BBWAA Embarrasses Itself. Again.

He got in as an Expo when he should’ve got in as a Met.

Thoughts: The arrogance and ignorance of the majority of baseball writers (outside of good guys Joey Pos and Davidoff) isn’t a surprise. As long as those writers are around, we’ll never see more than one or two players go into the Hall. The Hall has unfortunately become a giant farce.

and was teammates with Raines

People like Neyer, Posnanski, and co. shouting from the rooftops might tip the balance. Plus, Rock was a member of the 1996 Yankees, which might help.

Get out from under that couch under which you were trapped, Mr. Thrilledge?

David Eckstein, Luis Castillo, Scott Podsednik, Juan Pierre, Darin Erstad….

I could go on.

Yeah, I know the 1970s and 1980s were a pitchers decade, but still.

Ozzie Smith also trumps him by .014.

Dawson does beat Bill Mazeroski and consensus-he-shouldn’t-be-there-straw-man Rabbit Maranville, though. Bully!

Amazin’ Avenue voters elected Roberto Alomar with 85% approval.

it’s sad

Where’s mine? Mine doesn’t have Jim Rice or Andre Dawson.

OBP hasn’t proven to be a valuable way to assess talent. And let’s take a closer look at those two numbers you pointed out. He stole 314 bases, but got caught 109 times. That’s a 74.2% success rate. Not terrible, but not good. His 438 home runs came over 21 seasons. Baseball reference has his 162 game avg at 27, again, that’s good, but not excellent. His wOBA is .352, there are 397 players, with a minimum of 5000 PA with a number higher than that.

We’re not the ones who go out of our way to taunt people, the way idiots like Jon Heyman and CHB do EVERY YEAR when they release their ballots and essentially say “nyah nyah, I didn’t vote for the guys you nerdy nerds like!”

I’m starting to think that the reason Blyleven hasn’t made it is because these pea-brains know that the “stat geeks” have been shouting from the rooftops that he belongs, and they’re not voting for him to spite us.

Would nod politely, and then call your comment “piffle.”

Smugness aside… five voters took the time to submit blank votes. Everyone goes a little crazy because even though we know that the process is f*cked, we hold out hope that the clock has broken-down at the correct time, or maybe the process has gotten slightly less f*cked this year and they’ve gotten one or two guys in that we think have been underserved.

The “embarrassing” part comes, frankly, from the fact that the writers either refuse to explain themselves or explain themselves using rationale that would get you kicked off a middling high-school forensics team. AND THIS IS THE PROFESSIONAL NORM. A good percentage of the voting body hasn’t covered the game actively/professionally in a decade or so, and a large plurality take PRIDE in their ignorance of the most up-to-date methods of evaluation in their field… in absolutely NO other field— sports, entertainment, history, science, art— is this the case. I know the stakes are different, but can you imagine a doctor stubbornly sticking with his method of treatment in the fact of scientific evidence that it works? Or, more to the point, can you see a sprinter rejecting a training method that gets better results, or a track-and-field authority refusing to use more advanced timing systems because they “don’t strike us as a REAL timing system.”

I’m frustrated not because these guys are idiots. I’m frustrated because a lot of them are smug and proud idiots, and because I’ll have to continue to explain to my kid that the HOF is a nice place to look at, but is more like the Oscars of baseball than its church.

Sorry, I know in our politically correct world, we’re supposed to respect all opinions, but that’s sheer nonsense. By no known metric or standard is Robby Alomar other than a sure-fire Hall of Famer, and yet over 25% of those writers who have a vote have deemed him not worthy. Believe it or not there is such a thing as objective truth, and some opinions do not deserve to be respected if they are based on the flimsiest of arguments or rationale.

hyperbole much? I’m calling Jon Heyman and CHB and people like them idiots. I’m not marching them into Dachau.

But we can’t say that the people who enabled that travesty to occur are embarrassing?

The head spins.

what he said.

The writers aren’t embarrassments for having their own opinions. They’re embarrassments to the sport— and to professionalism in general— if and when they pride themselves on willful ignorance in their chosen field.

But I sort of agree with some of the writers when they don’t vote a guy in in his first year. mariotti is a “pompous blowhard” as someone said, but he is right in that a “first ballot HOFer” should be someone special. I don’t see Alomar, Raines or Martinez as such. I think Piazza is an example of a guy who should be.

Watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI

I just want to watch hundreds of thousands of game simulations on my spreadsheets

As if because I take thinking about the game seriously means I can’t go to the game, toss back a few budweisers, and scream myself horse like “real” fans. The two are definitely not mutually exclusive.

It’s Posnanski. I just hope to hell the guy doesn’t burn himself out, what with 5 blog posts a day, 3 actual articles for CNNSI, 1 article for the print edition, and book-writing/professional-juggling/sous-chef-ing for three KC rib restaurants on the side.

Also, it’s adorable when the guy makes hip-hop allusions. Like toddlers co-opting adult diction, you know?

It’s about the people with the loudest voices when it comes to player perception also being the most ignorant when it comes to true talent evaluation. It wouldn’t be so bad it this were just limited to the HOF, but most average fans still base their opinions on what they read by these writers. This in turn puts pressure on front offices to respond to the fans and often they make decisions to satisfy a fan base rather than making good baseball decisions.

Like it or not, the mainstream baseball writers still have a tremendous influence on the baseball operations of many franchises. (The Mets included) And once again they have proved how ignorant they are.

It makes people (voters) take notice when someone with relative prominence takes up the cause so aggressively. Joe Poz is widely read and respected, so if he makes a daily post around Hall season about Tim Raines being deserving maybe some of the haterz out there will re-think their stance. Blyleven garnered like 18% of the vote on his first ballot and now is at 74.2%. That % has shot up since Lederer started pushing for him a few years back.

1. They make it as hard as possible for writers with more progressive ideas to get in

2. there’s plenty of young fans/writers who are just as anti-newfangled ideas as the older guys.

I see it mentioned from time to time, like when Tommy Lasorda was inducted into it at a Cyclones game (I was planning to go, just to boo, but plans fell through; He doesn’t belong in such a place, the shill), but it’s some kind of phantom entity or something, because I can never find information about it…

and it’s a shame