Ken Griffey Jr.’s No

The identities of the three writers who did not vote for Griffey was not immediately known. With 99.3 percent of the vote, Griffey surpassed Tom Seaver’s 98.8 percent and all of the other 118 players voted in by the BBWAA, including guys in the inaugural class named Ruth, Cobb and Mathewson in 1936.

But the board also purged the voting body of about 100 writers, none of whom have actively covered the sport within the past 10 years.

New York’s star backstop joins Ken Griffey Jr.as the two representatives of the 2016 Hall of Fame Class.

Griffey and Piazza had contrasting treks to stardom. When Piazza became eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2013, he seemed to create a whole new subset of candidates: players who were rumored to have dabbled in PEDs – without concrete evidence – yet never tested positive or were suspended by Major League Baseball. Piazza was taken by the Los Angeles Dodgers with the 1,390th pick on the 62nd round in 1998; since the draft started in 1965, the lowest draft pick elected to the Hall had been John Smoltz, taken with selection 574 on the 22nd round in 1985.

Linked to steroids in the past, Roger Clemens (45.2 percent) and Barry Bonds (44.3) gained more votes than previous year but remain a long way from the threshold to Cooperstown. The knock on him is his potential connection to steroids and his defense. There were whispered stories that he confided in certain friends and media members, admitting he had indeed used steroids. “Knowing how many great players had to wait, it keeps it in perspective”. But to get the highest vote percentage ever was a shock, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2016.

They’re not the Yankees but the Mets have had their moments: only two championships but they’ve now played in five World Series, including this most recent one, and several periods as a contender during their 54 years of existence.

Raines, considered the greatest leadoff hitter not named Rickey Henderson, also thanked the bilingual fans of Montreal in French in a fourth tweet. Both were elite base stealers with extra-base power and on-base ability that made their cases solid.

And there’s no nice way to say this so I’ll just say it: Older voters will continue to die, regardless of how many years since they last stepped inside a press box. “There was Rickey and then there was me”. “I can’t control any of that, so I don’t worry about those things”. He had more attempts. This is a great day for Mariners fans and really all baseball fans to celebrate his outstanding career and love of the game.

The Hall of Fame’s board of directors would like to be done with Bonds and Clemens. “The way people talked about that stuff, I didn’t give a shit…It never occurred to me that I might become part of the problem”.

Whether Griffey himself actually wants to do that is yet to be seen. “He just said ‘Not now kid, I gotta run'”. If you have a group of players worthy of the Hall, and an individual player compares very favorably to that group, you have a Hall-worthy player by definition. I think that’s something they really took to, and saw I wasn’t here to sort of be a rockstar, (but) to just go out and do my job.

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

Raines should take heart in the realization nobody ever asks how many years it took. That is what Tim Raines is: “the definition of a Hall of Famer”.