JAY BELL WANTS TO KNOW WHETHER SOME EXPERIENCE WITH FAME IS A PREREQUISITE FOR INDUCTION IN A HALL OF FAME: This year's ballot for the baseball hall of fame is out, and there are ten new names (weirdly NL-centric, on a quick look). I won't mention the holdovers because we've covered them already.
The mortal lock this year is Rickey Henderson, who is just as much a dick as Barry Bonds or Albert Belle (without the steroids or corked bats) but who oddly doesn't get the old-writer hatred that those two draw.
The guys who won't even get a moment's thought before the writers strike "no," at least in my view, are Ron Gant, Dan Plesac, Greg Vaughn, Matt Williams, and Jay Bell. I think Mark Grace gets a token "ah, Mark Grace, let me look up his stats" before he gets dinged.
Mo Vaughn, who was a very good player for too short a time, won't make it, but he'll get votes because he was good in Boston and everybody who is any good in Boston gets at least mildly overrated -- we'll call this the Dustin Pedroia effect. Jesse Orosco may also get a few votes -- not enough to get him in -- both because he was a key part of that Mets title and because he played so long (24 years) that I had gotten so used to saying "he's still playing?" that it was jarring to notice that he wasn't any more.
That leaves David Cone as this year's lone interesting candidate. He played a long time, won some hardware, and has an unusually volatile ERA+ line. I probably say "pass," but I'd at least listen to the counter-argument.
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