Jeff Bagwell should, and probably will, join the 2011 class of Baseball Hall of Famers. His numbers are great, he's a well-liked one-team player, and nobody is accusing him of steroid use. At least, not directly. On Monday, Danny Knobler at CBS Sports wrote that he is only voting for Jack Morris and Roberto Alomar.
Baseball Hall Of Fame Voter Logic, As Applied To Everyday Situations
There are players I’m not voting for this year because I strongly suspect they built their credentials by cheating. And I’ve decided, after much consternation, that I’m not going to vote for them.
Who are they? I can’t tell you.
He can’t tell you. On the other hand, he did tell you. There’s no way Bagwell’s credentials aren’t enough for Knobler; as Hardball Talk points out, he implicated him without mentioning him.
I don’t mean to single out Knobler here -- BBWAA voters have famously employed all kinds of strange lines of logic, including the staggering “I didn’t vote for him because players shouldn’t be voted in unanimously” defense. If you operated by Hall of Fame voter logic in everyday life, what would your life be like? This is how I imagine the morning routine:
7:36 a.m. You lie awake under your sheets, wondering whether you should get out of bed. You would really like to, as getting out of bed is the first step to living life and actually doing things, but it’s very possible that Richard Karn, who famously played the role of Al in Home Improvement, is waiting outside your bedroom door with a sledgehammer, and he intends on smashing your face in, scooping up your teeth from the ground, running away, and using them to frame you for the murder of an obscure European figurehead.
8:04 a.m. You crack an egg on the skillet, but you think a piece of the shell may have found its way into the yolk. You can’t find it. You immediately throw the skillet out the window, fill your bathtub with bleach, and roll around in it for 45 minutes.
8:27 a.m. You begin your commute to work, and hear about a couple of car wrecks on the radio. You will definitely not drive on those streets, and just for good measure, you will arbitrarily avoid streets that strike you as particularly car-wrecky. You decline to explain to your carpool partner what “car-wrecky” means. After two hours of massive detours, your carpool partner asks you if you can just let him drive. “NO!” you shout. “ONLY 539 PEOPLE IN THE WORLD GET TO DRIVE AND YOU ARE NOT ONE OF THEM!” You then make a wrong turn onto another street because it possesses intangibles.
11:40 a.m. You are late to work at the Terrible Logic Factory once again. You are fired, which is a shame, because you were really good at manufacturing terrible logic. You trudge out of the factory, head down, face covered in soot.
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