There's no big story in Yankeeland today and the only big story in baseball is the announcement of the 2014 HOF electees, so might as well write about it. You've probably already heard the news by now, but if not Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas were all elected today by the BBWAA. Craig Biggio just missed out on making it, by 2 votes reportedly, and nobody else was really that close.
No Yankees made the cut this year, which wasn't a huge shock. Mike Mussina came in with 20.3% of the vote, Roger Clemens got 35.4%, and Don Mattingly just 8.2%. After the jump, some other factoids on the voting that will pleasantly or unpleasantly surprise you depending on where you stand on the PED issue and how you feel about the voting process in general:
- Both Clemens and Barry Bonds lost ground in their 2nd years of eligibility. Doesn't bode well for their future chances, near future that is. Jeff Bagwell also lost ground as well.
- Mike Piazza went from 57.8% in his 1st year to 62.2% this year. He'll get in eventually.
- Rafael Palmeiro appeared on just 4.4% of the ballots, which removes him from all future ballots.
- Armando Benitez, Jacque Jones, Kenny Rogers, J.T. Snow, and Eric Gagne all received votes. I can't even articulate how insanely stupid that is.
- Maddux was left off of 16 ballots. Not sure if that's more or less stupid than those other guys making it onto 1 ballot.
Every year this becomes more and more of a circus and this year was no different. There's so much wrong with the system and the criteria used to evaluate players, and in this social media age it's almost become more about the guys with votes trying to find a way to make it about them rather than doing the right thing and voting in the players who deserve to be there. I could go on and on about it, but doing so only makes me upset. The 3 guys who made it this year are all unquestionably deserving and combined with Torre, Cox, and LaRussa make a great class.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment