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Finally?

Halldan1

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Jan 1, 2003
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Or will some writer feel the need to get his 15 minutes in the sun.

Mo should never have been the first, but hopefully he opens the door to future players that deserve the same honor.


Rivera should open door for more unanimous Hall of Famers

By Kevin Kernan

baseball_.jpg

Mariano RiveraReuters


End the silliness. Or is it madness?

Baseball writers need to all get on the same page, and Tuesday evening should be the time for that long overdue breakthrough.

Mariano Rivera must be the first unanimous Hall of Fame selection by the Baseball Writers Association of America. There should not be a single no for Mo. The man with the most saves in baseball history at 652 should get 100 percent of the vote in this 75th BBWAA HOF election.

It must happen. Then next year Derek Jeter can follow with 100 percent, too, giving the Yankees the first two unanimous Baseball Hall of Fame selections.

It’s really not that hard, voters.

Cooperstown needs to get this right, finally.

How can it be that no player has garnered 100 percent of the votes. Ken Griffey Jr. is at the top of the list with 99.3 percent of the vote. In 2016, three of 440 writers left Griffey, who was only a 13-time All-Star, off their ballots.

This is something that should have been done long ago, but the BBWAA voters couldn’t agree on The Big Fella. In their waxing-poetic minds somehow Babe Ruth, who revolutionized and saved the game after the Black Sox scandal, wasn’t good enough, despite his 714 home runs.

The Great Bambino should have been the Unanimous Bambino.

Let’s make it Unanimous Mo come 6 p.m. Tuesday (MLB Network). It’s past time, dating all the way back to 1936.

The writers really messed that up. Ruth tallied 95.13 percent of the vote. In all, 226 writers voted, and 11 of them did not vote for Ruth. Eleven clueless writers.

Interestingly, that first year Honus Wagner was voted into the Hall and 11 writers refused to vote for him. Ty Cobb led the way with 222 votes.

Rivera has already dodged a HOF ballot bullet from Bill Ballou, a Worcester (Mass.) writer, refusing to vote for Rivera because he believes saves are overrated — even 652 saves — but deciding not to submit a ballot as to not affect Rivera’s chances to be elected unanimously. I’ve known Ballou a long time and attended his retirement party at Fenway Park near the end of the regular season last year. He’s always been a bit of a curmudgeon, in a good way, but this was too much.

SEE ALSO
Breaking down New York Post voters' Baseball Hall of Fame ballots


Sometimes you just have to accept that if a player is the best the game has ever seen at what that player does, in this case closing games, even if you don’t like that part of the game, you have to recognize his greatness. Ballou decided to opt out of the no vote, explaining, “I’m not voting this year. A submitted blank ballot is ‘no’ vote for every candidate, so I’m doing a Switzerland and not sending one at all.’’

Rivera could still be a unanimous selection and he is tracking that way on Ryan Thibodaux’s HOF tracker on Twitter (@NotMrTibbs). But all the votes have not been released publicly. There is the possibility of a writer submitting a no vote on Rivera.

The old “I’m not voting for this guy on the first ballot.’’

Here’s hoping all the voting writers understand the situation, and that no one decides to pull the stunt that no HOF candidate, no matter how great, should be a unanimous selection.

Hopefully, the voters understand Rivera’s brilliance as a closer. It’s not that hard to understand, especially since closers have become Hall of Fame fashionable of late. Last July on Main Street in Cooperstown, HOF closer Goose Gossage, who is not afraid to say what he believes, said he can’t wait to welcome Rivera into the Hall in 2019.

“I love Mariano,’’ Goose told The Post that sunny day. “I will be here for his induction. I wouldn’t miss it.’’

Now Gossage may not like one-inning saves, but he loves Mariano.

All HOF voters should show Mariano their love, too. The time is now to have a unanimous Hall of Fame selection.

Rivera is not the greatest player ever, but this unanimous vote would be for Babe, Ty, Honus, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Cal Ripken Jr., Griffey Jr., Greg Maddux and the other greatest of the greats who were denied that privilege because of silly games writers can play.

