Goose finally gets cooked

By Dave “Large” Larzelere
Last year around this time I wrote a piece for No Mas about what I saw as the two major shocks resulting from the voting for the 2007 Baseball Hall of Fame induction.
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In this year’s voting one of those shocks was resolved, as Rich “Goose†Gossage finally gained his much-deserved election to the Hall as the sole member of the class of 2008. As I said last year, this one had to be inevitable after Bruce Sutter made the cut in 2006, because Gossage was at least the equal, if not the superior, of Sutter. Goose becomes only the fifth true reliever to gain entry to the Hall.
My other shock from last year continues unabated, however, and that is the universal lack of support for Mark McGwire’s candidacy. Never did I think that Mac would be a first-ballot guy given the steroids business, but neither did I imagine that he would be shut out of the Hall altogether, which based on the numbers certainly seems likely right now. After receiving just 23.5 percent of the vote in 2007, his first year of eligibility, he bumped that number up only a tenth of a percentage point this year to 23.6 percent. As I pointed out last January, only two men since 1980 eventually have made it into the Hall after posting first-year numbers as bad as Mac’s -- Sutter, who was obviously caught up in the evolving debate about relievers in the Hall, and Billy Williams, the Cubs’ legend whose long battle to make the Hall to my mind can only be considered a statistical anomaly. The fact that Mac’s vote count climbed so infinitesimally this year tells me one thing and one thing only -- he’s going to be frozen out of Cooperstown because of ‘roids. A certain home-run-king miscreant in San Francisco must be scratching his oversized head on that one.
A final note: Based on this year’s numbers, it looks like the great Jim Rice question is going to go down to the wire. Rice just missed the 75 percent cut this year with 72.2 percent of the vote, and next year will be his last year of eligibility with the writers. He probably will make it next year, but I bet it will be a close one. Based on today’s numbers, I’d also say that Andre Dawson’s candidacy looks promising, as the Hawk came in with a solid 65.9 percent. This pleases me, because to my mind Dawson definitely belongs in the Hall, whereas Rice is a borderline case. To emphasize that point, I quote the august Jayson Stark -- “Dawson racked up 2,774 hits, 438 homers and 314 stolen bases. The only other players in history who can match that combination are Willie Mays and Barry Bonds.”↵