Hall voting shows wrongs can be righted
Hall’s wrongs righted: Common sense emerges as deserving candidates led by Mariano Rivera elected.
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Baseball’s broken Hall of Fame is alive and quite well. In fact, the only thing broken is what once seemed a hopeless pattern of silly snubs, backlogged ballots and enraging inertia on the road to Cooperstown.
Roy Halladay, Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina and Mariano Rivera earned election to baseball’s Hall of Fame last week, as the game’s ultimate shrine welcomed, for the second time in five years, a four-person class.
Suddenly, 2013 feels like an awfully long time ago.
Remember that sordid January day when the Baseball Writers’ Association of America elected absolutely nobody to the Hall, despite a ballot bursting with legends? Well, five men on that ballot — Martinez, Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza and Tim Raines — eventually earned election by the BBWAA. Three others — Jack Morris, Alan Trammell and Lee Smith — found their way to Cooperstown via the Today’s Game committee.
In the years since, common sense emerged from the fog of WAR and steroid chatter — some of it well-founded; much of it mere conjecture — and the writers from 2014 to 2019 pushed 16 players into Cooperstown.
Last week’s results showed that pragmatism, ultimately, can still win out.
Martinez went in on his last shot, a 10-year saga that bottomed out with a 33 percent vote total in 2011 before a steady climb that saw him soar past the 75 percent required for election. Martinez was named on 363 of 425 ballots, a staggering 85 percent.
Rivera and Halladay went in on their first shots with Rivera the first to earn 100 percent of votes and Halladay equaling Martinez’s 363 votes just 15 months after he died when the plane he was piloting crashed into the waters of Florida’s Gulf Coast.
But perhaps most important was Mussina, on the bubble based on early ballots compiled by Ryan Thibodaux and easing in with 326 votes, just seven beyond this year’s threshold for induction.
No matter. Mussina is a Hall of Famer and, for the second consecutive year, those who favor a bigger Hall and ballot flexibility got a most fortuitous bounce.
Last year, it was Trevor Hoffman, second only to Rivera in baseball’s closer pantheon, earning 79.9 percent of the vote to get in on his third shot. This time it was Mussina completing a climb from 20.3 percent to 76.7 percent in just six years.
Their cases, and Martinez’s decade-long saga, show just how difficult it is to earn a 75 percent consensus among any group of individuals, let alone a writers electorate that spans some 50 years in age.
They’re all clear now. Suddenly, writers torturing just who to include on their 10-man ballot will suddenly find the process much easier in coming years.
In 2020, there’s just one slam-dunk newcomer: Derek Jeter, Rivera’s Yankees teammate.
And suddenly the group of holdovers isn’t so overwhelming.
For a Big Hall-style voter undeterred by pre-testing connections to performance-enhancing drugs nor by discomfiting and offensive statements made on social media, there’s a halfdozen additional players who are conceivably easy picks alongside Jeter: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, Larry Walker, Scott Rolen and Billy Wagner.
Unless one is moved by 2020 ballot rookies Bobby Abreu, Alfonso Soriano, Cliff Lee, Paul Konerko and Jason Giambi, that still leaves three ballot spots to fully consider worthy holdovers such as Omar Vizquel, Gary Sheffield, Jeff Kent, Todd Helton and Andruw Jones (who at 7.5 percent barely passed the 5 percent mark to retain eligibility).
Jeter will coast to induction and Walker will fall off the ballot one way or another next year, leaving 2021 as a key year for Bonds, Clemens and Schilling.
They’ll be, by far, the highest returning vote-getters and will go up against a tepid class of rookies, headed by pitchers Mark Buehrle and Tim Hudson and outfielder Torii Hunter.
After that, a moral reckoning of sorts in 2022.
It will mark the final year on the ballot for Bonds and Clemens and the first for David Ortiz, whose reported positive drug test was strangely discounted by Commissioner Rob Manfred on the final day of Ortiz’s playing career.
Oh, and it’s Year 1 for one Alex Rodriguez.