Make Mo a clean sweep.
 
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In my lifetime the greatest player I was old enough to see was Willie Mays.

How anyone could not vote for him is beyond my comprehension. I would love to sit down with those writers and discuss their reasoning. I'm always up for a good laugh.
 
I truly hope that Mariano is the first unanimous selection to the Baseball Hall of Fame so that those who may be deserving in the future will have the opportunity to receive that honor. Mo is certainly worthy of it not only because of his accomplishments on the field but also because of the type of person he is, caring about his fellow man , honest and a man with great faith.
 
In my lifetime the greatest player I was old enough to see was Willie Mays.

How anyone could not vote for him is beyond my comprehension. I would love to sit down with those writers and discuss their reasoning. I'm always up for a good laugh.

There probably are no valid reasons just a belief that no one is ever good enough to get every vote.
 
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On Tuesday, the Baseball Writers Association of America will reveal the 2019 Hall of Fame voting results. You'll be able to watch the announcement live on MLB Network at 6 p.m. ET. But with less than 30 hours to go, we wanted to check in on the latest polling numbers to see who's likely to get in, who's on the bubble, and who might be on their way off the ballot.

Note that all of this is possible thanks to Ryan Thibodaux and his team of helpers. You can access Thibodaux's full ballot tracking spreadsheet by clicking here. With that out of the way, let's get to the numbers.

Three likely in with Mussina a possible fourth
As of Monday at 2 p.m. ET, four players were polling at or above the 75-percent threshold for induction: Mariano Rivera (100 percent), Roy Halladay (92.8), Edgar Martinez (90.3), and Mike Mussina (81.2). Rivera is looking to become baseball's first unanimous inductee.

Alas, it probably won't happen. In fact, the percentages for the players listed above are likely to drop across the board. Just over half the ballots are known at this point, and those who don't submit their ballots ahead of time tend to be conservative in nature. For example, both Martinez and Mussina lost about six percentage points last year when all ballots were included. If history repeats itself, Mussina could find himself on the outside for another year.

Still, things are boding well for at least a three-person class.
 
Mo should be unanimous. Amazing that it has not happened yet with Babe Ruth and Willie and Hank and others. Great ball players that rarely come around and Rivera is one of them. Totally dominated his position and most batters he faced.
 
The obvious and most glaring omission was Babe Ruth. Nearly 100 years later he's still considered by most as the greatest baseball player of all time. I know many didn't like him personally, but that should never have been a consideration in this type of voting.

Shame on the writers who didn't do what everyone knows should have been done for for many baseball greats.
 
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There probably are no valid reasons just a belief that no one is ever good enough to get every vote.

I think that exactly was the belief, starting with the very first class. I believe Ty Cobb was the "first" of the first Hall of Famers. Neither he, Ruth, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner nor Christy Mathewson received all the votes.

I love the tradition and if Mariano got 99.9% he would be in good company. If he becomes the first unanimous choice - good for him. I always felt the biggest honor to differentiate between HOF was the first ballot. Mariano is a first ballot HOF. Edgar Martinez, to pick one name, is a HOF in my opinion but not a first ballot guy.
 
I think Mo has to be in. However, there is no reliever who benefited more from the change of the game for relievers than Mo. Back in the 70's and 80's, closers routinely went 2 innings and sometimes 3.

Sparky Lyle the closer for the Yanks in 1977 pitched 137 innings and went 13-5 with 26 saves. He pitched over 100 innings 6 years, pitched over 90 2 seasons.

Goose Gossage pitched 134 innings as the closer for the Yanks in 1978.

Rivera, besides 1996 where he was the set up man to Wettland, he never pitched more than 90 innings in a season. As a matter of fact, he only hit 80 innings one year! He averaged somewhere mid 70's per season.

I think we forget how great the relievers in the 70's and 80's really were. Saves is a stat but it doesn't tell the entire story.
 
