Winners Win! – After his MLB days, Craig Biggio coached both of his sons at St. Thomas High School in Houston (my alma mater). He also led the Eagles to a state championship. – Winners Win!
Today, Wednesday January 8, 2014, @ 1:00 PM CST, Craig Biggio gets his “yes” or “support falls short” call about his 2014 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Houston hearts are strongly on the side that this will be the year, that Caig Biggio’s second year of eligibility will land him with the 75% support he needs from the American Baseball Writers Association for induction as the first Houston Astro selected on merit for the Hall of Fame. Others, like Nolan Ryan, have made it there with “Astros” on their resume’, but these, as typified by Ryan, made their biggest merit splash elsewhere.
Ryan would have gone into the HOF as an Astro, but, as most of you recall, the penurious money moves of former Astros owner John McMullen chased him north to the Texas Rangers, where he earned even greater fame as the aging pitching machine who threw two more no-hitters and established the career strikeout record for all pitchers, all time. Meanwhile, Ryan was leaving during the early years of Mr. Biggio’s twenty-year run as a pure Astro career, establishing himself as one of the most versatile multiple-position all-stars in history on his way to 3,060 career hits.
I hate the arrogance that’s built into the current system of selecting players for induction, but, given the psychological flaws of ego that live inherently within the framework of the human condition in general, there’s probably not much we can do about it. My principle irritation is with those voters, historically and contemporarily, who claim they rarely, if ever, vote for a candidate in his first year on the ballot. If they are telling the truth, then these are the people who kept Biggio out of the Hall last year, when his 68.2% support left him outside the door. If it’s any consolation, there were voters back in 1936 that didn’t vote for Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb on the very first HOF vote of all time. There were not enough of these types (04.9% against Ruth; 01.8% against Cobb) to keep the two super-greats out of Cooperstown, but gee-ma-nee, to withold support for guys who still are the gods of baseball greatness is the epitome of attention-seeking arrogance.
And don’t get me started on voters who apparently vary their support for people like long-term candidate Lee Smith from 2012 to 2013. Smith’s support vote total fell from 290 in 2012 to 270 in 2013. What did a guy who had been retired for years do in one uneventful year to go from worthy to unworthy of induction? Maybe we should insist upon individual vote disclosure and a statement of reasons for these apparently capricious changes of the mind in some voters.
The selection system will have to hang in the air, for now, as a battle for another day. Let’s get ready for what we hope will be the good news about Craig Biggio at 1:00 PM today.
And, PLEASE, once the word is in, please post your comments to and about Craig Biggio in the comment section that follows this column. I will be honored to collect them all and send them to Craig, if he doesn’t first read them here.
Thank you! – And GO, CRAIG, GO – All the Way to Cooperstown!
Tags: Craig Biggio HOF Vote
The Pecan Park Eagle 
January 9, 2014 at 1:05 am |
Two votes shy. Dave Krieger, a sports writer here in Denver who voted for Biggio, said the ten-vote limit and the fact that one voter turned in an empty ballot resulted in an increase in the denominator, which made it just short of the 75% needed for election to the Hall of Fame. Maybe next year, Craig.
January 9, 2014 at 6:35 am |
Sportswriter Murray Chass said he won’t vote for Craig Biggio because he used PEDs. He said he got his information from other players. I wonder how many voters acted on that belief?
January 9, 2014 at 5:26 pm |
Bill, I sent the following to one of the skeptics: I just spent a while gazing at Craig Biggio’s career stat pattern, and I’m guessing that you read the spike in his homeruns starting in 2001 as the anomalous deviation in what should have been his decline phase. However, his batting average and OPS strike me as fitting a reasonable tail-end decline pattern, as does the uptick in his strikeouts, although it also looks like he might have started swinging more for the fences in the mid-90s. But that abrupt uptick in homeruns in 2001 is very easy to explain by the move from the Astrodome to Minute Maid Park. He pulled the ball a lot and the Crawford Boxes are a pop fly away from home plate. I see no evidence in his stat pattern of a guy who started using PEDs at any clearly defined point. He never added the body bulk of a juicer. I don’t care what some players alleged to Murray Chass. I think Biggio played clean.
January 9, 2014 at 5:48 pm |
For what it’s worth, Wikipedia has a story about how Murray Chass accused Stan Musial of racism, based on a second-hand story about Curl Flood and other black players being refused service at Stan’s restaurant–even though the story was refuted by Flood’s son. Chass doesn’t believe in innocent until proven guilty when it comes to hearsay.