I posted a hypothetical hall of fame ballot way back in 2007 and decided to do this year’s version before they announce the result. There are 28 players on the list, half of them for the first time.
Scott Rolen – Almost
Todd Helton – No
Billy Wagner – No
Andruw Jones – No
Gary Sheffield – No
Alex Rodriguez – Yes
Jeff Kent – Almost
Manny Ramirez – Yes
Omar Vizquel – No
Andy Pettitte – No
Jimmy Rollins – No
Bobby Abreu – No
Mark Buehrle – No
Torii Hunter – No
Carlos Beltrán – Almost
John Lackey – No
Jered Weaver – No
Jacoby Ellsbury – No
Matt Cain – No
Jhonny Peralta – No
Jayson Werth – No
J.J. Hardy – No
Mike Napoli – No
Bronson Arroyo – No
R.A. Dickey – No
Francisco Rodríguez – No
Andre Ethier – No
Huston Street – No
Also, Fred McGriff was elected by one of the committees this year. To me McGriff represents possibly the best example of the “small hall” versus “big hall” points of view. The small hall thinks admission should be only for those whose greatness is beyond a shadow of a doubt, wheras the large hall thinks admission is a good capstone for a career full of solid contributions. There have been a little over 20,000 players to play major league baseball, and 270 are in the Hall of Fame, so about 1.35%, though if you filter out the number who only played a few games or even a single season, we’re probably in the 2-3% range. The small hall crowd thinks this should probably be closer to 1%, the large hall is probably more like 5%.
If forced to choose, I would probably land on the small hall side. I look at players like McGriff and Andrew Jones and think they were fantastic players that I would have loved to have on my team, but am I going to reminisce about how dominant they were? No. I’d actually like to see a tiered system where it’s not all or nothing, but we can give these players a more visible place in history while also recognizing those we felt we were lucky to see play, but that’s a post for another day.
The Yeses
As mentioned in 2007, steroids is still a factor, and in 16 years little progress has been made in how to handle that. My only two votes on this years ballots both had suspensions for PEDs late in a career that would have been automatic HoF status up to that point, but they will likely never get in from the writers’ voting as a result of the suspensions.
The Almosts
- Carlos Beltrán might make it eventually after a long and solid career, but is likely in the penalty box for the Astros cheating scandal, so we’ll think about him next year.
- Scott Rolen and Jeff Kent were great all-around players but I’d put them in the same tier as McGrifff.
- Todd Helton played half his games in a hitter’s wonderland and put together a few great seasons and a few good ones, but not enough to make the cut for me.