Let's keep this thing exclusive

Ben Godar

Baseball writers of America, I salute you. In a thin year for the Hall of Fame, voters resisted the urge to throw the doors open to throngs of marginal candidates. Instead, we get only Bruce Sutter. And I wouldn’t have minded even less.

I’ve got no problem with Sutter being cast in bronze, but I’m a strict conservative when it comes to the Hall. When you listen to supposedly learned folks discussing who should be in, it seems many believe if a guy isn’t elected, it means he’s just another Mackey Sasser. I feel like if you even have to construct an argument for why a guy is worthy, he probably doesn’t belong there.

Too many fans and journalists want to play the lowest common denominator game. If a player’s numbers compare to the worst guy already in the Hall of Fame, then clearly that player deserves to be in as well. Jim Molony of MLB.com would have put six guys into the hall this year, his reasoning for Jack Morris and Jim Rice being "there are players with less glittering resumes already in the Hall."

Players certainly deserve to be compared to their peers already enshrined, but that’s hardly reason to keep lowering the bar. If anything, it should be ever tougher to make the cut.
Call me crazy, but I don’t want to lead my kid through Cooperstown someday and say, "Look son, that’s Albert Belle. He was an above average hitter and a real asshole." Ain’t exactly magical, is it?

But the ballots and reasoning displayed by MLB.com’s voters show pretty definitively that there is no science when it comes to Hall of Fame voting. The bulk of the votes went to Goose Gossage and Sutter, but these professional writers threw flyers out to guys like Alan Trammel and Don Mattingly. Rich Draper, in a move that will surely cost him his voting privilege, even revealed he voted for Will Clark, Albert Belle and Willie McGee. Apparently he wasn’t granted the convenience of an "All of the Above" box.

But the reasoning behind the votes is just as varied. Most point to statistics or the players’ prominence on a classic team. Others fall back on some version of "he was a class guy."

I don’t want to make this the Hall of Class Guys. And if you think it is, ask a black guy about Ty Cobb. And I’m also not one of these Sabermetric junkies that wants to make it the Hall of OPS. I just want to see the Hall of Fame stay a place that only absolute best make it into. This year, collectively, I’m glad to see the voters felt that way, too.