Ken Griffey Jr., Mike Piazza selected for baseball’s Hall of Fame

But there are reasons players get 10 years on the ballot. For those that are, we know it’s well-earned; if you got votes on 75% of ballots from the (seemingly) stingy old newspaper dudes at the BBWAA, folks, there’s no question. So, a similar boost for Clemens and Bonds may not occur every year. This year is no exception.

To one of the best players in the 90s and of all time, congrats Ken Griffey Jr, youll forever be the kid. As is tradition with Griffey Jr., the shirt also features him with a backwards hat on, which he made cool in baseball. My view on candidates who are in what I perceive as a gray area of suspicion is that I am going to wait until their 10th (and final) year of eligibility before voting yes. Griffey will go to Cooperstown with the highest vote percentage at 99.3, getting 437 of 440 ballots.

The Norristown, Pa., native was a 62nd-round draft pick by the Dodgers in 1988. The Mariners lost the first two games of the best-of-five series.

“What an wonderful life I’ve had in baseball”, Piazza said. The list could go on and on.

Hoffman was likely hurt by the writers’ reluctance to elect relievers to the Hall. This was Wagner’s first year of eligibility for the Hall of Fame. He certainly falls into this category.

Griffey, 46, had 2,781 hits and 630 home runs in his 22-year career with the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds.

Those seem like fairly indisputable numbers.

Griffey and Piazza were power hitters who played amid the heart of baseball’s steroid era. Probably not. The reality is that there’s publicity, not good publicity, but publicity nonetheless in being contrary. “Ken played on a division championship-winning team in 2008, and he provided Sox fans with great memories that will not be forgotten”.

Will Griffey break Seaver’s first-ballot record? All four players were strongly linked to PED use – so strong that I doubt if they’ll ever get in by a vote. He also was as great an ambassador for the game as there ever was. Both as a teammate and as a player, it was obvious that he was a Hall of Famer.

With a solid chance to finally gain induction, Raines spoke about what it would be like to stand on the stage on induction day and join the 70 living Hall of Famers.

As we’ve seen with Mike Piazza’s gradual rise up the ballot, it takes time for voters to come around, even in the more complicated cases such as these.

There’s some evidence that it could happen. Crasnick had not voted for either guy in previous years. So for me, this is really about Clemens and Bonds.

It should be noted that MassLive.com’s Ron Chimelis is not one of those voters.

Several prominent writers, such as Ken Rosenthal and Jon Heyman of MLB Network, Joel Sherman of the New York Post, and John Shea of the San Francisco Chronicle, to name a few, made that leap with this vote.

Chimelis is not alone in this line of thinking. The climb for Bonds and Clemens may not be so quick, but it could end up in the same place. They both received in excess of the 75% of the required vote. Sosa has also been stained by accusations of performance-enhancing drug use.

Some of those substances were allowed at the time but later banned by Major League Baseball.

McGwire was infamously evasive in his 2005 congressional testimony. Hall of Fame backstop Johnny Bench tweeted. Unfortunately for McGwire, the actual voters do not appear to be impressed. Raines spoke last spring of the Henderson comparisons and what it would mean to be ushered into the Hall alongside friend Andre Dawson. A year ago, Clemens was named on 37.5 percent of the ballots and Bonds on 36.8 percent.