Quick Thoughts on the Hall of Fame Voting

There's an army of bloggers all pounding away at a legion of databases and spreadsheets out there going over this vote right now, so I'm not going to get too detailed on this. They will do a much better job analyzing the Hall of Fame vote than me, and I look forward to reading their articles. Here's a few things that caught my eye though when I looked over the final voting tally:

Jim Rice is getting elected next year. No way the writers give Jim 72% of the vote only to let the Veteran's committee be the ones to let him in. It's kind of like Obama last week in Iowa. As soon as he won the state his New Hampshire poll numbers go up 10% since he's now proven he is a legitimate candidate. Meanwhile Hillary and Andre Dawson are getting all teary eyed and asking "Hey, what about me?".

I'm still pissed that Hawk still isn't in, but 65.9% of the vote is good. Ditto with Blyleven.

I was all ready to get indignant on the idiot voters about Hawk and Bert, but comparing this years vote to last years shows almost every one of the holdovers got more votes than last year. Some had huge jumps too, Goose jumped up 14.6%, Blyleven 14.2%, Hawk 9.2% and Rice 8.7%. Only McGwire held steady at 128 votes and Harold Baines actually lost one.

The fact that votes went up for everyone means one of two things: Last year there were a lot of people who looked at the ballot for two seconds before quickly checking Cal and Tony's name and putting a big red X though McGwire's. Or it could be that the hordes of stat geeks have been hassling the writers for so long about their stupid choices that they are finally paying attention and voting a little better. My guess is the former. Update: Baseball Crank has a 6 year voting trend chart up on his blog. It pretty much confirms my "Check, Check, X" theory as just about everyone went down from their 2006 totals last year.

Dale Murphy got 25 more votes than last year, yay! At this rate he'll be elected in 2023. Hopefully our Robot Chinese Overlords will let me have time off from the Soylent Green factory to go to the induction ceremony.

Most mind bogglingly stupid thing from the vote: Tim Raines didn't even get 25%. Voters are funny about first ballot candidates though, we'll see what happens next year when the voters get a good side by side look at his stats along side dead solid first ballot lock Rickey Henderson's.

Here's one more card of the Goose for good measure. This one's for the White Sox fans out there...


Update: Apparently I'm on the same wavelength with someone on my choice of White Sox Gossage cards. Here's my second choice with Goose wearing a beautiful horrible white cap just so I can upstage everyone.


Updated update: DAMMIT

An Update to the Updated Update: I fucking dare someone to have an '82 Kellogg's 3D Goose Gossage posted already. Triple DOG dare ya.


Just one more, I promise: Check out the stat line for 1981 on the back of Goose's Kellogg's card. Absolutely SICK!