2024 Baseball Hall of Fame Tracker

[bnorth]

Originally Posted by z28jd

I'd love to see Helton just miss again. He's lost more votes than he has gained from returning voters so far, down -1, which makes it hard to pick up any ground. He's a fringe candidate for me based on his career, but I don't like rewarding a habitual drunk driver. I'd be fine making him wait the ten years if he only had one DUI, but once he got the second and left the scene of an accident too, I had zero respect for him.

People are out here not voting for Vizquel because of a clubhouse incident that affected one person, or Andruw Jones because of his spousal abuse, which I'm completely fine with in both cases. I wouldn't vote for either of them for those reasons. If they were slam dunk cases for the HOF, then I'd withhold a vote for 2-3 years, or one year like people did with Roberto Alomar. Yet people are fine with Helton getting caught twice on the road drunk. Who knows how many times he just risked lives of everyone else around him those days. It's probably in the hundreds judging by the time gap alone.

Please don't defend Helton's actions either, because I won't ever see his side or your side of it. He made nine figures in salary during his career, he could have had a personal driver 24/7. That makes it even worse, but it's not even something specific to him. I have literally one relative out of a huge family with one DUI and the best thing I can say about what they did is that they didn't hurt anyone else with their own accident. Don't drive and drive ever or stand up for someone who does.

I absolutely love your stance on drunk driving. The HOF is a complete joke on many levels. I would still like to visit it someday.