there was a good period where Beltre was kind of a surly jerk in the media so I wouldn’t be shocked to see him ” punished” a little bit first, though it’s pretty stupid. Helton is holding up pretty well so if he doesn’t make it this year I don’t think it will take him three more seasons. Ichiro should be first ballot unanimous but obviously we are dealing with people who probably couldn’t hit their ass with a chair if they sat on it, determining who belongs in a place for people who could so I’m sure some jokers will conjure up some nonsensical reasons not to check his box. Concealing your ballot is such a crap move nowadays. If you are so confident in your reasoning and you know what you’re talking about in your own mind, then why hide it until the end?

        • With the Veteran’s Committee, I have no clue on who is even on the ballot to begin with, since unlike the BBWAA ballot, the Veteran’s Committee seems to release the ballot only a month before the election. These are just my guesses as to who will make it in.
          As for the BBWAA ballot, here is my justification for the ones you mentioned:
          2024 – Beltre might of been somewhat of a jerk towards the media, but he does have well over 3000 hits and nearly 500 home runs, something that the older, more traditional voters can easily get behind. In addition, Beltre put up 93.5 WAR, which means the analytic crowd will easily support him as well. I definitely see him getting in on the first ballot.
          2025 – Ichiro will easily get 95% of the vote. The only reason why I can see people not voting for him is the criticism that he was not a “power hitter” and relied a lot more on infield singles. Other than that, nothing really comes to mind why someone would leave him off (expect for maybe a few ugly reasons that I rather not talk about).
          2026/27 – Because of how strong the ballot is getting in both ’24 and ’25, I definitely see Rolen, Helton, and the like all losing some support in these two years. Rolen specifically will lose support due to Beltre coming on next year, as well as maybe even losing votes to David Wright. This is because one of the big arguments for Rolen is that he a third baseman and that there are not enough third basemen in the Hall. So what happens when one third baseman with far better statistics and another third baseman that is basically equal with Rolen enter the ballot at the same time? Rolen loses votes. However, Rolen will still make it due to a large Internet campaign to get him in a la Jim Rice a la Larry Walker. Helton is basically in the same boat with the crowded ballot, but he still makes it in, even before Rolen due to Helton actually having a somewhat better case than Rolen. Either way, both make it, whether we want them in or not.
          As for your final point, maybe some voters don’t want to reveal their ballots due to the possibility that they will get harassed for not voting the way the online crowd wants them to. It should perfectly acceptable for voters to not want to share their ballot with the world. If you want to reveal your ballot before the election, that is perfectly fine. If you want to make it public, but not before the results come in, that is perfectly fine. If you don’t want to share it at all, that is perfectly fine. If they don’t want to share, that is up to them. Some people see it as a personal privilege to vote for the Hall, and if they want to keep their vote between themselves and the Hall, that is fine.

          • 100% agreed bithe Beltre and Ichiro belong immediately. Just getting used to the idiocy that has come to permeate the process at this point. The rest make sense from a certain standpoint but as usual, not from a logical standpoint. If they think a guy is a Hall of Fame guy then they should think that when others enter the ballot as well. In the next several years I don’t see enough talent to have to negate a Rolen for a Wright if they like both guys as I can’t see where the other 8 votes would be locked up. Since so many guys are hell-bent on not electing PED guys, I don’t see a huge swell happening for any of those guys. Anyway, I know I’ve become part of the minority anomaly nowadays but I firmly feel if you’re going to be losers who drop turds in the punch bowl the stand up and face it. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, mine involve not ruining people’s lives and being a coward about it.

  16. Do you still expect a 15 percentage point drop off between public and non-public vote? Or do you think voters are becoming more inclined to reveal their ballots?

    • Over the past 10 years the revealed voters ( both pre and post announcement) have risen from 52.9% (2014) to 81.5% (2022). The pre announcement portion went from 33.3% (2014) to a high of 57.6% (2018) but began dropping to 49.8% (2022). My local chapter of SABR group thinks that the newer, younger, social site voters are just trending the way America is going: Let my voice be heard. But, due to online criticism of the voters’ choices, they began holding back their ballots until after the BBWAA announcements when online comments fade.

      • Exactly how America is going. Which is the most annoying part. “I want to ignore reality and do whatever I want, not be argued with and face no consequences”. Good plan. I see a bright future for this country, and baseball along with it.

  17. I would vote for these 10: A-rod, Rolen, Helton, Wagner, Kent, Sheffield, Pettitte, Jones, Rollins and Abreu. K-Rod, Hunter and Buehrle would wait.
    The ballot should go back to up to 15 names for 15 years because most players’ careers are around 15 seasons. And I hate blank ballots.
    I expect Ichiro, C.C., Beltran and Beltre to all go in before 2028 when it is Pujols’ turn.

    • I wonder if anyone will remember the trainer who told Jack Clark when they worked together in LA that he had been injecting this young, up and coming star who was about to blow up on the scene named….. Albert Pujols….. Never hear about it anymore so I’m imagining it will be conveniently forgotten for this golden boy.

      • Jack Clark literally retracted that statement and the trainer referenced totally denied too.

