My Hall of Fame Ballot by Ed Botti

My Hall of Fame Ballot

by Ed Botti

December 30, 2021

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I would never vote for a cheater. Period. End of story. It’s a shame because there are players on the ballot that didn’t need to take steroids, and did so for whatever reason they may have had, and that means they cheated. So, no to Bonds, Clemens, AROD, Manny, Sosa and Ortiz. Some got caught, others lied about it, and others caught lucky breaks or just happened to be protected by their ownership and the politics of the Mitchel Report.

But they all took them, in my opinion.

Of the remaining candidates, I have three I would put into the HOF.

Curt Schilling- Like him or hate him let’s just look at his on field performance, which is all that really matters, isn’t it (unless your name is Albert Belle)? He has a career 4.3 strikeout-to-walk ratio, the best in 100 years, and he somehow is the only pitcher to win a World Series game in his 20s, 30s and 40s. Bloody sock and all, he is a HOF’er.

Jeff Kent- Long before he was a Giant, he was a Met and a Blue Jay. He always put up impressive numbers in Queens and just got better as he aged in San Francisco. How good were his numbers? First off, he hit 351 home runs, which is more than any second baseman in MLB history. That would be more than Rogers Hornsby (301), Ryne Sandberg (277) and Joe Morgan (266). By the way, all 3 of them are in the HOF, and only Hornsby (.577) had a higher slugging percentage than Kent (.500). He’s a HOF’er.

Billy Wagner- If you analyze pitchers with at least 800 innings pitched, Wagner’s 11.9 K Rate per nine innings is the best in MLB history. He may not have any saves records and he never led the league in saves, but his WHIP of .998 was even better than Mariano Rivera’s. Any Closer that did anything better than Mariano is a HOF’er.

Todd Helton and Gary Sheffield are on the bubble. Not this year.

Andy Pettitte was great, ditto for Omar Vizquel, Andruw Jones and Scott Rolen, all of them could play for me, but they are not HOF’ers.

#AndyPettitte #BarryBonds #BaseballHallofFame #RogerClemens