The logic pretzel that a lot of Hall of Fame voters constructed to choose among steroid era candidates is crumbling. Some writers maintained for years that they would never vote for cheaters, until seemingly and finally acknowledging with their ballots that there’s no real way to separate who actually cheated and who did not.
By the numbers, Mike Piazza was the greatest hitting catcher of all time, finishing his career with 427 homers and a .308 batting average, and seven top-10 finishes for MVP. But he was kept out of the Hall of Fame in his first three passes through the voting because of steroid suspicion, before finally getting in last summer.
The same has apparently been true for Jeff Bagwell, whose statistical credentials for election are overwhelming -- the 1994 MVP had a .408 on-base percentage in his career, mashed 449 homers, reached base almost 4,000 times, won a Gold Glove and stole 202 bases. But he’s waited through six rounds of votes without election almost certainly because a lot of writers have seemingly guessed that he used steroids. After receiving 71.9 percent of votes last year, he appears poised to be elected next month.
Piazza’s in, despite suspicions. Bagwell will get in, despite suspicions.
So what in the world is keeping the writers from supporting Sammy Sosa?
You remember Sammy Sosa. He had 609 homers, more than all but seven players in major league history. He had 1,667 RBIs, far more than Piazza or Bagwell. He had 2,408 hits, 929 walks, 234 stolen bases, six Silver Slugger Awards.
Like Piazza and Bagwell, he has long been suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs.
But unlike Piazza, now a Hall of Famer, and Bagwell, who is about to be a Hall of Famer, Sosa’s voting percentage has barely reached the 5 percent necessary to keep him on the ballot. Sosa got 12.5 percent the first year his name was presented to voters, and last year he garnered 7 percent.
If voters dig into the question of why Sosa has been treated differently from his peers, there might be four reasons for their rationale.
1. He got caught using a corked bat
And if that’s actually used as a separator, well, that’s kind of stupid. Because Gaylord Perry is a Hall of Famer after admitting for years that he doctored baseballs, and hell, in this era, you can see pitchers breaking MLB’s foreign substance rules every night. The truest indicator of the severity in this offense is the suspension he served: eight games. That any voter would ignore Sosa’s 18-year career because of an eight-game suspension is embarrassingly silly.
2. Sosa played a starring role in the 1998 home run chase, with Mark McGwire
If Sosa used performance-enhancing drugs -– which, to be clear, I believe to be the case -– he was no different from a vast majority of his peers, including some who might already be in the Hall of Fame.
That he got more attention and was a better player than other possible users wouldn’t make his sin any worse than theirs. And besides: The feats of McGwire and Sosa are still in the record books. MLB and the Hall of Fame treats them as legitimate. The Cardinals and Cubs haven’t given back any of the money they made from that summer.
3. Sosa had a much-criticized appearance before Congress in 2005
The reason Sosa and McGwire were summoned to that hearing was because former slugger Jose Canseco had named them as PED users in his newly published book. Canseco could have named hundreds of others, including many other stars, but he chose Sosa, McGwire and a small handful of others.
If Hall of Fame voters want to hang their vote on the serendipitous choice of Canseco, that’s pretty flimsy, and in complete disregard to context.
4. According to The New York Times, Sosa tested positive in the survey testing of 2003
If a voter uses this to disqualify Sosa, he or she better be fully prepared to apply the same standard to every other player linked to that, including David Ortiz.
The dominoes with the PED candidates are falling, and it stands to reason that Sosa’s vote total should grow significantly this year.
Among the early ballots made public, Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds have seen an enormous spike in their percentage.
Clemens has never polled higher than 45.2 percent, Bonds never higher than 44.3 percent. A jump into the range of 65 to 70 percentage would reflect a significant change in the perspective of the voting body. But it’s noting that a year ago, Clemens and Bonds did well in the early ballots, as well. It could be that the writers who are more conflicted about Bonds and Clemens aren’t as eager to mail and post their ballots.
It seems highly unlikely that either Clemens or Bonds will be elected this year, but there does seem to be a trend of softening about their respective candidacies, with each still having six more years to reach the 75 percent required for election.
But the sad part of their climb in the voting is that they might be gaining support at the expense of other players because of the Hall of Fame’s arbitrary and antiquated Rule of 10 -- the regulation that limits voters to casting ballots for no more than 10 players in a given year. Until Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and other players linked to steroids advance through this process, there will be writers who probably leave other worthy candidates off the ballot because they simply don’t have the room for everybody.
• Tim Raines is in his 10th and final year on the ballot, as Tyler Kepner writes. From his piece:
A defining measure of Tim Raines’s greatness probably never appeared on his baseball cards. Year after year, for the Montreal Expos and beyond, Raines would reach base around 40 percent of the time. Yet even Raines could not have told you his on-base percentage.
“I didn’t even know anything about it,” Raines said by phone the other day. “That was what I was thinking, but I didn’t really think about the number. I didn’t think about having a .400 on-base percentage, like that was important. I just felt like: I batted .300, and I knew if I walked enough, I was going to be on base a lot. So the chance of me scoring, especially with the threat of stolen bases, was a lot greater.”
Scoring runs, quite obviously, has always been the goal of the game, and to do so you must reach base. Quantifying that skill was not widely done for most of Raines’s career, which stretched from 1979 to 2002. With no time to spare, Hall of Fame voters are finally catching on.
Candidates once had 15 years to be considered by the baseball writers who controlled the ballot, after a five-year waiting period following retirement. Now, the limit is 10 years, and Raines, who is in his final year on the ballot, has steadily gained support. In his first five years on the ballot, he hovered between 22 and 48 percent of the vote, with 75 percent needed for election. Last year, he shot up from 55 to 69.8 percent, right to the doorstep of Cooperstown.
• Paul Swydan writes that if you vote for Vladimir Guerrero for the Hall of Fame, you have to vote for Larry Walker.
• Wallace Matthews won’t participate in the Hall of Fame voting anymore.