      • I would imagine he would retract it. He had already gone bankrupt years earlier, he lost his job on the radio because of the statement and then Pujols was suing him. Only then did he retract the statement, which, oddly enough, caused Pujols to drop the lawsuit.
        But if we’re now keeping people out of the Hall of Fame based on suspicion instead of reality, the whole thing stinks of suspicion.
        Did anyone expect the trainer would not deny it? So Jack Clark pulled a meaningless name like Chris Millfield out of thin air? How many people listening to the radio at that time would have any idea who that was? If he was looking for credibility, you could see him saying Mark McGwire, someone people would immediately recognize and associate with peds. Chris Millfield? Who the hell is that?
        Then, after having come up in a system with Mark McGwire on the roster and putting up ridiculous numbers year in and year out, within 2 years of this accusation and moving across the country, his average falls off a cliff, so do his home runs and then even his doubles took a drastic decline. And this all stayed this way for the rest of his career.
        The guy was a great player and I’m not saying he did or didn’t do it, I have no idea obviously. What I am saying though is that, Roger Clemens is not in the Hall of Fame based on hearsay. No failed tests, no suspensions, nothing. Then we had to hear about “suspicions” surrounding guys like Mike Piazza and Jeff Bagwell. Granted they ended up in the hall but if there were any reason for suspicion regarding guys like that, I would think based on this chain of events, there would certainly be reason for suspicion surrounding Pujols.
        Again, I have no way of knowing obviously so this is not an accusation, just an observation. An observation that pretty well illustrates what a sham this entire voting process has become and how lame the reasoning has become to keep guys out.

    • I always see there is lot of love for Buehrle I’m kind of iffy on him maybe borderline HOF but what I don’t get is no love for Tim Hudson and his career numbers are actually better yet he’s not even on the ballot anymore

      • Personally, I can see a case for a guy like Buehrle, to no hitters, a history of consistency and a pretty uncanny ability to induce ground balls, double please and pick-offs. In essence controlling the base paths like not too many guys can. Unfortunately you have to also mix in the hits and home runs he did give up which bring the era a little high at 4.81. but allowing 59 stolen pieces over 3,200 innings is pretty astounding as well.

        But that being the case, I would certainly agree that Tim Hudson was a much stronger candidate than the way it played out as well. Hudson was often dominant, for the most part he was dependable in the postseason although he was a little shaky in the World Series his team did end up winning anyway. But overall I could definitely see him in there.

        Shamefully, the voters are trending more and more towards imaginary numbers and trying to explain away win totals as a meaningless statistic. I get the argument that your wind totals are somewhat dependent on your team producing offense but a guy doesn’t win 200, 300 or 350 games by coincidence. Clearly there are occasions where a guy like Phil Hughes wins 18 games because he was the beneficiary of some pretty good offense in spite of him giving up more runs than he probably should. And vice versa, Felix Hernandez or Jacob degrom posting other dominant numbers in the face of poor offensive output by their own squad. But these are such rare occasions and they definitely don’t define an entire career. While I can understand giving a Cy Young award to a guy who blew away the league in the era department and or strikeouts etc but didn’t benefit from a great offense, that is not the case nearly often enough to throw away everything we know about baseball.

        There is an overall picture that just doesn’t seem to be looked at any longer. Personally, I also believe David Cone was worthy of induction. But hey, what are you going to do?

  18. Let’s play a game, shall we:
    Which one of these two players do you believe should be in the Hall of Fame more?

    Both are third basemen.
    Player A: Played from 1996-2012 (Very High-Offensive Era)
    .281/.364/.490, 2077 H, 1211 R, 316 HR, 1287 RBI, 118 SB, 49 CS, 899 BB, 1410 SO in 2038 Games, 8518 PA, and 7398 AB
    7x AS, 8x GG, 1x SS, 1x WS
    Player B: Played from 1955-1969 (Very Low-Offensive Era)
    .288/.349/.462, 2143 H, 1104 R, 282 HR, 1141 RBI, 105 SB, 77 CS, 713 BB, 1017 SO in 2034 Games, 8274 PA, and 7455 AB
    11x AS, 1x MVP, 5x GG, 1x WS

    Player A is Scott Rolen, who is currently getting approximately 80% of the vote in his 6th year on the ballot, and will eventually get in the Hall of Fame whether we want him in or not.
    Player B is Ken Boyer, who peaked at only 25.5% in his 9th year before falling off the ballot after 15 years, and, despite appearing on multiple Vet’s Committee ballots since then, has never been a serious Hall of Fame candidate.

    What does that tell us? To me, this shows that Ken Boyer was a far better candidate for the Hall of Fame than Scott Rolen will ever be. And yet no one is really clamoring for him to be in, meanwhile, Scott Rolen gets so much support from certain people that if someone leaves him off their ballot, the entire Internet has a meltdown. This proves that when Scott Rolen gets into the Hall (because it is inevitable that it will happen), Ken Boyer needs to get into the Hall as well.

    • Preaching to the choir sir. Steve Garvey could play first and third and put up a career quite comparable to both of those guys. Somehow also not in the Hall of Fame. Seems like all of the real numbers have gone out the window and the only thing anyone is looking at is this nonsensical WAR. Which is a shame because, how many people are going to pay money to walk through the door at the hall of fame and look at Scott Rolen’s 70 WAR? Who cares?

  19. Sorry, Carmine, RegisKelly is not preaching to your choir. You are ranting against advanced metrics such as WAR, while RegisKelly highlights the context of offensive era, which is one of the factors that WAR addresses.

