Junior and Mike

I’m obviously happy to see Ken Griffey Jr. elected to the Hall of Fame — here’s a good roundup of the highlights of his Seattle career. His injuries robbed him of most of the second half of his career, and yet he was still one of the 5 greatest centerfielders ever. Junior got the highest vote percentage of any player in the history of the voting.

And, of course, it’s good to see the greatest-hitting catcher of all time finally get his Cooperstown induction despite his highly troubling back acne. Needless to say, Tim Raines’s failure to win induction is the greatest outrage in the history of history itself, although he and Bagwell (a ridiculous exclusion) are at the level where they’re likely to be inducted.

The exclusion of Barry Bonds, arguably the greatest player in baseball history, and Roger Clemens, arguably the greatest pitcher in baseball history, remains farcical. Their numbers are, at least, going up, suggesting that the arguments of the anti-PED faction in HOF voting might eventually collapse from the weight of their incoherence and stupidity. Clearing some people who haven’t covered baseball for years off the ballot surely helped as well, and I must say that I was greatly amused by the GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR SLIDERULE AND WATCH THE GAMES crowd expressing outrage about being hoist on their old-fart petard. But, then, few people ever show less evidence of having actually carefully watched baseball games than hacks who go on about bloggers and their mother’s basements. Murray Chass doesn’t even argue “Felix Hernandez should win the Cy Young Award because I watched him play and saw x”; he argues “Felix Hernandez shouldn’t win the Cy Young Award because of one largely useless statistic I’m sentimental about.”