No, I'll blame the idiotic assholes who think everyone in one clubhouse must be exactly the same. By their logic, Tom Brady should be denied entry into the Pro Football HOF because he shared a locker room with Aaron Hernandez, and therefore must have been involved in killing people. It's beyond insane.
Seems par for the course when it comes to baseball and it's writers. Slow to evolve and set in their ways when they believe someone is guilty.
I don't know. Part of me feels he'll hover between this 54%-60%. I think he's looking at an uphill climb.
The reasoning this asshat for leaving Biggio off is because he felt there were 10 players better than Biggio on this year's ballot. TEN?!? Raines, Trammell, and Larry Walker are not better than Biggio.
Some recent HOFs who saw a dip in support at some point: Goose Goosage Jim Rice Bert Blyleven Andre Dawson Piazza improved, which bodes well for Bagwell. The guys that take a while usually see this happen, and none of those guys fell because of ballots this strong.
And I'll not assume he's an idiot cause he is. You don't not vote for someone you think should get in so someone can have 5% of the vote to stay on the ballot.
You do if you think that person needing 5% is a HOF, given the system. When writers have more than 10 HOFers on a ballot, they don't just pick the Top 10. Raines suffered more than anyone from the, we can't leave Jack Morris off in his final year crowd. I wonder how it would be if they set guidelines requiring to vote for the 10 best on the ballot. No more empty ballots, less people guessing about results to determine which 10 to choose.
In fairness, he did vote for Bagwell. But that also makes it more confusing that he would vote for Bagwell and take Biggio off the ballot when Biggio has the justifiable HOF threshold numbers whereas Bags don't.
Better hope this doesn't come back to bite Bagwell in the ass. He's gonna need all the help he can get for a few years.
Bagwell ain't making it. But by all means, let's keep LARRY ****ING WALKER on the HOF ballot at the expense of a player with actual HOF credentials because I'm sure he'll make that meteoric rise from 5% to 75%! **** BASEBALL.
I'm not going to get too worked up about Biggio - 1) he's almost assuredly going in next year; 2) his candidacy is, frankly, not overwhelmingly strong. He’s worthy, IMO - but I think a "just falls short" campaign can intelligently be waged (see Neyer, Rob). But the continued slighting of Bagwell, who is a *much* more worthy candidate - just floors and irritates me to no end. Yeah, but that's the thing: it would never happen because the PFWAA has a much better (though far from perfect) method for picking Hall of Famers. I truly believe if I, or someone as passionate about Bagwell's candidacy as I am, got in front of the BBWAA, he'd be in, or at least a lot closer because while I think the PED and personal whispers are a big hurdle for him, there's also still way too large a portion of voters who simply don't think he's HoF worthy because they’re too lazy to consult baseball-reference.com. If Frank Thomas is a first ballot Hall of Famer (and he is), then Jeff Bagwell is an absolute first ballot Hall of Famer.
That's good to know. I don't study HOF votes so I don't know what the history is but the talking heads were saying that in general if your vote dips it's unlikely you will get in. Hopefully Bagwell can get in.
I think we all know it's absurd. Even most of the writers agree the system is a joke. Bunch of idiots over there.
He probably thought Biggio would get in without his vote and thus used his vote to help someone else. Unfortunately, it just backfired in this case. It seems more about the process than the end result which is just terrible.
I love both Bags and Biggio but I don't get why some of y'all think Bags is a much better player than Biggio.
[rquoter]Every player not still on the ballot who received 50 percent of the vote from the BBWAA has eventually been elected to the Hall, either by the BBWAA or the Veterans Committee, with the exception of Gil Hodges.[/rquoter] http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/43420/hall-reaction-rough-day-for-biggio-morris Of course, the PED era may change that.