    RegisKelly, as for your analysis, advanced metrics (at least bWAR) acknowledge that Boyer was a better offensive player than Rolen. But Boyer was an average defender (despite his Gold Gloves, which reward reputation, not value), while Rolen (at least according to dWAR) was the fourth best defensive third basemen of all time (behind Brooks Robinson, Adrian Beltre and Graig Nettles).

    Boyer’s Hall of Fame case is a reasonable one. According to JAWS, Boyer is the 4th best Third Baseman not in the Hall (behind Beltre, Rolen and Nettles), and Third Basemen are egregiously underrepresented. And of course, it’s not the Hall of WAR or even the Hall of Value, but the Hall of Fame, and “fame” cannot be measured by a number. A voter can reasonably argue that the Gold Gloves and MVP award made him famous, and that he therefore belongs in the Hall. But it is not the statheads that are keeping Boyer out. The Veterans Committees are not looking at WAR. In fact, today’s more analytics-aware BBWAA electorate would probably give Boyer a better shot than the writers of the seventies and eightees.

    • I’m going to walk back my “average defender” characterization of Boyer. In his prime, he was one of the best (if not the best) defensive third basemen in the National League. He just wasn’t on the same other-worldly level as Rolen.

    • Sorry to you chief, but I agree completely with his assessment, analytics or not. Hence the expression “preaching to the choir”. It means someone is saying something you agree with. I’m sure you’ll say you don’t need that explained to you but since you obviously didn’t catch that drift, it appears you do need it explained.

      As far as ranting, it’s hardly a rant. It was stating a fact that you helped me prove. The “war” mongers I’m actually convinced themselves and each other at this point that what they are doing makes sense. So much so that even when you prove them wrong within your face logic, they will not see it. Apropos of the time we live in because that’s pretty much everywhere now. But I guess that’s another point you helped me prove. He didn’t argue for, defend or even mention war or any “analytics” in his entire comment. If you are really as astute as you’d like to believe, you will notice that all of the numbers he put out there to prove his point have nothing to do with silliness or hypotheticals. They are the actual meaningful numbers that show what the guy really did. Not pipe dream numbers. So maybe you and the analytics-aware crowd should sit down and make a list of all of the most important games in history and then you can analyze that list and make another list of how many of them were won the highest war guys in history. Because the guys your numbers take a dump on, are the guys that win games.

      Those guys can be found in the box score the very end of the season, you know, when the guys who actually put up the meaningful numbers are still doing that en route to the championship or close to it.

      • Hmmm. RegisKelly presents the standard back-of-the-baseball-card offensive stats, which suggest that Rolen was slightly better offensively than Boyer. He then introduces the context of offensive era, concluding that actually Boyer was slightly better. The application of context when comparing players was one of the prime motivations for Bill James and other early sabermetricians, who challenged themselves to come up with context-sensitive metrics. Lo and behold, Baseball Reference’s oWAR quantifies RegisKelly’s off-the-cuff analysis: Boyer 55.9, Rolen 52.8.

        But the only defensive metric that RegisKelly uses is Golden Glove awards. That’s understandable, since, in the pre-sabermetric world, there were no meaningful defensive metrics. While batting average, home runs, strikeouts, etc. provide tangible starting points to which context can be applied, fielding percentage (and, by extension, Gold Gloves) is merely a reflection of an official scorer’s visual evaluation of that which is indescernable to the naked eye.

        When we compare two third baseman, we are basically asking which one, on a generic team, would give a better chance at winning a championship. While advanced metrics such as WAR are far from perfect (especially their defense components), they certainly do a better job at answering this question than Gold Gloves.

        As a Yankee fan, I detest the Houston Astros, but I must acknowledge that Astros’ superior use of analytics has made them baseball’s most dominant team of the past six years.

      • Lauding the exploits of Bill James et all, is on par with commending the inventor of radiator stop leak. It can be talked about and described in ways that make it seem like it solves the problem. Especially by the people who want to believe in it. Yet it’s supporters see nothing more than it’s praises and habitually completely ignore any other option. Go through this entire comment page and you will see, not all, but predominantly analytics supporters who have no argument for how analytics can completely miss the unsung heroes that get the most done in this league. Just constantly compiled arguments in favor of analytics, regardless of the story they don’t tell. But it falls short of actually measuring something that cannot be quantified that way. Everything that goes into supposedly quantifying defensive prowess from the analytics standpoint is subjective at best. It still relies on someone deciding basically the difference between right and wrong or good and bad. Too many intangibles go into any given player being able to field any given ball put into play. Well beyond physical range. And I am not talking about the trickery and circus stunts. Many guys have played entire seasons with nagging injuries that serve them no purpose to explain at a press conference. But the real purpose is that their bats are valuable in the lineup even though the injury May limit their range in the field. Some guys have chronic injury issues that pop-up sporadically, again causing them limited range. But they play it smart in the field and keep their bats in the lineup where they are most valuable. Defense is very valuable but if the team can’t score runs it doesn’t matter how many you stop. Conjuring up a statistic that encourages a player to risk injury trying to “knock down” balls that may be unplayable for him cleanly, it’s not a very responsible idea. Especially now that they are being held to these imaginary standards and disqualified as great fielders if they don’t meet them. Mike Lowell was a great third baseman, analytics or not. And the most important aspect of a guy like that, on top of the fact that he won two World Series and was the MVP of one of them, is the unquantifiable heart, soul and leadership he provides, all while being a great fielder, more than competent hitter and necessary cog for a championship machine. But your metrics render him an afterthought. Thank God the Marlins and Red Sox front offices didn’t see him that way.. and he’s only one example of the great many who actually carry this game on their shoulders.

