Cleveland Indians legend Jim Thome got a well-deserved first-ballot Hall of Fame nod this year, and after some apparent discussion, as well as a specific request by Thome, the slugger will go in on a plaque bearing the Cleveland “Block C” logo, rather than the “Chief Wahoo” Native American caricature that Thome wore…
There are few—if any?—genres of baseball writing that are more entertaining across the board than the Hall of Fame ballot explanation column. That’s not to say these columns are good; they usually aren’t, and they’re frequently the opposite. They’re often cranky or self-righteous or defensive, and yet they can be…
Barring something truly unexpected like a teary confession from Derek Jeter or Mariano Rivera becoming the subject of a startling exposé, Alex Rodriguez will, when he joins the ballot in 2022, become the final strong candidate for baseball’s Hall of Fame to have both made his name in the sport’s doping era and to be…
As worked up as we all were for the results of Baseball Hall of Fame voting, I suppose the players who got in were probably even more excited. As is tradition, cameras were rolling when Chipper Jones, Vladimir Guerrero, Jim Thome, and Trevor Hoffman received the phone calls letting them know they’ve got a date in…
Many of the conceptual arguments around the Baseball Hall of Fame aren’t really about baseball. Debates about players who used steroids are about justice or punishment or cheating. Debates about the character clause are about the separation between the sport and the people who play it. Debates about the size of the…
For the sixth year in a row, baseball’s home run king and a seven-time Cy Young winner have both been refused entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Neither Barry Bonds, the second-greatest hitter of all-time by fWAR, nor Roger Clemens, the best pitcher ever by that same stat, cleared the 75 percent vote threshold …
Every Hall of Fame voting season, a few narratives get beaten into the ground. What to do about steroids. What to do about the 10-year rule designed to screw over steroid guys. What about the war over WAR? But here’s one argument that still deserves to be used as a bludgeon against the BBWAA: The 10-vote limit per…
Dec. 31 was the deadline for BBWAA members to put their Hall of Fame ballots in the mail, which means the 2018 inductees are fixed—we just won’t know who they are until the ballots are counted and then announced on Jan. 24. But we can predict, and with more and more media members announcing their votes ahead of time,…
It’s fair to say that baseball’s Hall of Fame is relatively meaningless and therefore any argument about its membership is fundamentally kind of stupid; that does not preclude some of those arguments from being stupider than others. There are any number of arguments here—specifically about given players, more broadly…
It took over 15 years of waiting, but Alan Trammell is finally in the Baseball Hall of Fame. With 13 out of 16 votes, the Modern Baseball Era committee chose the longtime Detroit Tigers shortstop to finally gain entrance to Cooperstown, after never getting more than 37% on the traditional writers’ ballots.
Joe Morgan—two-time National League MVP, all-time great, Hall of Famer, and vice-chairman of the Hall’s board of directors—sent an email today from the general Hall of Fame email address to current voters, arguing (among other things) that drug users like Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle shouldn’t be in the…
The Baseball Hall of Fame traditionally airs a “highlight reel” of its inductees at the annual ceremony before the newly enshrined deliver an address to those in attendance. We found yesterday’s tribute film to former commissioner Bud Selig to be a bit lacking, so we produced a more honest version.
When discussing Rickey Henderson’s Hall-of-Fame prospects, Bill James once wrote that “if you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” It’s a seemingly hyperbolic quip from one of sports’ most precise thinkers. So it’s probably worth a closer look.
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.
Finally, mercifully, the period of speculation about who will be inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame this year will come to an end.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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…
