Hall of Lame

So Goose Gossage got in, which I'm fine with. Jim Rice nearly did, which I am less fine with, and I'm starting to worry that he will now get in next year - no one's ever reached 70 percent and failed to get in the following year, I believe. Oddly, it seems the intervening years have lowered the voters' standards - this was Rice's 14th year on the ballot.

That's kind of dumb, isn't it? Why do players stay on for 15 years (if they get more than 10% of the vote each year)? Why is someone who's not a Hall of Famer in 1995, 2000, or 2005 suddenly very likely to be one in 2009?

My dad was pitching the following idea earlier today: players are on the ballot for three years. Writers say yes or no to each. If 75% haven't said yes after three years, that's it. 15 years is ludicrous. And the writers should bear a lot of the responsibility for this system being as dumb as it is - there are still guys who think that because Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb weren't elected unanimously, no one should be, leading to idiocies over the years like Ted Williams getting only 93% of the vote, Warren Spahn 83%, Mickey Mantle 88%, and Hank Aaron and Willie Mays not being unanimous. And to this day, no one has been. It's so stupid because you know these guys don't think that Mays, say, isn't a Hall of Famer - they just leave him off to make a point that barely made sense 60 years ago. If the Veterans Committee could be re-tooled because it was getting too chummy, surely the regular HOF balloting could be re-tooled. You're a Hall of Famer or you're not. I refuse to believe that Jim Rice's stats have gotten more impressive with time. (If anything they've gotten less impressive - not because the counting stats got dwarfed as much as because people actually look at home/road splits these days.)

One other question to stir discussion: how do you feel about the players of the so-called "Steroid Era?" Surely it's extreme to keep out everyone whose heydays took place mostly between 1995 and 2005 - what do you do with Frank Thomas or Jeff Bagwell or Craig Biggio or Greg Maddux or Ken Griffey Jr., guys who were never even suspected of steroid use but played most of their careers during the era? What do you do with Barry Bonds, who was probably a Hall of Famer before taking anything? What do you do with Sammy Sosa, who doesn't show up in the Mitchell Report and was never significantly accused of anything, but whom everyone suspects of having taken something and whose offensive explosion from 1998 to 2003, followed by a pretty steep drop-off, provokes eyebrow raises? What do you do with a number (500 home runs) that has always meant Hall of Fame enshrinement, when the club has added eight members in the last decade and will almost certainly add two more by the end of next season, and when some new members are suspected of steroid use but many others are not?

(To get you started: I'd vote for anyone who I felt was worthy. While steroid use should be stamped out of baseball, I sometimes find the high-and-mightiness on it to be too much. Ty Cobb is believed to have gambled on games; many old-time ballplayers probably did so under the table. Gaylord Perry is an admitted ball doctorer, yet somehow his cheating is considered cute and cuddly. And if we're never going to know for sure who was on what and when - and I don't think we will - it may be better to cut our losses and just accept things for what happened. It's part of the game's history now whether we like it or not, especially given how long baseball dragged their feet on the problem. But I know not everyone feels this way.)