        • And it’s still not clear how much better a job these metrics do at measuring anything. You’re talking about someone being rewarded for barely getting to and knocking down balls, keeping them from the outfield. Great, so now the batter “only” got a single instead of “possibly” more. There’s that old unquantifiable intangible again. Since the ball was knocked down, you have no idea if it would have even been more than a single even if it reached the outfielder behind the guy who knocked it down. But the guy who our undependable “eye test” sees making amazing plays in the most adrenalized settings in history, while he may not “knock down” hypothetical doubles into singles very often, saves games that matter like a madman. But his metric won’t show that if course. And to think, we’ve wasted all this time watching games with our eyes instead of just relying on calculated maybes.

    • Do you guys even watch baseball? Yet another statistic to prove these numbers tell you nothing important. Robinson was great long before these numbers were ever imagined. But any number that would try to make you believe Beltre and Nettles round out the top 2 or 3 third sackers ever is obviously a little off. Lowell, Alfonzo, Petrocelli, Uribe, Arrenado and Lansford off the top of my head would play third base defensively ahead of those guys. If the game is boring for certain people, it would have been nice if they had just said ” I don’t like this” or I just don’t have the attention span for this”, instead of turning it upside down with nonsense and ruining one of the few relaxing engagements we had left. Everything doesn’t need to be sped up or overanalyzed to be appreciated. Go apply these silly things to ping pong or something no one cares about.

  20. Measuring defense is really, really hard. Nothing is “obvious,” because one of the most important components of defense, reaction time, is indescernable to the human high. And the classic defensive metric, fielding percentage, is merely an extension of the eye test, as it is dependent on the eye of the official scorer. Fielding percentage, in fact, punishes range, as a fielder that gets behind a ball and knocks it down is more likely to be charged with an error than a fielder who lets the ball go by him. And Gold Glove awards merely confirm the eye-test/fielding percentage bias.
    Brooks Robinson was other-worldly. Our eyes told us as much, and the metrcs confirm that he was as good as he was entertaining. Ditto with Ozzie Smith. On the other hand, Derek Jeter’s acrobatics masked his deficient lateral range. Only by carefully observing Jeter on a daily basis was Brian Cashman confirm the advanced metrics’ message that, despite the five consecutive Gold Gloves, Jeter was a defensive liability (Cashman then famously had dinner with Jeter and tactfully gave him the ultimatum to improve his lateral explosiveness or change positions — Jeter became a league-average defender and the Yankees won a World Championship).
    As fans, we can choose whether to geek out on advanced metrics or just be entertained. Jeter’s jump-and-spin moves were great to watch, even if they didn’t bring World Championships to the Bronx. Writers can consider the entertainment value of Jeter’s defense when voting him into the Hall of Fame (of course, Jeter’s offense, leadership and intangibles make him a Hall of Famer in spite of his lack of lateral range), But front offices charged with converting dollars into wins need to use the best metrics available. And for geeky fans who get a kick out “playing GM,” resources such as Baseball Reference and Fangraphs enhance the entertainment value of the game.

    • Measuring defense isn’t hard and it’s extremely obvious. You guys say it’s not because you want your stats to be meaningful but telling the rest of us they are explaining something they’re really not doesn’t make it so. Just like whoever (Bill James?) decided what these crazy things are being measured against. Completely arbitrary. They are not set in stone or factual so all this garbage is phony. You seriously can’t tell if a defender is good by watching him? You’d rather rely on someone else telling you what the guy should be able to hypothetically do in an ideal utopia? Wow you must really not enjoy actual baseball. I feel bad for you guys.

  21. If it were just a case of nerds playing GM, no one would care. That’s their business, do whatever you want. The problem is that we now have way too many people taking these numbers seriously and in considering them to be scripture, which is leading to deserving players being left out and VERY OBVIOUSLY, not so deserving players getting votes. But I guess the point then is, we are not supposed to take the Hall of Fame seriously any longer. The difference between having fun with numbers and completely ignoring actual statistics is a guy with more home runs than any other second baseman ever not getting votes and a guy with barely 2,000 hits in 17 years getting 80%.

  22. You are playing with numbers too, Jesse. You are just choosing different numbers to play with. Or perhaps you are just focusing on the “one sentence story” (“most home runs for a second baseman”), as many writers are (legitimately) wont to do.

    Ignoring Kent’s defensive liability (and his wheelies — summoning the character clause), decided to take a deeper dive into his offensive value. His oWAR of 60,1 is not only less than 60% of Joe Morgan’s, but it is eclipsed by several non-HOF second basemen. Oh, but WAR is not an “actual statistic,” so I took a peak under the covers. Let’s play the Player A/Player B game.

