Why certain players gain election over other players who on the surface appear equally, if not more deserving, has as much to do with a voting member's bias than anything else. Generally local writers vote for players they covered on a daily basis. Same goes for writers who grew up watching these players. Big name, big market players seem to attract more attention than smaller market players.
There really is no rhyme or reason for why a guy gets in on the first ballot, and why it takes other players 15 years, as we saw last year with Jim Rice.
Andre Dawson's election into the Hall of Fame Wednesday is proof as to how goofy the voting system is. Dawson has always been deserving of election into the Hall. His numbers have not changed one iota from the first time he was eligible. Dawson was the premier outfielder from the late 1970's and throughout the 1980's. His blend of power and speed is matched only by Willie Mays and Barry Bonds as the only other members of the 400 home run/300 stolen base club. Does Dawson deserve a spot in Cooperstown? Absolutely. Did he deserve it in 2002, his first year of eligibility? YES!
So for Bert Blyleven, Roberto Alomar, Jack Morris, Barry Larkin, Lee Smith, and maybe even Edgar Martinez, it's very likely that their time will come at some point over the next few years.
Unfortunately, they're at the whim of sportswriters who have way too much power over the election process.
How Baseball Super Star Fred McGriff only garners 21.5 percent of the vote is to me, an absolute farce. McGriff retired with 493 home runs. The Crime Dog was one of the top first basemen in both the American and National League. McGriff singlehandedly sparked the 1993 Braves to the NL West pennant, and he won a World Series with the Braves in 1995. Save for the strike in 1994, McGriff would surely have the 500 home runs that would grant him automatic admission into the Hall.
While sportswriters straddle their high horse over numbers inflated by performance enhancing drugs, there's little doubt, and even less evidence that McGriff ever used steroids. And yet McGriff's 116 votes were 12 less than Mark McGwire's 128.
It's clear that the voting process for the HOF is flawed. In fact, the only sensible thing to the voting is that retired players have up to 15 years of eligibility.
But almost always, the writers either re-examine a player that they've previously voted no for. Or they slowly die off, and new voting members are admitted and help sway the voting.
At the end of the day, the numbers will speak for themselves.
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