The obvious and most glaring omission was Babe Ruth. Nearly 100 years later he's still considered by most as the greatest baseball player of all time. I know many didn't like him personally, but that should never have been a consideration in this type of voting.

Shame on the writers who didn't do what everyone knows should have been done for for many baseball greats.

And this is exactly why Riveria probably will not be the 1st unanimous HOF selection, because some writer is going to say if Ruth, Mays, etc where not unanimous, how can Riveria be?

Just backward thinking, just because some writers made stupid decisions 75+ years ago, to keep this dumb tradition going makes no sense to me.

But in the end, it is meaningless whether you get all the votes or not, and gives people something to complain about.
 
The one known Mariano Rivera Hall holdout shamed into mind-change

All the rage and hand-wringing worked. It convinced one columnist how wrong he would be for not voting Mariano Rivera into the Hall of Fame.

Bill Ballou, who received almost unanimous scorn for publicly saying he would not vote for the legendary Yankees closer because he distrusts the save as “an indicator of greatness,” wrote a column explaining why he changed his mind.

The Telegram & Gazette (Mass.) writer initially was going to abstain from voting this year, but changed his mind.

“There was a lot of feedback, some of it from writers and observers whose voices are important, almost all of it saying I was wrong,” he wrote.

Ballou originally said he did not want to be the reason Rivera was not voted in unanimously. He also felt it was unfair to other candidates for him to not take part in the voting, and he couldn’t imagine writing a book about the history of baseball without including Rivera in it. He felt postseason performance — in which Rivera was legendary, putting up a 0.70 ERA in 141 innings — had to factor in.

“No baseball history would be complete without a serious mention of Rivera, of course, even if that mention is based upon a flawed statistic, the save,” he wrote.


https://nypost.com/2019/01/22/the-one-known-mariano-rivera-hall-holdout-shamed-into-mind-change/
 
..............Among those who obsess about Hall of Fame balloting, there is a small subset who obsess over this twist of history: No Hall of Famer has received 100 percent of the vote. Somehow, 23 people didn't vote for Willie Mays. Nine people didn't vote for Hank Aaron. Imagine having a Hall of Fame ballot and not voting for Willie Mays or Hank Aaron. Twenty didn't vote for Ted Williams, but, hey, a lot of writers despised the man. In the first election in 1936, 11 writers didn't vote for Babe Ruth. The rules might not have been entirely clear: Ruth had just retired the previous year. Still, Ruth received just 215 votes out of 226 ballots.

So, as Joe Posnanski related in a recent column, the issue of unanimity became a thing right from the beginning.

Tom Seaver came close. He was named on 425 of 430 ballots in 1992. Three writers sent in a blank ballot, protesting that Pete Rose was not on the ballot. One writer had just gotten out of open-heart surgery and simply missed checking off Seaver's name. The final non-vote, as Posnanski writes, came from a retired writer named Deane McGowan, who apparently refused to vote for any player on his first ballot. And you think Baseball Twitter is cranky.

Ken Griffey Jr. set the record with 99.3 percent of the vote in 2016. Three writers didn't vote for him. We don't know who they were since voters don't have to reveal their ballots. Maybe somebody sent in a blank ballot. Maybe somebody refused to vote for anybody who played in the steroid era. Maybe somebody decided, "If Babe Ruth wasn't unanimous, nobody should be unanimous."

So it goes. As did Griffey, Rivera has received 100 percent of the publicly revealed ballots. He's 180-for-180 so far. My guess: He won't get 100 percent. Somebody will enforce the Ruth rule. Maybe somebody feels no reliever deserves to be enshrined. Maybe somebody, knowing Rivera will get elected, will use his or her 10 spots on the ballot for other candidates. But Rivera has a chance to end the silly 100 percent stigma.

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/25769242/mlb-everything-need-know-hall-fame-announcement-day
 
I don't see the big deal. Does he get a bigger plaque for it? Or maybe one made of solid gold? What matters is whether or not he (or any other player) gets in. Beyond that, who cares? I'm sure he doesn't. Getting 99% vs 100% will have zero impact on his life.
 
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