The Baseball Hall Of Fame Ballot Came Out And I See Ichiro, CC Sabathia & Billy Wagner Getting In
This is one of my favorite days of the off-season. The Hall Of Fame Ballot release day is such an interesting look at not only who is newly eligible but also who is returning. This year has an especially deep new class that has, in my opinion, two first ballot Hall Of Famers.
I think the following three players are locks:
Ichiro Suzuki
C.C. Sabthia
Billy Wagner
Ichiro and Sabthia are both new players on the ballot. Ichiro has 3,089 hits...and that's just in the MLB. Counting Japan, it's over 4,000. He's also one of the best defensive outfielders this century. I've spent too many words on this. The only question is if it's unanimous. But you know that a couple of asshole voters will fuck that up.
Sabathia won't be hitting 95%+ of the vote like Ichiro but he should absolutely be a first ballot guy as well. 251 career wins is not easy to do in this era of baseball. He's also 18th all-time in strikeouts. The only question is if he gets a Cleveland or Yankees hat on his plaque. I think he goes Yankee. He has more wins with the Yankees and won a World Series there.
Wagner is a different case entirely. He's on the ballot for the very last time and came painfully close last year. You need 75% of the vote to get in and he had 73.6%. His growth among ballots has been wild to watch. His second year on the ballot, he only had 10.3%. More and more voters saw that despite not having post-season success, he really has been one of the greatest closers of all time. He'd have my vote as well.
The rest of the ballot is a lot more questionable. I think Andruw Jones and Carlos Beltran both should and will be in Cooperstown one day. Jones (3 years left) and Beltran (8 years) both have time left but with the ballot so stacked this year, I don't see this being the season for them.
Felix Hernandez, Dustin Pedroia and Chase Utley just fall short. For various reasons, they just didn't play long enough. If Pedroia had never gotten hurt, I think he has a career like Barry Larkin and gets in. But Larkin played 650 more games than Pedroia. Utley played more games than Pedroia but he only got 28.8% last year and I don't see voters putting him in with only 1,885 career hits.
King Felix is a different story. He's the one that could surprise me. Maybe voters ignore a lot of his compiling stats and focus on his dominant stats. He's the anti-Andy Pettitte in a way. While Pettitte played on dominant teams with post-season success and wound up with more career wins than Sabathia, he was never considered among the very best pitchers in baseball. I believe that while Hernandez won't make it this year, he should stay on the ballot for another year at least. That will hopefully give us more time to consider him. I could certainly be swayed myself.
When it comes to Hall Of Fame voting, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and Andy Pettitte are the Steroid Guys. I use Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens as the benchmark here. Bonds and Clemens both had Hall of Fame careers BEFORE using steroids and still didn't crack 67%. If those guys couldn't get that close, these guys won't get there. A-Rod hasn't even cracked 36%.
The rest of the list has a bunch of guys that had truly fantastic careers. Bobby Abreu, Curtis Grandson and David Wright are three of my all-time favorite players. But, I'm not going to fool myself into thinking they have any sort of chance. It's more likely that they fall off the ballot entirely.
We'll all hear the results Tuesday January 21st at 6 PM. It's one of the best days of the year. But if Ichiro, Sabathia and Wagner don't all get in, it'll instead be a disappointing one.