“Silent, hidden and nuts”

The best line I’ve seen so far on the twenty-eight guys who didn’t vote for Rickey comes from Ray Ratto:

We have no compelling defense for the 28, although Corky Simpson, who was pilloried on the Web for omitting Henderson, at least had the stones to say so. The other 27 remain silent, hidden and nuts.

Good point on Simpson. Dumb and honest is better than just dumb.


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Aaron Moreno
15 years ago

If you can’t have unanimity on Ruth or Cobb for the Hall, you can’t reasonably expect it on anyone else.

And the fact that there hasn’t been a single unanimous HOF inductee is just stupid.

Chris H.
15 years ago

Ballots should be public, and people who make incredibly-stupid votes should be forced to explain themselves.  I mean, seriously, how do you defend not voting for Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb?

Alskor
15 years ago

Yeah… still waiting on the explanation for why Corky screwed the Canes.

GBS
15 years ago

At least with Ruth and Cobb there were 60 years worth of players to choose from, so the ballot was rather full.  And those two fellas also had “personality issues” like Rickey.

Glenn Raucher
15 years ago

“If you can’t have unanimity on Ruth or Cobb for the Hall, you can’t reasonably expect it on anyone else.”

Which basically means these writers are saying “Since some writers 60 years ago were idiots, some of us better be idiots, too!”

Ridiculous, really.

Jim C
15 years ago

On Mike & Mike this morning on ESPN Radio, they said their producer got in touch with one of the 28 (presumably not Corky) who told them that the reason he left Rickey off his ballot was because of all the times over the years that he felt that Rickey dogged it during games. He had no problem with Rickey being elected and said that he would vote for him next year (something he knew wouldn’t be an issue, obviously) but felt that he wanted to register a “protest vote”.

Chris H.
15 years ago

What a douche.  You know, if the guy occasionally dogged it (and I’m not saying he did) and still put up the numbers he did…so what?

I’d sure take a couple guys like him dogging it like that on my team right about now.

Nate
15 years ago

I’m sure that writter has never “dogged it” in all his years in the business. Every single column/article was Pulitzer-worthy.
I’m all for public ballots in this case and when a guy gets over a certain threshold, say 90%, all those writers should be forced to provide a detailed explanation on why they abstained.

APBA Guy
15 years ago

Let’s see, 28 morons out of 555 BBWAA members, that’s about 5%, not bad really, but we should know who they are so they can be tagged and tracked, and kept out of populated areas.

By the way, the Chron’s feature sportswriters (Ratto and Jenkins) and their baseball guy (John Shea) are pretty good. I can’t say for sure that they haven’t dogged a few columns, but I actually enjoy their columns more often than I did the guys back at the Washington POST.

RS
15 years ago

Years ago Paul Ladewski claimed he would not have voted for anybody who played between 1993 and 2004. He didn’t vote for Gwynn and Ripken, for example, and that was a “steroid era protest vote”. He claimed he didn’t have enough information to judge those players.

This year, two ballots have been left blank once again. I assume one of those belongs to him.

So much for any unanimous decisions coming up (including Greg Maddux) anytime soon.