SocraticGadfly: Baseball HOF voters go 1-2 at plate

January 12, 2009

Baseball HOF voters go 1-2 at plate

The Baseball Hall of Fame Class of 2009 is official. Rickey Henderson? No-brainer. Jim Rice? Brainer. As other educated fans wonder, how does Rice suddenly get better from one year to another?

He doesn’t.

He gets sentimental votes. This was the same reason the Veterans Committee was overhauled, after Mazeroski got in. Maybe we ought to add a couple of percentage points to the 75 percent cutoff in a player’s final year of eligibility.

Good news for fans of Bert Blyleven (me) and Andre Dawson is that they both crept higher up the ballot percentages.

No comments: