Baseball’s Hall of Fame Needs Some Changing

Congratulations goes out to Ken Griffey Junior and Mike Piazza. Both were named last week to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. No player has ever been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame unanimously, but Griffey Jr. came pretty close.  He was three votes shy of being a unanimous choice. He received 99.3 % of the votes and Piazza garnered 83% of the votes which is nothing to sneeze at either.

As I looked down the list there were some very qualified names that didn’t get enough votes to make the Hall. Names like Lee Smith, Trevor Hoffman and Edgar Martinez. In my opinion all three deserve to be in this year.

There were other names Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Roger Clemens on the ballot. Oh, they all got votes, but McGwire, Bonds, Sosa and Clemens may never get in due to their alleged involvement with the use of enhancements.  That too is a shame.

Is it right that they put up monster numbers because they were “juiced up”? No it’s not. But in their own way, they may have saved the interest in the game of baseball at a time when it needed it badly. People loved watching homeruns fly out of ballparks and honestly, they didn’t care if their favorite player was using. They just wanted to see how far that baseball was going to go.

So perhaps, the Hall of Fame Committee needs to take another look at how they admit their members. Maybe a “Juiced up” wing of the Hall needs to be built for the so called “bad-boys” of baseball that deserve to be there. If the Baseball Hall of Fame builds it, they will come. The fans will come because they want to see the busts of McGwire, Bonds, Sosa, Clemens and others on display. And isn’t the Hall of Fame for the fans?

Oh yeah, don’t forget to include baseball’s all-time hit leader…Pete Rose too.