    Player A: 1992-2008 (high offense era), 8498 AB, 1320 R, 2461 H, 560 2B, 47 3B, 377 HR, 1518 RBI, 94 SB, 801 BB, 1522 SO, .290/.356/.500, .855 OPS, 123 OPS+, 224 GDP

    PLAYER B: 1975-1995 (low offensive era), 8570 AB, 1386 R, 2369 H, 420 2B, 65 3B, 244 HR, 1084 RBI, 143 SB, 1197 BB, 1099 SO, .276/.363/.426, .789 OPS, 117 OPS+, 143 GDP

    Player A is the better hitter, even when adjusting for era (as OPS+ does), but not by much. Player B walked more, struck out less, hit into fewer double plays and was a much better base runner. That accounts for his higher oWAR. Player B was a delete defender, while Player A was a defensive liability. Player B was a model teammate, while Player A got injured through reckless behavior and lied about it. Player A is Jeff Kent. Player B is Lou Whitaker, who was one-and-done on the Hall of Fame ballot and has been largely dissed by the Veterans Committees.

    Now focusing on a single-sentence story is 100% legitimate, especially if you are a journalist who makes a living through stories. But a voter can certainly choose to focus on the whole picture, and advanced metrics provide a tool to assist with such evaluation (which does not mean that they are “scripture”).

    BTW what I see as rendering the Hall of Fame as a joke is shutting out the best big-game pitcher in history, who has the best strikeout-walk ratio in the post war era, because of his post-retirement social media behavior.

  23. I focus on the real numbers. It would be one thing if this was some new game and we were still trying to figure out how to determine who is a good player. That’s not the case. This game has been about the same thing forever. Winning the big one. Nobody grows up practicing war, rf, zone rating, etc. They go out there, hit, field and pitch and try to do it better than the other team. You can cite generational change but I’ve yet to see a press conference or interview where I hear a player say “I’m just trying to have a good dear day out there and hope my ops+ helps the team”. Guys go out there, take mighty rios, blaze the corners and field the ball the way they’ve learned how their entire lives. Try teaching young kids how to play the game for these numbers and you’ll lose their attention faster than spinach ice cream. Today’s teenager generally doesn’t put down their phone or video games for anything that requires any effort and nobody gets to the high school or college levels trying to impress scout with their analytics. Most guys know what a five tool player is and they are just aiming to show as many of those as possible, knowing all the while, the biggest eye-catchers will be smoking shots over the wall or striking out a dozen guys and breaking the radar gun. All things that have gone on since way before the silly stat crowd came along. If read open-mindedly, there are far more than one sentence in this story. But I get why that’s a defensive mechanism for analytics, because if they actually made sense and brought something credible to the table beyond even a large scale doubt, why wouldn’t the rest of us, including the players, want to accept them. They make a lot of people feel better to believe in I’m sure, I’m just not one of those people. I watched Kent for years and somehow missed what huge defensive liability he suddenly supposedly was. The arguments against fielding percentage are unfounded. It’s judged by the eye? Ok, so determining where the range limits are for your defensive metrics is a more dependable science? Based on who’s authority? St. Sebastian? If you can take the guys with the most range and judge everyone else against that and that’s good enough for you, then I’m glad you have something to latch onto. But once again, it’s not how the is played, taught or won. And once again, make a solid point like the several reasons someone could possibly not play like Ozzie Smith and still be great and some “analytics major” is there to completely ignore that reality. Go to spring training, mingle with some players and ask someone you consider deficient due to his low total zone rating, etc and see if he explains it your way or mine. Obviously this wouldn’t happen because metrics “believers” don’t want to hear reality.

    Nutshelling a century and a half of baseball into whatever this “single sentence” rhetoric is supposed to infer doesn’t remotely do justice for the alleged intellect being a “sabetmetrician” would suggest supports such an astute introspection into the game’s intricacies.

    Once again, there is no definitive measurement to determine high and low offensive eras. It’s another off the wall term, attempting to intelligently identify an immeasurable quantity. What day did one end and the other begin? Don’t worry, I know there’s no answer. But let’s pretend using an arguable terminology makes any sense at all as a control in this “math problem”. First of all, I wouldn’t blindly accept the definitions of the time frames. I would say Whitaker played roughly half his career after the “accepted” onset of the “high offense era”. While some of the numbers are comparable, some are not as close as you’d like them to sound. In roughly 75 less at bats, not only did “A” have close to 100 more hits, 140 doubles, 130 homers and 430 RBIs are a pretty good “slight difference”. Whitaker walked a lot more and therefore won the obp race but otherwise, I’m pretty sure there’s not that close of a comparison. Though I don’t necessarily think Whitaker wasn’t a great player and didn’t deserve maybe some more consideration. At least from the vets committee maybe.

    If Jeff Kent is a character problem for popping wheelies and (probably due to embarrassment), lying about it, wow, I’d say the voters NB eed to take some serious stock of what a real bad character is. Guy does something stupid, obviously for entertainment, screws it up and makes a fool of himself and then doesn’t want to broadcast it? Sounds like a real no-good-nik. Those are the kind of things that actually make me feel embarrassed for the media (and a lot of other people these days). People who think they are entitled to detailed explanations for whatever they feel they should know. I’m injured, spoke about it with the team, all on the same page, see you when I get back. But of course there has to be more to it and the media “has the right to know”. Yeah right. What these guys should say is ” I’m payed to play the game and I have a contractual obligation to provide a certain amount of media availability. I’m here, if you want to talk baseball. If you’re just looking for the “big scoop ” of your career, sorry, none of your business.

