The Pecan Park Eagle

Craig Biggio is a close 2nd place in the all time career HBP category.

One Recipe for Craig Biggio’s Hall of Fame Induction.

Please follow the instructions carefully:

1) Take all the active voting members of the Baseball Writers of America and boil their heads in water for three to five years.

2) At the same time, marinate Craig Biggio’s qualifications through an audio visual device that will be ready for presentation whenever the voters’ brains have been softened to a receptivity level on the matter  of Mr. Biggio’s deserved induction into the Baseball Hall f Fame.

3) After the head-boiling period, take any remaining resistance from voters with a grain of salt.

4) The brain-softening and well-marinated material presentation will come together as the perfect time for a positive vote in Mr. Biggio’s behalf.

5) Take the vote and wait three minutes for a persuasive ballot in favor of Mr. Biggio.

6) Wait for at least one of the voters to shout: “Why didn’t we think of this man three to five years ago – when he first became eligible for our vote?”

7) Place the news of Craig Biggio.s  HOF selection on social media and wait five minutes for the first one million tweets of approval.

7) Allow Mr Biggio 24 hours for a normal resumption of all bodily functions and , Voila, prepare the candidate’s plaque for installment in Cooperstown.

Too bad it’s not that simple. Last night during the 5-3 Jose Altuve-aided 5-3 American League victory, I kept up my multitasking hobby of playing with stats while I’m watching televised baseball. I decided to check on how many of the straightforward offensive career categories I could find that included Craig Biggio among the Top 100 Players of All Time. I came up 13 categories in which that were true. Only one of the main categories, strikeouts, was a negative achievement. The rest were all a combination of longevity and ability. Here’s a table that best illustrates them:

The 13 Career Categories in Which Craig Biggio is among the Top 100 Players of All Time

Craig Biggio: During his post-career St. Thomas High School caching peios in which he led the Eagles to two state championships.

Craig Biggio could have finished first in the HBP category had he managed 3 more arm bunts off his protective sleeve. As it played out, however, he had to settle for 2nd behind Hugh Jennings of the dead ball era who had 287.

As for those who brush away any positive record that spawns from longevity, I take issue. A guy doesn’t play for 20 years and earn top dollar without being far better than good, I don’t think.If you care to labor over the way Baseball Almanac portrays the data in every category, you will find the place over run with Hall of Famers in the top 100 groups for each positive category.

Craig Biggio deserves to be n the Baseball Hall of Fame and let’s hope the BBWA members soften their heads to see it that way too in 2015. Otherwise, we may need to think about boiling over 200 plus big pots of water. Like a lot of other fans, The Pecan Park Eagle’s angst is undoubtedly going to continue experiencing these little flare-ups until the writers make it right and vote Craig Biggio into Cooperstown where he already belongs.

Have a nice hump day, everybody!

Craig Biggio never liked getting nailed at 2nd on a potential double. We can only imagine how he feels this week.

“If I have doubts about a guy for the Hall of Fame, I don’t vote for a guy,” said veteran MLB.com writer Marty Noble, who said he decided to omit Biggio from his ballot after some former players accused the Astro of using steroids. “I know what I heard and know the tone of voice that I heard from a lot of players. I really don’t know how many I spoke with over the course of a week.”

… Jesus Ortiz, The Houston Chronicle, Thursday, January 9, 2014, Page c4.

By his reported remarks, writer Marty Noble stands out as an example of the problem facing Craig Biggio in search for that rightful and deserved place in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Please note that Noble did not omit Biggio from his 2014 ballot for any reasons that cast aspersions upon his qualifications and accomplishments as a player. Noble was hastened to caution by the ways in which some of Biggio’s player contemporaries spoke of him through a series of uncounted contacts that Noble had with them “over the course of a week.”

Week? What week? If you cannot tell us who these people were, Marty Noble, can you, at least, tell us what they said? Did they make clear accusatory statements? Or did they simply speak in hushed innuendo – with suspicious eyes darting left and right as they spoke? Did they present hard evidence of their charges? Or were they merely talking in “a guy told me” tones? Did they get together and conduct a trial of Biggio as an accused PED user, giving him a chance to defend himself as accusers showed convicting proof of his guilt? Or were they simply doing what a lot of people, players and non-players alike are doing – just treating almost everyone from the era who performed well as guilty unless the day comes that each suspect can prove himself innocent?

The PED Era legacy is spreading its cancer of distrust in ways we hate to even acknowledge as the foulest of legacies. PED use is now the sin that can be visited upon innocent people and harm them for life in some instances. A ballplayer does not necessarily have to be convicted in court to be found guilty of PED use. Sometimes, all he has to do is be accused of it by loose talk that plants the virulent seed of suspicion. Once that happens, all the accused needs to do to clear his name is make all those lingering thoughts go away from the minds of millions who’ve already convicted him on the basis of what they’ve either heard or seen in the body language of storytellers.

Craig Biggio deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. He does not need to be victimized by the steroid era syndrome that convicts innocent people by careless speech and innuendo.

In the meanwhile, it continues to be impossible to have a civil discourse on what the writers are doing to some of the greatest, most accomplished stars of the game because of the greater evidence against them as PED users. As far as I know, players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens have never been convicted of drug abuse in a criminal court. The writers’ response to Bonds and Clemens is preponderantly what a few did this year to Biggio. They simply ignored them.

