My (Make Believe) Hall of Fame Ballot

I did this once several years ago. The time felt right to do it again.

1. Bert Blyleven (14th year) – There is nothing that anyone (let alone me) can say or write at this point that will have the slightest impact on Blyleven’s Hall of Fame candidacy. The biggest arguments for voting against him are that he lost a lot of games, he’s no Jack Morris, and many sportswriters are contrarian by nature. I’m gonna stick with the other side of the argument, which says that he won a lot of games, struck out a lot of batters, pitched a lot of games without allowing any runs, and did alright for himself in the postseason.

2. Roberto Alomar (2nd year) – It’s not easy casting a vote for Alomar. If what I’ve heard is correct, the very worst thing you can do to a man, aside from insulting his mama, is spit in his face. So there’s that wee bit of controversy. Also against him is his sudden drop in productivity, from the best second baseman in baseball in 2001 to a guy who was traded straight up for Brad Murray after the trade deadline in 2004. It was a tough way to end a great career, and it came out of nowhere. Still, I think he did enough from 1990 to 2001 – eleven All-Star games, ten Gold Gloves, five Top Ten MVP finishes – and is respected enough as one of the game’s great second basemen to get him into Cooperstown.

3. Jeff Bagwell (1st year) – A few years ago, I developed a close friendship with a young woman at work. We hung out a lot and she loved my wife and kid. She was part of the family. Somewhere along the way, people saw the way we behaved around one another and began to assume that we were having an affair. We weren’t, but they believed what they wanted to believe because, as they saw it, the signs were all there.* So yeah, I kinda understand how Jeff Bagwell must feel when people assume he was on steroids just because he had muscles and hit homeruns and grew a funny beard. I mean, maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. We don’t really know. What we do know is that five years have passed since his career ended. A lot of players have been outed as steroid users. He isn’t one of them, and it’s unfair to assume otherwise.

*This is a ridiculously oversimplified version of this story, but hey, the Cliffs Notes version best fits the Bagwell narrative. I hope to write about the whole situation someday. I just have to figure out how to do it first.

4. Tim Raines (4th year) – This was one of the first years that I really gave a lot of thought to steroids, their effect on the game, and why people care. One of the biggest problems I had was the hypocrisy with which we treat different kinds of drug users and different kinds of cheaters. Steroids are awful, but cocaine is okay (for some). Steroids are awful, but doctoring the ball is okay. I haven’t been able to make it match up in my mind. Maybe I never will. It’s one of the reasons I’m glad I don’t have a real vote. Anyway, I’m voting for Raines. He was a great player and deserves the recognition, even if he used the cocaine.

5. Fred McGriff (2nd year) – I once played an entire season as the Atlanta Braves on one of Ken Griffey Jr.’s Super Nintendo games from the early 1990s. McGriff was my star player with a .468 batting average and lots of homeruns and RBIs. He was pretty good in real life as well – thirty-plus homeruns every season from 1988-1994, and at least twenty in every season but one from 1987-2002 (and that one season, he hit 19). He was also eerily consistent when it came to runs batted in: he had eight seasons with between 101 and 107, and fifteen straight years with eighty or more (although I suppose that’s likely when you’re hitting twenty bombs a year). And did anyone ever have a bad word to say about McGriff? I think not. He was just a quiet, homerun-hitting superstar, perhaps the last true power hitter before the offensive explosion of the mid-1990s.

6. Edgar Martinez (2nd year) – From 1995, when he became a full-time designated hitter, to 2003, when he enjoyed his last great offensive season, Edgar’s OPS+ was 159. That’s really good. And it’s not like the years before that were all that bad either: 138 from 1990-94, including a 164 when he won the batting title in 1992. Imagine if he had reached the majors as an everyday player before his 27th birthday? His Hall of Fame candidacy wouldn’t even be in question.

7. Larry Walker (1st year) – I had Walker on my ballot. Then I took him off. Then I realized I was a couple guys short of ten, and realized there was no way I could leave him out in the cold if I hadn’t even reached the maximum yet. So here he is, Coors Field Creation or not (and I know many people have argued both sides of that), one of the most dominant hitters of the late 1990s.

8. Dave Parker (15th year)
9. Dale Murphy (13th year) – Alright, so I put some thought into this one. Parker and Murphy are, in reality, a couple of those close-but-no-cigar candidates. Both had a few great years; the latter had, as pointed out by Joe Posnanski, ONLY a few great years (and a handful of icky ones), the former almost ruined his career with cocaine. So there are definitely some reasons to dismiss them out of hand. My problem is that I’ve endorsed Jim Rice in the past, and seriously considered Andre Dawson, which makes me somewhat hypocritical in that Parker and Murphy are not all that dissimilar from either player in terms of career accomplishments (and Murphy was a helluva nice guy, to boot).

Now, here’s the thing for me. It might be obvious, it might not, that I haven’t included any known steroid users on this list - Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro are the most obvious ones – and I mentioned earlier that I still wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to handle those guys. Well, here’s what I’m thinking: Parker is done on the ballot after this election, Murphy has another two years after this. Why not give them those moments with a couple of votes that they earned through excellent careers, and deal with McGwire and Palmeiro more fully next year and beyond? Because at this point, I feel like my feelings are starting to become more fully formed on this whole mess. Hell, I’ve got two dudes who used coke on my ballot, and last I checked, cocaine was as illegal as steroids. So yeah, even though I’ve got one more spot open, that’s what I’ll do.