Baseball Hall Of Fame Voting Is Fascinating Right Now

Dec. 31 is the deadline for BBWAA members to submit their Hall of Fame ballots, and nearly one third of them have already made their ballots public. And here’s a hell of a thing: Probably not this year, but Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens will make the Hall of Fame within a couple of years.

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This Strange Column About Bud Selig And Drugs Is Extremely Confusing

Estimable baseball writer Tim Brown has a column up today that’s either about how Bud Selig’s election to the Hall of Fame shows up the condemnation of players such as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens by the likes of the veteran baseball writers who have refused to vote them into the Hall of Fame for the farce that it is, or about how people who think that Bud Selig’s election to the Hall of Fame shows up the condemnation of players such as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens by the likes of the veteran baseball writers who have refused to vote them into the Hall of Fame for the farce that it is refuse to face the fact that it was labor, not management, that was responsible for the drug scandals baseball faced in the aughts.

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Curt Schilling Should Be In The Hall Of Fame

As of this morning, Ryan Thibodaux’s invaluable Hall of Fame election tracker has the results of 44 ballots up, representing about a tenth the total number of ballots expected to be cast by veteran baseball writers this year. It’s a skewed and self-selecting sample—writers who make their ballot public and do so early tend as a group to have opinions closer to those of the average Deadspin reader than those of the average Hall voter—but one thing is very clear: Curt Schilling won’t be voted into Cooperstown this year, and probably never will be.

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This Guy’s Hall Of Fame Ballot Is Art

Take a second and think back to some of the highest artistic achievements you’ve seriously engaged with—The Brothers Karamazov, Mingus Ah Um, The General, whateverand fix them in your mind, thinking about how they expanded your sense of human possibility. Now consider baseball Hall of Fame voter Steven Marcus’s ballot, which reveals that, confronted with a decision in which he was asked to pick up to 10 from among a list of 34 ballplayers up for election, with at least a dozen of them easy choices for the Hall and several more presenting very good cases—these are players ranging from Barry Bonds to Jeff Kent and including the likes of Roger Clemens, Manny Ramírez, and Tim Raines—our man decided that Vladimir Guerrero and Trevor Hoffman were the two worthy of baseball’s highest honor.

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Take a second and think back to some of the highest artistic achievements you’ve seriously engaged with—The Brothers Karamazov, Mingus Ah Um, The General, whateverand fix them in your mind, thinking about how they expanded your sense of human possibility. Now consider baseball Hall of Fame voter Steven Marcus’s ballot, which reveals that, confronted with a decision in which he was asked to pick up to 10 from among a list of 34 ballplayers up for election, with at least a dozen of them easy choices for the Hall and several more presenting very good cases—these are players ranging from Barry Bonds to Jeff Kent and including the likes of Roger Clemens, Manny Ramírez, and Tim Raines—our man decided that Vladimir Guerrero and Trevor Hoffman were the two worthy of baseball’s highest honor.

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