Griffey elected to Baseball Hall of Fame in landslide

Griffey was the unanimous victor of the American League MVP Award in 1997 with the Seattle Mariners after batting.

“A trail-what?” I can hear him say, feigning confusion with a wince and a smile.

“What an fantastic life I’ve had in baseball”, Piazza said.

“Sit down”, he said. A player needs 75 percent to gain election, and Bagwell missed by 15 votes and Raines by 23. Hoffman’s 601 saves are the second most ever.

The vote total dropped by 109 from last year because writers who have not been active for 10 years lost their votes under new rules.

The BBWAA announced the elections of Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mike Piazza to Cooperstown.

However, Griffey was willing to talk about why he never gave in to the temptation of using steroids. Clemens is now at 45.2 per cent, Bonds at 44.3. “It’s just an honor to be elected and to have the highest percentage is definitely a shock”, Griffey said during a conference call. “I was just hoping, and the big thing is to get into the Hall of Fame”.

That allowed his first-ballot support to soar. “Alex is one of the greatest players and stories I’ve been around in the game, how he persevered and the changes he made and how he did it and how he led, and he didn’t complain”.

During the next two decades, most of which was spent in Seattle, Griffey hit 630 home runs, the sixth-most ever. When he reached the major leagues in 1989, still a teenager, he joined a franchise that had never had a winning season, had been devoid of star attractions, and played its games in a dark, depressing concrete mausoleum.

Mike Piazza, on the other hand, was an afterthought during the 1988 draft, going to Los Angeles in the 62nd round. “You know, there’s so many opportunities in this game that you can sort of find a role and be an underdog”. However, 2016 will be his 10th year on the ballot, and the Hall of Fame not so long ago lowered the maximum time on the ballot from 15 years to 10 years. The BBWAA’s website has a page where voters can record their ballot almost 130 had done so as of 9 p.m. Wednesday and all of them said they had voted for Griffey. “There was not a day that goes by that I felt I couldn’t get better”. Griffey was the first overall pick in 1987, chosen by the Mariners, becoming the first such player in the Hall. Piazza became the lowest-drafted player to be elected. In addition to helping send the team to their first World Series in 16 years, Piazza’s go-ahead eight inning home run against the Atlanta Braves, just 10 days after the September 11th attacks, will forever be embedded in the brains of Mets fans and New Yorkers forever.

Jim Duquette, the former Mets general manager who was in the organization for much of Piazza’s tenure in NY, said, “People are speculating without any proof or any documentation”.

Piazza, who retired after brief stints with the San Diego Padres and Oakland Athletics, will nearly certainly be wearing a Mets cap on his Hall of Fame plaque.

During a time when some of baseball’s biggest stars were linked to performance-enhancing drugs – power hitters in particular – doubters looked at Piazza’s brawny frame and questioned how a guy who initially languished so far off the radar for scouts could ascend to such heights against elite competition.

Alan Trammell, Lee Smith and Mark McGwire were in their final years of eligibility.