Baseball Hall of Fame ballot includes home runs like Greg Maddux and question ...
ALAN MOTHNER/APBraves pitcher Greg Maddux, a four-time Cy Young winner, headlines the Hall of Fame ballot.
Famine to smorgasbord.
This is the Baseball Hall of Fame's great anticipation Wednesday when, a year after the Baseball Writers Association sent no one to Cooperstown they could be electing as many as 3-4 candidates from a ballot that includes seemingly no-brainer newcomers, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas, along with Craig Biggio and Jack Morris, who both missed by less than 8% of the necessary 75% for election last year, and Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza, whose respective 59.6% and 57.8% first-time vote totals last year may or may not have been affected by suspicion of steroid use.
Because of the many holdover steroids players - Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro - who, without that taint, would've likely been easily elected last year, it is one of the largest ballots ever with 36 candidates. The 500-plus senior BBWAA members who comprise the electorate are restricted to voting for a maximum 10 candidates - a rule that is under review by a special committee and could be changed next year. For now, however, there is intrigue aplenty attached to this year's election:
Will the writers elect as many as three or more candidates? You have to go back nearly 60 years - 1955 - when they elected more than three.
Will Maddux, who won four Cy Young Awards, ranks eighth all time in wins (355) and is one of only four pitchers in history with more than 3,000 strikeouts and less than 1,000 walks, surpass Tom Seaver's record plurality (98.84%) for election to the Hall?
We already know he won't be a unanimous choice, as Ken Gurnick, who covers the Dodgers for MLB.com, said Tuesday he's only voting for Jack Morris, explaining he wouldn't vote for anyone who played 'during the period of PED use.'
Which leads us to Bonds and Clemens.
Were Bonds' (36.2%) and Clemens' (37.6%) dismal first-ballot showings last year merely a one-year statement from the writers, or will the seven-time National League MVP and seven-time American League Cy Young Award winner not make any significant gains the second time around and remain mired far away from election?
Certainly, on statistics alone, there are plenty of candidates on the ballot that would seem to warrant election.
Biggio, whose 68.2% topped the voting a year ago, has 3,060 career hits, 414 stolen bases, was an All-Star at three different positions (catcher, second base and center field) and has the most doubles (668) of any righthanded hitter in the history of baseball. (That, by the way, would include Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Rogers Hornsby.) No player who has ever gotten over 65% his first time on the ballot, has not been elected the next year, but obviously this ballot is unchartered territory.
Glavine, who won two Cy Young Awards and has 305 career victories, was a 10-time All-Star who led the National League in wins five times. Thomas won two AL MVP awards with the White Sox, ranks 18th all-time in homers (521), 10th in walks (1,667), 20th in on-base pct. (.419) and 22nd in RBI (1,704).
For Morris, who finished runner-up to Biggio last year with 67.7%, this is his 15th and final year on the ballot. Winner of 254 games and the ace of almost every staff he was on - his 14 Opening Day starts are tied for second all-time with Steve Carlton, Randy Johnson, Walter Johnson and Cy Young behind Seaver's 16 - Morris has been gaining steadily but with fellow starters Maddux, Glavine and Mike Mussina all crowding their way onto the ballot, he may have run out of time.
Then there's Piazza and Bagwell, both of whom achieved plenty of Hall-of-Fame numbers but whose candidacies have been clouded with steroids allegations even though neither of them ever failed a drug test or turned up in the Mitchell Report. In Bagwell's case, he admitted to have once used the testosterone-boosting drug androstenedione before it became one baseball's banned substances, and also worked out at the same Houston gym where Andy Pettitte allegedly got his HGH. Bagwell, who won the 1991 NL Rookie of the Year award and the 1994 NL MVP, hit .297 for his career, had seven 100-RBI seasons and hit 449 homers.
Piazza, meanwhile, will go down as the greatest hitting catcher in history - his 396 homers as a catcher are the most all-time at that position - and was a 12-time All-Star. Last year, he was inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame, but he's going to need a leap of 17% to make it into the big one and that, too, could be problematic on this crowded ballot where voters are limited to just 10 selections.
Other candidates who figure to get decent support though not nearly enough for election are Tim Raines (52.2% last year), Curt Schilling (second all-time in strikeout-to-walk ratio at 4.383, 11-2 with a 2.23 ERA in postseason), and newcomers Mussina (270 wins) and Jeff Kent (the all-time second base homer leader with 351).
No matter how many candidates the writers elect, the Hall, after enduring one its quietest induction weekends ever last year - in which all three inductees, Deacon White, Jacob Ruppert and umpire Hank O'Day were long deceased - is already guaranteed three live bodies for next July after this year's Expansion Era Veterans Committee elected former managers Joe Torre, Tony LaRussa and Bobby Cox in December.
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