Thanks to Ryan Thibodaux’s diligent ballot tracking, we already knew that Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines (thank God) were going into the Hall of Fame this year. Now that all of the ballots have been counted, we can see if anyone else will be joining them.
Read more…
Powered by WPeMatico
Finally, mercifully, the period of speculation about who will be inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame this year will come to an end.
Read more…
Powered by WPeMatico
The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Bill Livingston wrote a grandstanding column today about his decision to forgo participating in this year’s baseball Hall of Fame vote. There’s, uh, one big problem with his column:
Read more…
Powered by WPeMatico
It is impossible for me to get enough Baseball Hall of Fame shit. News, analysis, debate—give it all to me. Hook it to my veins.
Read more…
Powered by WPeMatico
Curt Schilling, who is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame but would be a first-ballot pick for the Meme Curator Hall of Fame, talked to TMZ Sports about how he probably won’t be elected this year and continued to hurt his chances for the future.
Read more…
Powered by WPeMatico
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.
Read more…
Powered by WPeMatico
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.
Read more…
Powered by WPeMatico
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.
Read more…
Powered by WPeMatico
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, whatever—and 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.
Read more…
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, whatever—and 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.
Read more…