Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
The Envelope Please
There will be cocktails at the Carter residence after all. As expected, Kid Carter and Eddie Murray were elected to the Hall of Fame this afternoon: Carter was on 78% of the ballots, Murray topped that with 85.3%.
This is how the best of the rest faired:
Bruce Sutter 53.6%
Jim Rice 52.2%
Andre Dawson 50.0%
Ryne Sandburg 49.2%
Lee Smith 42.3%
Rich Gossage 42.1%
Bert Blyleven 29.2%
I was a little bit suprised at Ryno's poor showing. So was Rob Neyer in his on-line chat today:
"I figured [Sanburg] he might get in, but if he didn't he'd certainly come close.
But he didn't come close at all. Which is something of a shock if you were a fan in the 1980s, because then everybody thought Sandberg was a lock. I think that Sandberg, like Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell suffers from comparison to the bloated hitting stats of the last decade...
I've been doing this long enough that the actual arguments for the players don't interest me as much as the bizarre arguments. Today alone, I've now had somebody tell me that Sandberg is the greatest second baseman ever, and somebody else tell me that if Sandberg had played for the Mariners, he'd already be completely forgotten.
The truth is somewhere between, of course. He is one of the ten or twelve greatest second basemen ever, and so I guess now he joins Ron Santo as a Cubs infielder who the BBWAA screwed."
Neyer also commented on the voters' ambiguity towards relief pitchers, Sutter, Goose, and Lee Smith:
"It's funny, the "closer" has been around for approximately 25 years now, and yet we're still trying to figure out if they're really worth anything. Everybody says they're hugely important, but the Hall of Fame voters apparently haven't yet been convinced. To answer your question, though ... I don't believe Sutter was great for long enough, and I don't believe Smith was great enough at all. I can understand the arguments for both of them, but to me Gossage is more deserving."
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