Welcome to 2024 and the ninth year of 210Sports, and in what has become a New Year’s tradition here on the blog I’ll begin the year off by casting my completely unofficial Baseball Hall of Fame ballot.
To be eligible to cast an official ballot a person must be a Baseball Writers’ Association of America member for at least 10 years and cover baseball for 10 consecutive years for an accredited outlet. Obviously, I have neither qualification and will never get to cast an official ballot. But I do watch a lot of baseball and have a blog I can write about sports on, so that must count for something.
Within the rules determined by the Baseball Hall of Fame, BWAA writers can vote for up to ten players on the ballot and may use any criteria they see fit in selecting which players from the ballot to vote for. I am a huge fan of the way Bill Ballou, formerly of the Worcester Telegram, decides who to vote for: “You would buy a ticket just so you could tell your grandchildren you saw him perform”. That’s as great a reason to vote for anyone as I have ever heard.
As it does every year, the subject of performance-enhancing drugs will come up. To be honest, how I deal with that is very easy: if a player is eligible, I’ll vote for him if I think he’s worthy of the Hall of Fame. I understand that some people think they shouldn’t be enshrined, but if they’re on the ballot the Hall of Fame has determined that player is qualified to be inducted.
The first part of my ballot is easy, it’s the players I voted for last year that are still on the ballot this year. Those players are:
Manny Ramirez
Alex Rodriguez
Billy Wagner
None of those guys got any better or worse on the field, so I’m not sure why a voter wouldn’t just copy over the ballot they had the previous year. I guess you could see voters dropping some players because those players turned out to be really sketchy people since their inclusion on the ballot, but short of being a physical menace to society, I try to let their on-field careers decide if they’re worthy.
For the same reason, I also won’t make any additions to any players I left off before. For me to add a player I omitted before someone would have to make a very convincing argument that I got it wrong leaving him off the first year he was eligible. That happened just once before when I added Edgar Martinez in 2019. Looking at who is on this year’s official ballot again from previous seasons there’s no chance of it happening for any of those players.
Of the first-time candidates, Adrián Beltré tops the list and makes my ballot. Beltré never won an MVP but played in the top ten in voting six times, and would have won in 2004 were it not for Barry Bonds. Three-thousand hits shouldn’t be an automatic qualifier for the Hall of Fame, but it is worth noting Beltré has 3,166 of them, 1,151 for extra bases.
And that’s it. Lots of really good players on the ballot this year, but Beltré is the only great one.
While we’re on the subject of Hall of Fame players, no one can be a borderline Hall of Famer. Being a Hall of Famer in any sport is like being pregnant, either you are or you aren’t. And if you have to think about if a certain player is or isn’t a Hall of Famer, then they’re not. The key difference is that eventually, no matter how, you’re not pregnant anymore.
That’s not true of being a Hall of Famer.
On January 23rd the BBWAA will announce the results of its 2024 Hall of Fame balloting, and those that get the required 75% for enshrinement will join Contemporary Baseball Era Managers/Executive/Umpires Committee pick Jim Leyland at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony on July 21, 2024, in Cooperstown, New York.
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