Dodgers Beat Writer Leaves Greg Maddux Off His Hall of Fame Ballot
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Hall of Fame hunting season has started a day early. Baseball fans got a jump on the yearly tradition when Ken Gurnick, the Los Angeles Dodgers beat reporter for MLB.com, revealed his ballot Tuesday. He’s voting for one guy and one guy only: former Detroit Tigers pitcher Jack Morris. In an article published to the league’s official website, 17 contributing writers — all members of theBaseball
Writers’ Association of America — disclosed who they voted for and why. Squeaky-clean starters Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine made the cut for everyone but Gurnick. Nobody — including baseball’s best players from the Steroids Era — received the 75 percent necessary for enshrinement in 2013. It will be Morris’ 15th and final shot at Cooperstown. “Morris has flaws — a 3.90 ERA, for example,” Gurnick wrote ahead of Wednesday’s Hall announcement. “But he gets my vote for more than a decade of ace performance that included three 20-win seasons, Cy Young Award votes in seven seasons and Most Valuable Player Award votes in five. As for those who played during the period of PED use, I won’t vote for any of them.” Maddux, a four-time Cy Young Award winner
, was believed to have a shot at unanimous selection in his first year on the ballot.
Listen at this stage of the game, Hall of Fame voting has become almost completely irrelevant. Its basically only a half a level above All Star Voting and Gold Glove Voting. So I don’t wanna even get into the logic behind who should get in and who should be out from the Steroid Era. Don’t wanna argue about what made up dates we can just arbitrarily decide are some sort of steroid cut off. Don’t wanna argue about suspicion or asterisks or how steroid users should get in but have their own wing in Cooperstown or all those other trite arguments.
But leaving Greg Maddux off your Hall of Fame ballot is so outrageously stupid that the sport does need to recognize that some of these self righteous, self important baseball writers are simply using their vote as a “Look At Me! Look At Me!” stunt. Like this dickhead knew exactly what he was doing today leaving Maddux and Glavine off his ballot. He’s been the talk of the baseball world today. Articles being written about him and tweets being sent about him. Blogs like mine talking about him. I almost feel like an idiot playing into his hand here. But its just such an obvious publicity stunt for attention to leave off two of the best pitchers of all time who have absolutely zero suspicion of steroid use. Maddux, as much as I hate him, should have most certainly been the first unanimous candidate ever. At this point I feel like voting should just be anonymous to prevent shit like this. I don’t know much else about the voting process to know if voting anonymously would somehow fuck things up, but taking away the chance to be the one dick who left Maddux off or the one asshole who votes for Aaron Sele like last year should be the first issue that the Hall of Fame addresses. Don’t get me wrong theres a goddam laundry list of other issues as well – but guys like Ken Gurnick just fucking around just for some short lived attention is the worst part about these yearly debates on whos in and whos out.


And as I was writing this, Jim Bowden tweeted this dude is giving up voting from now on:
What a fucking chump.