Hall of Fame Poll Results

He tried to tell people it was creatine that was his wonder drug. I think everyone tried to publicly hide the steroid use at the time because the drug itself was illegal without a prescription. I mean a few years before players were hiding their cocaine use, which re: Fay’s memo was a banned substance too. That would be a reason to keep Tim Raines out of the Hall too if we use that as a guideline.

I’d wouldn’t vote McGwire into the hall at the moment, at least until he comes clean about what he did but I don’t think I’d use it as a reason to keep out all suspected juicers because….well because it would be unfair. Let’s say we keep McGwire out but we put in Player X because we think he was clean, how do we know. I’ve heard all sorts of numbers about how many players juiced but the one thing I do know is we will never know for sure. Player X could be clean or he could have just hid it better.

Of course the big problem I have with it all now is the steroid era power numbers were so huge that guys that players that were great just before that don’t look as good now. Dawson was an amazing player but when compared to the juicers his numbers don’t stand out.

And the question that goes with it: How do we know which players refused to cheat? Rafael Palmiero lied right to congress and we believed him until it was proven he lied. Which ones do we believe? Do we believe Canseco and guess that just about everyone was doing it? Is Pettitte better than Clemens because he admitted using?

It is Bonds will be an interesting case because he was a great player before juicing but it seems obvious that using allowed him to continue playing into his 40’s as well as doubling the number of home runs he could hit. If you look at Roger Clemen’s career it followed the usual pattern for a power pitcher, if his career was going to keep going he was going to have to learn to change speeds and go thru the normal transformation a power pitcher goes thru in his 30’s. Or he could juice.

I think that’s why I’d push for Rice and Dawson in the Hall. They were great players whose bodies broke down in the normal way. If they had played 10 year later they could have juiced and ended up with huge numbers. But they didn’t have that option then and they ended with really good careers but not ones where their production improved into their 40’s.

I was just reading about ritalin use in university and wonder if it is a direct link to sports, kids thinking well those guys cheated, I should too.

first, i was not implying that number of intentional walks should be a metric for admission to the Hall. It is, however, a pretty decent metric of how feared an hitter is, which is a big argument for Rice’s admission.

additionally, the trouble here is that Jim Rice’s fielding is basically useless. He needs to hit way better than the average hall of famer to get in because he played LF and played it poorly (and played it at Fenway, where its importance is even more drastically reduced) and DHed quite a bit. In my opinion he gets docked quite a bit for being almost useless in the field for 1543 games and completely useless for 530 games.

Black and Gray ink numbers are misleading because they are emphasizing statistics that players have little control over and do not account for park factors at all. Does twice leading the AL in RBI (at Fenway, no less) really qualify Jim Rice for the Hall? In one of those years, he tied for the league lead, by the way. Rice gray inked batting average six times, but OBP only twice.

Not to mention the fact that there are a lot of very borderline HOFers bringing some of those numbers down.

Finally, the HOF Monitor Score has nothing to do with how deserving a player is to make the Hall, just how likely he is. The Standards score is much more useful (see the difference in scores between the two for guys like Nellie Fox, Phil Rizzuto, Derek Jeter, Bill Mazeroski and also for guys like Dwight Evans, Tim Raines). Basically, the Monitor score gives you points for reaching very arbitrary landmarks and team accomplishments.