O/T - Goosed!!!

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Posted By: davidcycleback

For eligible HOF quality players, the only legitimate concern is whether or not they are elected within the next decade or so. Whether a player was elected first, or this year or that is borderline numerology. Anyone who looks at the historical records knows that voting percentages should be taken with a historical grain of salt (Are Tom Seaver and Cal Ripken the greatest players to play the game?). You could field a hell of baseball team with players who were not voted in their first year of eligibility (Joe DiMaggio, Jimmie Foxx, Cap Anson, for examples).

Twenty years from now, ten years from now, no one's going to care whether Gossage or Jim Rice was voted in 2007 or 2008 or 2009-- and there's no reason they should care. No one says Robin Yount is a better player than Joe DiMaggio, because it took more years for DiMaggio to get in. No one says Tony Gwynn is a better player than Babe Ruth because Gwynn got a higher percentage of the HOF vote. In fact, baseball fans universally will question your iq and perhaps even sanity for using that logic and deduction-- for what should be the obvious reasons that Gwynn isn't better than Ruth and Yount isn't better than DiMaggio. So why, then, each year do sports reporters and fans get their girdles in a bunch about vote percentages and election year (beyond how it directly relates to a worthy player being a HOF member)?


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Just from the top of your head: Was Bruce Sutter elected in 2005 or 2006? Could it have been 2007?

P.s. I had to look up the year. I knew Sutter was elected just recently, but wasn't sure of the specific year.

Sutter was elected to the HOF in 2006. If I had said the answer was 2005, would that make you think Sutter was a greater ptcher?

My main point is few baseball fans can even state the year or vote percentage for a HOFer, including for greats like DiMaggio, Satchell Paige and Willie Mays-- and much less judge the greatness by these stats.

That I'm a baseball fan who followed Sutter's recent election and vote hubub and even had a GU Sutter cap at the time, but couldn't today recall or find importance in the year of his election, shows me all I need to know about the significance of these votings statistics.