By Blaidd Drwg
The BBWAA is changing the procedure for voting for the Hall of Fame. Once you are on the ballot, you are now only eligible for 10 years rather than 15. This is going to create a bigger mess because of the mess that the BBWAA has already created.
Because there are a large number of idiots in the BBWAA who feel like they need to make a point about the sanctity of the game with their votes, there is a massive log jam of guys who should be inducted but haven’t been. How bad is it? For the guys still on the ballot that you can make a legitimate case for election, we have: Biggio, Piazza, Bagwell, Raines, Clemens, Bonds, Lee Smith, Schilling, Edgar Martinez, Trammell, Mussina, McGwire, Larry Walker and Sosa. That doesn’t count Rafael Palmeiro who is no longer eligible or newbies for 2015 Sheffield, Smoltz, Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson. Steroids aside, that is 18 potential candidates on a ballot that can have a maximum of 10 names on it. It is only going to get worse and it probably won’t be until the 2019-2020 ballots that we don’t have a significant number of good new candidates joining each year. That means that there are guys that are going to miss out on enshrinement that absolutely deserve to be.
I also had a friend make the argument that a guy is a first ballot HOFer or not. My counter to that was, steroid issues aside, what do you do when you have 11 qualified candidates and only 10 spots on your ballot? If you figure we add 2-3 players a year to the Hall and 3-4 more qualified candidates to the ballot, how long before the backlog actually clears? This assumes that every ballot has 10 names on it anyway.
Besides this, have you ever seen the list of guys that were not “first ballot HOFers”? Here are some highlights with the number of years it took them to get elected:
Cy Young (2)
Rogers Hornsby (5)
Mel Ott (3)
Jimmy Foxx (7) – interesting side note, when Foxx retired, he was second on the all-time home run list behind Babe Ruth. It would be nearly 25 years before Willie Mays passed him.
Joe Dimaggio (3) – yep. The Yankee Clipper only drew 44.3% of the vote in his first year.
Roy Campanella (5)
Yogi Berra (2)
Robin Roberts (7)
Edie Mathews (5)
Juan Marichal (3)
Carlton Fisk (2)
Robby Alomar (2)
FlatbreadGarden 