After witnessing, in slack-jawed awe, the truly beautiful thing that has been Deadspin Hall of Fame nomination post, we stand before you, at full attention, with the sharpest possible salute we can muster. That was so much fun to be a part of that the actual Hall of Fame almost seems redundant.
We're gonna do it anyway, though, so some thoughts the day after.
• Number Of Nominees And Percentage Vote Needed. Since we have, obviously, a lot to sort through this weekend, we are limiting ourselves to 12 nominees, two a day, until next Tuesday, starting Monday. The polls will not be closed until induction day. Also, we've decided that 66.6 percent is, in fact, too low; we don't want a Tony Perez slipping through just because it happens to be trendy at that moment. So we're bumping it up to 75 percent. It should be very difficult to be enshrined.
• Location. Since we've yet to actually lease space, the actual hallowed halls must remain, for now, theoretical. But we can't imagine a better place than Berea. We just gotta figure out a way.
• Commenters. Many have suggested inducting individual commenters, or just "Commenters" as a whole. First off, we will be doing something specific involving commenters in the coming months, so for now, know that your praises of the best ones are being heard, and sit tight. As for "Commenters" in general ... we believe that commenters are so inherent and vital to the site that inducting them as a group would be like inducting "bat," "ball," "bases" and "players" to the Baseball Hall Of Fame. We're open for disagreement on this, though.
• The Inaugural Class. The more we've thought about it, we don't see any way we can even put two stories up for debate: They're just in the first class, and we can't imagine anyone possibly disagreeing. We'll do a formal induction in a couple of weeks, but we'd like to be the first to congratulate "You're With Me Leather" and Carl Monday for initial induction into the Deadspin Hall Of Fame. Their inductions include subsections — Mike Cooper, Damien Fahey, Neil Everett, "I'm a combat vet!" — we'll get into during the actual induction, but for now ... their inductions cover it all. Congratulations to them both. Other nominees coming Monday. And thank you.
(UPDATE: Commenter Wingman just came up with what we think is the perfect idea. To wit:
"I have an idea for location - each HOF post can be printed, we should create a book and stick it in the local Berea library (or the library Mike Cooper was caught floging the dolphin in). It's not like libraries ever check what books are on the shelves. Each year we should make a trip to the hallowed ground to add the new class of HOF inductees. In the end located in a local library with no ones knowledge will be the Deadspin Hall of Fame."
This is exactly what we should do. We're kind of blown away by this idea, actually.)