    And believe me, I’m aware that so-called “advanced metrics” are not scripture. I just said there are obviously voters treating it that way. And you’re right, they have that right, but it doesn’t make it right. Slice however you want, they’re screwing guys out of deserved recognition and trying to prove their “merits” by forcing borderline guys in based on empty metrics.

    But at least we agree on Schilling though.

  24. The Hall of Fame is a broken institution…
    1. Changing verbiage to include personal character clauses, or keeping players banned from mlb to also be banned from the HOF. Those decisions were choices that were implemented to target specific players.
    … the baseball HOF is not the MLB HOF. There is no official affiliation.
    2. The voting privileges of the writers need to be revoked. The voters already vote for mvp, cy, Roy and such, but somehow decide that someone they gave 7mvps or 7 cyyoungs isn’t good enough for the HOF? Please???? put the vote where it belongs, with the fans. Make the Fame part of the HOF relevant again. Make the voting like the all star voting. We paid for their careers and pay to visit the hall and we deserve the opportunity to have a say in who is represented.
    3. Peds… Great job on this subject HOF!! (Not). Do anything in your power to keep some PED guys out (bonds,clemens,etc…) while others are OK (piazza, bagwell, ivan rodrigirz, ortiz, etc..) and then let selig in as well? Worst case of hypocrisy I’ve seen.
    I understand to a point not rewarding suspected PED guys with first ballot status, or withholding votes from guys who were actually caught in the act. At the end of the day it is baseball…. leave the politics in your newspaper articles and out of the museums. Another instance of cancel culture…

    • And who determines what integrity and character are? Is purposely not voting for one of the five greatest pitchers ever and the best big game pitcher ever because of “suspicions” and political beliefs a display of integrity? I’d assume, since it’s a baseball Hall of Fame, those clauses would apply to baseball, not the guy’s personal life. Do you get or not get raises and promotions at work as a result of your personal life? With extremely few exceptions, I sincerely doubt it.

  25. SMOKIN is right. The HOF is not the MLB HOF. It is the BBWAA HOF. The voters need to justify their choices without appearing too petty and the new statistics give them an out.
    BTW, I am 80 years old and have been following player stats for over 50 years. Dissatisfaction with the old time (standard) stats lead Bill James to create Runs Created, which became the standard for stat heads (and baseball writers) for ten years. But, RC27 had its flaws, the major one being defense. So, Bill modified his RC27 to include defense into Win Shares. The WS then became the standard. Baseball followers, including BBWAA voters, relied (?) On WS to ascertain who was great, good, poor or bad. Right or wrong, that was the way it was, including entry or exclusion into the HOF.

    Then along came the new stat heads who wanted to outshine Bill James and develop the “greatest product” ever in WAR. Once WAR was accepted by the few, ardent, baseball careers dependent souls, it took on a life of its own. This includes the BBWAA members and a select few SABR analytics types. Unfortunately, WAR Is the COVID of the baseball stat world. It will reward some players and punish others, depending upon which stat component they excel at or fail to achieve. WAR will die in a few years, just like Win Shares, once the astute stat heads realize that nobody but a select few can compute (from the ground up) a correct WAR.
    In the meantime we have to live with the WAR virus infecting both the fans and the BBWAA. As a longtime devotee of baseball stats I will change my viewpoint once somebody can breakdown the dWAR in its real world components that I can see in action on the field during a game. Until then its just fuzzy math that is make believe.
    Lastly, ask the professional scouts who they think are good and it comes down to the five tools. Defensive tools can be honed, but not the inherent offensive ones.

    • Yeah Andrew Jones is the perfect example of all of this guys. Left Atlanta at 30 years old, looking like a borderline possibility guy if he could keep piling up some meaningful numbers and then proceeded to spend the next 5 years getting fat and worse while barely being able to hit his ass with the bench. Yet somehow the magic numbers have this guy at nearly 70% of the vote so far. Pretty sure we all saw the same thing but I’m sure some saberbaby can explain how we’re all missing something amazing he didn’t do and how we didn’t understand how much he sucked because we’re just not smart enough to fathom war. How many people are going to pay to go look at Andrew Jones and Scott Rolen in the Hall of Fame? Because I don’t know any of them.

  26. Completely agree sir. Congratulations on attaining 80 years young. Refuse any exact points I’ve been making over and over again on mostly deaf ears. I would have no problem accepting a defensive statistic other than Fielding percentage and errors if, like we’ve both said now, you could see it with your eyes. Facing a statistic like the possibility of range on someone’s “say so” is completely ridiculous. Because, you’re exactly right, defensive skills can be honed but every player cannot become Ozzie Smith so to determine players’ values based on their abilities to be him or anyone else, is, for lack of a better expression, stupid. Therefore, voting on a players Hall of Fame merit based on said fictitious value, is blatantly stupid as well. Fans from 40 to 100, 60 years of us, have watched guys play this game for generations now and have no problem discerning who is good and who is not. Once again, if you feel you need silly made up statistics to “enhance the enjoyment of the game”, you don’t really like the game the way it was meant to be played. But that’s your business, just stop punishing players unnecessarily for doing what they know how to do best do well.

