The good, bad and ugly of the 2016 Hall of Fame class

There were 18 candidates worthy of induction into the 2016 Hall of Fame class. Two of them got in. Congratulations to Mike Piazza and Ken Griffey, Jr., both worthy inductees and obvious Hall of Famers. Long after the last hair about first ballots and unanimous votes has been split, both players will be Hall of Famers.

The voting had the ups, downs and sidewayses that it always has, which means it’s time to parse the results and pick out the best and worst of the 2016 Hall of Fame voting. There was good. There was bad. There was ugly.

And there was well-conditioned sexy. But we’ll stick with the good, bad, and ugly for now.

Ken Griffey was the distillation of baseball grace, a vision of limitless talent. Age and corporeal destruction claimed him, as it will claim us and our children and our children’s children and all of your pets, but it’s hard to explain just how fun he was. Bryce Harper is one of my favorite players to watch right now, and he might eventually be one of my favorite players to watch ever, just like Mike Trout. I’ve been privileged to watch Barry Bonds and Buster Posey for years, and their respective talents will always stun me in different ways.

But I’m not sure if I’ve seen a player like Griffey who was better at capturing imaginations and making surly old men feel like children again, while making children as filled with the kind of wonder that children should be filled with. People make a big deal about his decline and injuries, but that’s only because they watched what he was like for the first 10 years.

Mike Piazza was the best at baseball-related things. It’s hard for me not to appreciate anyone who is the clear best at anything in baseball and give them extra Hall of Fame credit. Best knuckleball? I’m listening. Best curveball? A fine tiebreaker if you’re on the fence about Bert Blyleven. Best pickoff move? We’re pushing it now, but you get the idea.

Piazza was one of those players, twice over. He was the best catcher to hit baseballs. As in, ever. Of the 1,700-plus players to wear a catcher’s mask in a major league game, of the thousands to do it professionally, of the tens of thousands to do it in high school and college, no catcher could hit baseballs better than he could. And, in addition to that, he had the best right-handed opposite-field approach I’ve ever seen from a power hitter. His opposite-field home runs were surreal, and no one’s done it better since.

I grew up with a stack of baseball cards that I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what it was like to watch Willie Mays or Roberto Clemente, and I envied the people who did. Then decades passed, and I got into a different wing of the same club. I’ll get to tell my kids about Griffey and Piazza, and if I do my job, I’ll make them jealous*.

^{*Even if I wanted to cover Piazza’s mustache in lye and fire ants when I watched him as a Giants fan.}

Tim Raines fell 23 votes short. The history of the Hall of Fame suggests that he will get a boost next year, in his final year of eligibility, and finally get in. I’m still nervous, though. It’s nonsensical that he has to wait by the phone next year, knowing that it’s up to 23 people to remember something about his career that they couldn’t recall the previous nine times they voted. Maybe those 23 voters exist, like they have traditionally in Hall history.

But maybe they don’t.

And I hate that. Raines in his 20s was as good of a baseball player as you might ever see ... except he wasn’t as good as Rickey Henderson. That’s it, that’s his biggest flaw. Alan Trammell’s candidacy falls in this group, too, as his crime was not being as good as Cal Ripken or Robin Yount, but Raines was better than Trammell. More than that, he was more unique -- a combination of power and speed that was a baseball comet that you should have had to wait 75 years to watch again.

Except Rickey Henderson was right there, doing the same thing, but better. Raines stole 90 bases? Well, Rickey stole 130. Raines played in 23 seasons? Rickey played in 25. Just because Jan Brady doesn’t get the attention that Marcia gets, it doesn’t mean you get to keep her out of the damned Brady Bunch Hall of Fame, you monsters.

Also, to the point above, where I’m hoping I get the chance to describe baseball to future generations and make them jealous, I’ll save an entire night of what it was like to watch Mark McGwire while he was going bananas, and I hope that I can do that era justice.

Everyone knew, even back then. Everyone knew. No one cared, and I’m not exactly sure why. We were all having just too much wacky fun, I suppose. There was a retroactive attempt to honor the only guy who questioned it all, even though at the time, he was considered to be a loud belch in the middle of the symphony.

If you want a contemporary analogy about how nobody cared, it would be like how the entire world enjoyed the National Football League for the last two decades and will enjoy it for the next two decades. No one cares. The money is still spitting out of the broken money hydrant. It’s just too much wacky fun.

McGwire was ‘90s baseball. Baseball existed back then. Fans got excited about it and everything. There will be, like, three hitters from the entire decade. Archeologists will dig this place up and assume that Frank Thomas and Griffey each played for 15 teams and scored 1,000 runs for each of them every season.

The ugly is how the entire ballot is a revisionist referendum on the steroid era with absolutely no coherent voice. I get why Clemens and Bonds are off more than half the ballots. I politely disagree, but really, I get it. The evidence against them is public record, and there’s a lot of it. For all my grandstanding up there about McGwire, at least “he cheated” is an ethos, and it’s not without its logic!

It’s just that ...

For crying out loud, I’m can’t ...

Here goes:

WHY WOULDN’T YOU GIVE THE PITCHERS EXTRA CREDIT, THEN?

The ones without a single link to performance-enhancing drugs, that is. If you give me a list of the five best pitchers of the steroid era, excluding Clemens, I’ll guess that two of them had hair growing out of their toenails, and that’s being conservative. But absent any evidence, wouldn’t you be inclined to give the pitchers extra credit for dealing with the ‘roided up goons?

And yet Curt Schilling and Mike Mussina can’t get in. It absolutely hurts my brain.

I will never vote for a hitter suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs. They made a mockery of the game. Their numbers were artificial and grotesque. Hank Aaron is the true home run king. Roger Maris is the true single-season record holder.

Okay. Fair enough. But why don’t you vote for Mike Mussina?

Oh, his ERA was much too high.

I’m fidgeting and pointing like Lewis Black right now, and it’s hard to type with one finger while gesticulating wildly. I simply don’t get the cognitive dissonance required to be so concerned about hitters being artificial and so dismissive of pitchers. Even ignoring that pitchers’ ERAs were all much higher back then -- even though that kind of context is the whole point of evaluating a Hall of Fame candidate -- wouldn’t you still give Curt Schilling extra credit? Something like, “Yeah, his career 3.46 ERA was high, but he still had (wins, postseason history, strikeouts, whatever), and don’t forget he had to face ‘roided up goons. You know that had to make him work harder.”

The only explanation is that they’re falling into the Bagwell Zone, where laziness masquerades as analysis and the everyone-did-it-so-I-can’t-be-bothered-to-figure-it-out strategy applies to all pitchers, just as it applies to all hitters. Except I still can’t ferret out the secret formula that lets Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, and Tom Glavine through without being subjected to that stupid standard. “You must be this tall or pudgy or normal looking to ride the Cooperstown Fun Coaster.”

Vote for Mike Mussina and Curt Schilling, you twits.

That’s 500 words about the good stuff and 900 on the stuff I don’t like. Sorry about that. Pretend I copied and pasted the Griffey and Piazza sections a couple of times. The good outweighs the bad, almost certainly.

Did you watch Griffey play? Did you watch him rob home runs and crack up, and did you watch him in batting practice with his backwards hat, making people mad who deserve to be mad? Did you watch Mike Piazza’s flat, violent swing on a ball right down the middle, jabbing it 430 feet to right-center where another power hitter would have been lucky to pull it 400 feet? Did you see those players back then? Did you see them?

I did. It was transcendent. Congratulations to Mike Piazza and Ken Griffey, Jr., who are in the Hall of Fame, just like we knew they would be when we watched them play.

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