2020 Baseball Hall of Fame Class

They are too far back and too many voters have said that they won't change their mind on them to make it 16 percent. The only ones who have a shot to join Jeter are Schilling and Walker. If you want a good long shot that is going to make a huge jump this year it will be Vizquel. I expect he goes over 50 for sure and if it was high 50s that wouldn't stun me.

Bonds and Clemens will get in on their final try in two years. They will go up to 62-63 percent this time, 66-68 in Year 9 and then go in. That will be their "punishment"

 

I want a longform piece on Haverhill's own Carlos Pena's career. Gammons would not shut up about the guy even before he was drafted because he was a local Dominican kid who went to Northeastern. Then his career stalled, he seemed a part of Beane's early Moneyball run, played well in Detroit, was released by the NYY and Red Sox in the same year even though he hit 27 HRs two years before, came back with Tampa to get MVP votes (and go to a World Series), bounced around a bit until 36, and ended up with almost 300 career HRs and 25.1 career WAR(bb-ref).

 

He had a reputation as the best defensive 1b by far; I wonder if it holds up with new metrics.

 

It's obviously not the end-all, be-all of stats, but his range factor was always lower than the league average, and it's not like he had 0 errors year after year. I'm kind of assuming he was an average 1B defensively, but he "looked" like more of an athlete than some of the other hulking guys at the position. For comparison's sake, Doug Mientkiewicz had a RF near league average, and about half the errors, in 75 percent of the games played.

re: Pena's career, he turned out to be a perfectly average 1B, between the highs and lows. He had 28 home runs in AA, so I imagine people saw that and figured, "Well, he's going to add power as he ages," like most players do, but that was his high water mark until 2007, at age 29.

 

Sigh.

 

God, that's disgusting. They took my vote away for being out of the business for 10 years. That's fine, it's their museum. But arrant idiocy ought to be grounds for losing it, too.

 

Why not? Look at that list and, aside from the PED crew, show me who on there ought to be unanimous. Who would it look bad for if Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter are the first two unanimous votes?

 

OK, we know a sizable portion of the writers are leaving the PED guys off their ballots. Besides them and Jeter, who among them is a slam-dunk, no-doubt, Hall-of-Famer?

I see guys on there you could argue are worthy, but if a particular voter wants to leave them off, I'd hardly call it idiocy.

*Note: I'm consistently a small-hall kind of guy.

 

Well then there's this:

 

OK, that's idiocy. If Rieber was OK voting for PED guys last year, then Bonds, Clemens, and Manny (along with Sosa) should all be on his ballot this year.

The non-PED guys — Pettite, Schilling, Vizquel — could all be left off and I wouldn't argue.

Honestly, a Jeter-only ballot makes plenty of sense if you are someone who won't vote in a PED guy.

 

Buttttt. Isn't the elephant in the room that who the eff knows if Jeter used or not? We assume he didn't because 1) he wasn't some big hulking guy and 2) he's vehemently anti-steroid in his statements. (But so was Palmeiro.) His trainer co-founded a supplement company with the guy who allegedly was supplying HGH to Peyton Manning's wife, and surely just his wife and nobody else in his household. I don't think he used, because someone out there could have made a bunch of cash by outing him, but I think there is so much gray from that era (and onward, to today) that trying to suss out who used and who didn't is impossible.