  27. You know what, applying analytics to real World baseball is like the people that play dungeons & dragons but then having them expect the real world to function that way.

  28. Here’s something for everyone to think about, isn’t it called the Hall of FAME? Kind of makes it sound like it’s meant for FAMOUS people doesn’t it? I have steadily and steadfastly followed baseball since I can remember knowing what it was. Usually pretty up to date on current players, stats, etc. and to tell the God’s honest truth, I remember at one time being surprised to notice Scott Rolen was still playing the game. Seriously. I remember him coming up as a “promising guy to watch” around the time of Nomar I guess, remember him being okay for a little while and then remember not hearing anything about him again for years. Now, he clearly put together some numbers but, that’s how FAMOUS this guy was. Not just to me but I never heard him talk about in circles around the radio or anything. I was literally shocked to see if he played 17 years. I just don’t imagine that being a huge draw up in Cooperstown and I think each generation of voters bears the responsibilities to load the Hall of Fame with fame. We have the advantage in each generation because we actually saw those people and should have some idea of how famous they really were.

    • Exactly, this is the Hall of FAME, not the Hall of Stats and definitely not the Hall of W.A.R.. Obviously, stats should play some role in determining who should get in (otherwise someone like Joe Carter would make it), but it is not the end-all-be-all. If you think about it, the most famous players in baseball history just so happen to have the best stats in baseball history as well. Guys like Babe Ruth and Willie Mays became so famous BECAUSE they were so good at the game. Even second-tier Hall of Famers like Dave Winfield and Vladimir Guerrero were famous in their time, and still put up Hall of Fame stats. And yet people will tell you that not only that stats matter, but certain stats matter more than others. They will also tell you that fame should not matter at all in a Hall of FAME, because famous players are not necessary good. For example, these people will tell you that Yadier Molina is not a Hall of Famer because he has poor stats with “only” 42.2 WAR (ignoring the fact that he is a defensive-first catcher that played for an insanely long time on a lot of great teams, and also a 10x All-Star), but tell you that Scott Rolen belongs because of sabermetrics. There is just something wrong about a Hall without one of the best catchers of all-time, but with a pretty good third baseman who’s numbers aren’t that impressive and really was just kind of there throughout his whole career. It’s the Hall of Fame for a reason, otherwise, we are just going to induct players based on some arbitrary stats that the average fan doesn’t understand.

  29. Agreed. With Molina, you’re gauging stats against catchers in which case he’s 5th all time in hits and 6th all time in doubles. ,277 may not be .340 but among catchers, he beats Carter, Fisk, Schalk, Lopez and Bench who are all in the hall. Downside for me would be throwing out 40% of stealers puts him around 200th all time but he was also a rock defensively overall. Homers ok, RBIs top ten among catchers. The war numbers are of no use to me but to show how ridiculous these modern silliness ratings are, this “Hall monitor wackiness gives him like 170 and supposedly 130 is hall worthy but then, as you say, his war number is around 42. I’m sure we’ll see several ridiculous explanations on one side or the other within the sabercamp but who cares? Watch the guy play, compare his real numbers with history and with his peers, and make a vote. He would be a no-brainer for me. And here’s all we need to know about who the average (MOST COMMON) fan cares about seeing. I remember people who barely knew what baseball was, following McGwire and Sosa in 98. THAT’S Fame. I remember exactly no one ever, following the great war rankings of any year ever. Not many care. Stop ruining the museum by trying to be the smartest guy in the room. Kids played baseball to leave schoolwork behind and have fun.

  30. I wonder if the analytics can compute Todd Helton’s 484 passing yards, 4 TDs and 118.5 qb rating at Tennessee into his career war total

    • I think they already have, as well as his post game interview time averaged into his positional adjustment and ballpark factors.

  31. Well, at the time I am writing this, it is now approximately 24 hours until the results are revealed for the 2023 Hall of Fame voting season. With that being said, I am making some final predictions on where everyone will end up finishing. Here they are (ordered by current position as of 6:05 PM EST):

    All numbers are approximant
    Elected to the Hall: None
    Helton – 73-74
    Rolen – 71
    Wagner – 65
    A. Jones – 60
    Sheffield – 55
    Beltran – 51
    Kent – 50-51
    A-Rod – 35
    Manny – 29
    Abreu – 10
    Pettitte – 12
    Rollins – 9
    Buehrle – 6
    Vizquel – 20
    K-Rod – 5
    Hunter – 5 (by one or two votes)
    All others players will get less than 5 percent and fall off the ballot.

    Other miscellaneous predictions:
    There will be a relatively high number of blank ballots this year.
    There will be at least one Vizquel-only ballot.

  32. Why is it that on the eve of the announcement that the board only reflects less than 47% of the votes? The latest comment left by RegisKelly is probably more accurate. While it is very interesting for fans to express their opinions about the candidates and those who are already enshrined however the bottom line is that the writers continue to make this into a popularity contest. One suggestion that has been offered is to strip some of them of their voting privileges. I agree there should be more oversight to bring credibility and integrity back to the process.

