Mike McCombs

Baseball's Hall-of-Fame voting will be a train wreck

By MIKE McCOMBS - mmccombs@islandpacket.com

UPDATE: Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz and Craig Biggio were elected Tuesday to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The Baseball Hall of Fame will release the voting results for the Class of 2015 at 2 p.m. Tuesday.

I fully expect the results to be a train wreck.

I expect four guys to make the Hall this go around — two of the greatest pitchers ever in Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez, one of the best pitchers of the 1990s and 2000s and one of the Atlanta Braves’ big three n John Smoltz and 3,000-hit club member Craig Biggio.

Mike Piazza, the best hitting catcher of all-time, has the votes to get it among early ballots made public but it’s close and I have a feeling he’ll fall just short. And don't get me started on Tim Raines.

All are deserving.

But the writers will blow this again, though to be fair, they are not entirely to blame.

The problem is that among the 34 players on this year’s ballot, there are, in my mind, there are no less than 22 Hall of Famers.

And most of those 22 will never get in.

Voters — I am not one —are faced with a dilemma that gets worse with each passing year.

The Hall inexplicably limits voters to 10 votes per ballot. The writers must choose between those most deserving and those whose window of opportunity might be closing.

Mike Berardino of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, who made his ballot public, chose a strategy where he voted for players who “needed” his votes more than the most “deserving” candidates on the ballot.

As a result, he left Martinez and Johnson off in favor of longtime Detroit Tigers shortstop Alan Trammell and Expos and Rockies slugger Larry Walker.

As a result, Berardino is taking a beating from misguided fans.

The second, and likely bigger dilemma the writers face remains how to deal with players suspected of using performance enhancing drugs.

Barry Bonds. Roger Clemens. Mark McGwire.

I’ve long thought ESPN’s Jayson Stark had the best perspective on this.

“I'm going to say this one more time. What is the point of even having a Hall of Fame if it's going to pretend that players like this never played baseball?Bonds hit more home runs than any other player who ever swung a baseball bat. Clemens won more Cy Youngs than any other pitcher who ever smoothed the dirt on a pitcher's mound. None of their achievements has ever been wiped out of any box score or any record book. They all count. They all happened. It's not possible — and it's not our job — to create some sort of fantasy world in which they didn't happen.

So I'd rather have the Hall of Fame figure out how to explain what happened in the PED era than figure out how any of us, as voters, are supposed to guess who did what, in a time when the planet was populated by hundreds and hundreds of players who took PEDs — since what we know about them is overwhelmed by what we don't know.”

But that won’t save those guys this year, or likely any year. Many voters assume what they dont know and will never vote for them.

So in a year that has almost two dozen Hall-worthy players on the ballot, We’ll be lucky if we see five make it.

This story was originally published January 6, 2015 at 10:40 AM with the headline "Baseball's Hall-of-Fame voting will be a train wreck."

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