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It's finally over. Maybe you don't care about the Hall of Fame anymore, and that's perfectly valid - Marc Normandin wrote such a good article at SBNation.com about it this morning that I placed it on the front page, and it's absolutely worth your time to read. Yesterday, I threw a bit of a wet blanket on all the hatred for ballots with Morris on them, and how if he made it, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
Apathy is starting to become a very real thing with the Hall of Fame, and alas, Morris received just 61.5% - down from the year before. and he's off the ballot, though he'll be eligible for some later expansion era induction. Morris owns a career 105 ERA+, the same as Barry Zito and Tim Wakefield. It's absurd that it came to this point, but now it's finally over.
Maddux received 97.2%, so those who skewered Ken Gurnick for robbing his chances at a unanimous election can call of the dogs. Glavine gets in at 91.9%, and Frank Thomas got 83.7%. All three of those were eligible for the first time, so while next year's ballot will certainly have several slam dunks of it's own (Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson), it won't be quite as crowded as this year.
Craig Biggio missed the hall by 0.2%, which will bring a lot of heat on the guys that didn't vote him in. He needed two more votes to get in. He'll get there, especially after how close it was this year. If there's a ballot that had ten boxes checked, and one was for Morris and not for Biggio, I take back a lot of what I said yesterday. That sucks.
It wasn't a great year for Edgar Martinez, finishing at 25.2%, but that's to be expected. It's a big dip from the 35.9% he got the year before. There were so many deserving candidates this time around that there was a pretty good argument that he wasn't even among the ten best players eligible, and that's not going to get any easier next season either.
If Edgar is going to get in, it'll probably be after some of this steroid era controversy clears up, and that might be another ten years. His chances don't look great, at least not until some of the old guard gives up their votes and there's a shift in voter motivation. Even then, it's getting harder and harder to see him not getting lost amongst guys with bigger spotlights like Bagwell, Bonds, and Piazza as the years go on.