  33. It’s become absurd. Agree there are too many voters who should not be voters. If for no other reason than that they are obviously more concerned with pushing the saber-agenda through voting than with getting the guys in who’ve truly earned it. Obviously some percentage of voters still understand what they’re supposed to be doing but that number seems to be dwindling out of control. Therefore I love the earlier suggestion regarding having the living members creating a list of numbers. Numbers that aren’t easy to achieve and what combinations of numbers they agree are benchmarks. 500 homers, 3000 hits etc or any 4 or 5 of: .300 avg, 550 2B, 400 HR, 1500 RBIs, 2700 Hits, 500 SB, 4+ batting titles, etc. Then there are unarguable accomplishments and the guy is automatic. You can have committees for voting on borderline guys similarly to how the committees operates now but they should only be made up of Hall of Fame players. No one else. No executives and definitely no writers. Sorry to the writers who are doing the right thing but there are now too many petty little shit stirrers in your midst for this thing to be fair to the players who busted their humps for this, only to be pawns in this stupid little “WAR”, game if you will.

  34. RegisKelly,

    Do you think that Adrian Beltre will be the only player elected by the BBWAA next year or do you think that Todd Helton and Scott Rolen will join him?.

    • I made an earlier comment about who I believed who make it into the Hall of Fame up to 2027, so feel free to look at that. To answer your question more specifically:
      Beltre – Sole inductee from writer’s ballot in 2024
      Helton – 2026 with CC Sabathia
      Rolen – 2027 with Joe Mauer
      A. Jones and Wagner both fall off after their time expires on the ballot.

  35. Even Beltre is a crap shoot at this point. Obviously belongs but that doesn’t mean anything anymore. We’re now going on 2 generations of players who should have be put in and are not. Jeff Kent is probably the biggest travesty. Probably the greatest run producing 2 bagger ever but he wasn’t a charming likeable guy to the public. So what? Get over yourselves, and please don’t get out the stupid defense argument. The silly metrics show he was average, which combined with his offensive prowess, shoo-in. The real numbers, his managers and his contemporaries will tell you he was extremely solid and dependable at second. If he wasn’t, why would he have been trotted out there all those years ( and not lifted for late inning defensive replacements either)? Please save the “needed to keep his bat in the lineup” routine because if that was the case, at least one of his managers from Toronto, Cleveland, Houston, New York, LA or San Francisco would surely have recognized his “defensive liability” and moved him to a less impactful spot. But I guess his managers must all have not been as intelligent about the game they’ve lived forever, as the BBWAA is? Gaston thought he was great. Fool, how did you keep so many squads in the thick of the AL East and win 2 world series when you can’t see Jeff Kent sucking? Baker too. He must not know what he’s doing either. So on and so forth. Not sure how these clowns are allowed to keep voting like this while the hall and the fans suffer the consequences. Maybe the hall isn’t going out of business tomorrow but you can only water down a product so much before people stop buying it.

  36. Hopefully the vets put Kent in when they get to his era again. Damn shame when a guy can be the all-time leader in homers for a 2B, top 100 RBIs 8 times and not even sniff the passing requirement. Kind of insane to think about really.

  37. How stupid does the MLB Network look scheduling 4 hours of coverage to announce nothing? What a waste.

  38. Each player is obviously talented, capable and earned their spot on a team, steroids put them in the HOF- they didn’t earn it- they cheated to get to that level- can’t even stand A Rod as an announcer.

  39. Cheating has happened as long as there has been baseball. When it becomes a public outcry someone pretends to care and many jump on the bandwagon. Some kind of solution is reached and the game moves on until the next instance. Sheep nuts, horse testosterone, greenies, booze, racism, sign stealing, trash can jam bands, gambling, altering the ball, blah blah blah. The only major difference in this generation is the internet gives everyone a platform to promote themselves at the expense of others. Usually under the false pretense that they are doing a service to the public by “outing” some feigned societal cancer so everyone cheers them on as they hide at the keyboard, ruining someone else’s reputation. These guys did the same thing many others did before them only they unfortunately did it in a time when some self-serving, grandstanding clowns decided to use them for ammunition. Unfortunately, we are now inundated with self-serving, grandstanding clowns everywhere we look. From the old west through the beginning of the internet, people were more aware of causing this kind of trouble. You know, when they had to go face to face with someone they were stabbing in the back of trying to walk over on their way up. I don’t condone bullying by any means but weasels, cowards and punks are even worse in my book.

  40. If Scott Rolen is elected while leaving out the all time HR leader, a 7 time Cy Young Award winner and the best big game pitcher in a generation because of “cheating” or social media behavior, it’s like the Hockey Hall of Fame selecting a 3rd line wing on the Florida Panthers instead of including Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe and Mario Lemieux. Maybe they’ll find out those guys used illegally curved sticks, so they “cheated” and aren’t worthy.

  41. So, you’re telling me that a pitcher with over 3,000 strikeouts and one of the best in the playoffs is not a Hall of Famer, but a third-baseman with barely over 2,000 hits and less than 350 home runs is.

    The BBWAA has turned into the analytic version of the Veteran’s Committee.

  42. Yeah now I have some company in the extremely questionable third baseman department.

  43. Hey let’s play another game, read this list and tell me which one doesn’t belong. George Brett, Mike Schmidt, Wade Boggs, Brooks Robinson, Chipper Jones, Scott Rolen…….

  44. Throw Eddie Matthews and Paul Molitor on the list as well but I’ll give you a hint, they are still not the answer.

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