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·2 min read

Voting for The Hall of Fame Has Become a Farce

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There are many, many things wrong with the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame; so many in fact that I have trouble keeping track of them all.

First, the fact that no player in history has received a unanimous vote — players like Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Ken Griffey Jr., players who transcended the game and their time period — is ridiculous. Furthermore, the fact that baseball writers, for some reason of principle, will never vote a player in unanimously is equally as ridiculous.

Staying on the theme of ridiculousness (no, not Rob Dyrdek’s smash television hit, which is in it’s eighth season by the way… I mean speaking of things that are ridiculous… Sorry, getting off track), the Hall of Fame, despite the charade that no player deserves 100% while others must wait until their second, third, and even fifteenth ballot in the case of Jim Rice, is criticized for being just the Hall of Very Good. Players that are not worthy by any stretch of the imagination are in the Hall of Fame while many players such as Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, despite their obvious transgressions, will remain on the outside looking in.

But, let’s get to the reason why I was impassioned to write this blog.

Jeff Passan decided he’d share his ballot with the Twitter world, which apparently was printed on the back of a folded-up envelope. I appreciate this, actually. Starting next year all votes will be made public. That’s good news because it should make voters more accountable.

You may disagree with Passan’s ballot, and many did, but at least he was transparent. Then things got nutty…

Ok, you don’t want to vote-in Trevor Hoffman? Fine. Hoffman is the Craig Biggio of closers; he collected 601 saves over 18 seasons for a largely irrelevant Padres team. Hoffman, despite all those saves, made only 7 All Star teams (Jonathan Papelbon has made 6), and he has no memorable postseason performances. In fact, on the biggest stage of his life, the 1998 World Series, he got shellacked by Scott Brosius and the Yankees. So if you don’t think Hoffman is Hall-worthy then I can live with that.

But to say Mariano Rivera, the most dominant postseason player — not pitcher — in baseball history, “just barely” gets in, then you lose all credibility.

How can we possibly take Jeff Passan’s vote seriously if he honestly thinks Mariano Rivera is a borderline Hall of Famer?

For those of you who think he was trolling, he wasn’t. He went on to explain how the job of a closer is not worthy of getting them into the HoF because they pitch only one inning at a time and there are countless other players who have a bigger impact on the game. While that is true, a shortstop or starting pitcher does have a larger impact on any given game, it does not change the fact that for two decades baseball has relied heavily on short-inning relievers, so much so that this very offseason has produced the 3 largest contracts ever handed-out to relief pitchers.

Mariano was the best to ever do his job and Hoffman was the second-best of his era. Denying those facts is like denying the earth is round. It just makes you look stupid.