BTRTN Assesses the MLB Hall of Fame Contemporary Baseball Era Ballot
And now for something completely different! Today, Born To Run The Numbers takes a break from its industry-leading election predictions to assess the Major League Baseball Hall for Fame ballot for the committee looking at modern era players previously overlooked by the writers in the regular ballot.
http://www.borntorunthenumbers.com/2022/12/btrtn-assesses-mlb-hall-of-fame.html
Excerpts: "Today, Sunday, December 4, at 5 PM Eastern, we will hear the outcome of the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee's deliberations. They are considering – or better stated, reconsidering – the candidacies of eight players from 1980 on who did not get elected in their years on the regular ballot conducted by the BWAA. We’re not going to predict what the committee will decide, but we will give our point of view on which of the eight players are HOF-worthy....And what a collection of players! Albert Belle, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Don Mattingly, Fred McGriff, Dale Murphy, Rafael Palmiero and Curt Schilling...
"We stipulate at the outset that we believe that Bonds, Clemens and Palmiero were all known PED users and should not receive a spot in the hallowed HOF... For years on end, they violated a rule that sought to protect the fairness and integrity of the game, thereby achieving an advantage over rule-abiding players, and distorting the statistics that are part of the fabric of the game. Their statistics and achievements are tainted, and they disgraced the game...
"That said, the discussion comes down to the other five, whom we analyze below. To arrive at our conclusions, we compare each player to Hall of Famers at his position across a number of key statistics, both traditional (hits, homers, RBI’s and batting average) and non-traditional (OPS+ and WAR). We show the average statistics for comparison groups, by position...