Monday, January 5, 2015

It's Hall of Fame Time Again

Last year we shamed Jayson Stark of ESPN for admitting that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are two of the greatest players of all time, but leaving them off his 2014 Hall of Fame ballot.  He cited the broken voting system with many critiques that we share, but our point was that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

So this year, it's only fair that we commend Stark for his full throated support for the games best players, full stop.  We only hope that more members of the BBWAA take the same approach and start to clear out the backlog of historically great players that, to date, have not been enshrined into the games Hall of Fame. 

With that, we present our 2015 ballot and predictions.  Remember, due to the asinine rules imposed by the Hall of Fame (which Stark does a great job criticizing), a ballot can only have 10 players, regardless of how many are worthy of induction.   

  1. Barry Bonds
  2. Roger Clemens
  3. Randy Johnson*
  4. Pedro Martinez*
  5. John Smoltz* 
  6. Jeff Bagwell
  7. Mike Piazza 
  8. Curt Schilling
  9. Mark McGwire
  10. Craig Biggio*
* Who we think will get inducted - Smoltz and Biggio will be very close to 75%, but we think/hope they both get there. 

Our ballot has changed from last year - we gain three spots given the induction of Maddux, Glavine and Thomas, which are taken by first timers Big Unit, Pedro and Smoltz.  Our only other change was selecting Biggio instead of Sammy Sosa.  This change is partly due to our realization that we were under-appreciating the breadth of Biggio accomplishments and partly due to finally taking off our Cubbie Blue tinted glasses and realizing that Sosa's role in bringing the game back from it's devastating strike year was important, but not a reason for Hall induction under the current rules.  It's also clear that a vote for Sosa would be wasted as he only received 7% last year and is likely to fall below the 5% threshold in 2015, forever removing him from the ballot.   

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