OK, on the larger scale, if we are not going to have a Hall of Fame that includes Pete Rose and Barry Bonds, the two guys with the most hits and most home runs in history, I’m thinking we, at least, need to have a forum discussion on the need for a name change. – How can we continue to call it the Hall of Fame if its going to exclude the two greatest hitting total achievers. Their records are important to any complete history of baseball.

Maybe we should keep “Hall of Fame”, but add the “Hall of Shame” wing for those people who’ve done things on the field that should never be ignored, but who also have done some proven things off the field that most people wish we could ignore.

This also happened 284 other times during the 20-season Astros career of the great Craig Biggio.

In 2013, 569 BBWAA writers held the credentials for voting in the annual selection of inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame. For selection, an eligible party had to receive a minimum of 75% approval in the voting process for induction. For a voting population of 569, that translated to an eligible party getting a minimum of 427 votes of approval (75.3%).

For eligible parties who fell short of induction in the vote, Craig Biggio finished at the top of the heap with 388 votes (68.2%) – or 39 votes short of the 427 total votes he needed for election on his first eligible ballot. It also means that 181 votes (31.%) of the 569 total were withheld from Biggio in 2013 for one of four basic reasons: (1) the voter did not think that Biggio was deserving; (2) the voter does not think that anyone deserves a first ballot ticket to Cooperstown; (3) the voter views Biggio’s numbers as merely the product of longevity and not the fruits of greatness; or (4) the voter was not paying close attention and did not notice Biggio’s name on the ballot.

What about the 2014 ballot? Will Craig Biggio make it to the Hall of Fame then?

Here’s where “next year” always gets interesting for candidates like Biggio, assuming that he is like all previous retired players in the sense that he is now powerless to improve upon the same career numbers that the voters examined “this year”. – If this voting process were totally a logical matter, one would have to ask: If the career numbers for Biggio haven’t changed in the past year, why should the voting numbers change at all?

The answer’s obvious. – The voting culture in baseball is not all that logical or tied to any one standard of what represents greatness.

So, if Biggio loses votes rom the 388 writers who supported him in 2013, it says what? That those voters have had a change of heart, for whatever reason, on his deservedness for the HOF? That being said, at any rate, it is unlikely that Biggio will lose any of his 388 writer votes from this year, unless they are either dead or physically unable to vote by next year.

No, the big question next year is – how many of those 181 hold-back votes this year were firm negations of Biggio or simply a show of “no hands” from those same kind of writers that didn’t vote for Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron on their first ballots.

All Biggio has to do is hold his 388 “yea” votes from 2013 and add 39 more next time and he goes into the HOF in 2014. I think he will get them next time, if something in the meanwhile doesn’t blow through the world of baseball like the Spanish Flu did to the whole planet back in 1918 to depress the urge and desire for accolading anyone new.

I keep thinking of Biggio’s 3,060 hits – and his twenty seasons as an Astro – and of the fact he was both an All Star catcher and second baseman – and of Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell as the “Icons in Bronze” at Minute Maid Park – and of his 285 HBP’s – and of his work with the Sunshine Kids – and of the data reality that only one of the other comparable twenty men who have already made it to “The Hall” as second basemen even came close to amassing – his 668 career doubles total. The great Napoleon Lajoie finished with 657 doubles, eleven shy of the Biggio mark.

Craig Biggio:
Work of Art by Opie Otterstad

If it were up to the people like me who watched him play for twenty years, Craig Biggio would be going into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot opportunity when the 2013 class results of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) poll are announced on January 9, 2013.

But it isn’t up to everyday lifelong fans like you and me. It’s up to a national group of sportswriters who may or may not have seen Craig Biggio play, people who have achieved their right to decide based on their choice of professions and, hopefully, some considerable study of the game and its history. I would hope too that they each voter has had some experience playing the game, even if it was only kid ball or sandlot, so that they may, at least, possibly own a deeper personal appreciation for how hard baseball is to play brilliantly at any level.

What I’m saying is that history tells us the voters are governed by factors that are far more subjective than the stats generated by the HOF candidates during their careers. Selection here is not as easy as the everyday test for “is the sun hot?” The BBWAA is filled with some arrogant human beings who wouldn’t vote for the sun on the first ballot if the question was “what is the cause of sunburn?”

No one, no matter how obviously great he was as a player, has been voted into the HOF with 100% of the votes on the first ballot and few have gotten the 75% they need to be elected their first rattle out of the box.

Craig Biggio is not the kind of candidate who would be expected to be everyone’s choice for a number of good reasons. For example, some voters who never really saw him play over some of his best stretches may look only at the bottom line to see that he collected 3,060 hits, but hit only .281 over twenty years. These will conclude that his hit totals are simply a product of his playing durability over time and that he doesn’t deserve the HOF, at least, not on the first ballot, because he didn’t post a plus .300 batting average for his career. Others will take the “nobody gets in on the first ballot” approach and not even waste time on something as frivolously simplistic as the previously offered consideration.

As Brian T. Smith noted in his article in today’s Sunday Houston Chronicle article of 1/06/13, Jackie Robinson and Joe Morgan are the only two primarily second basemen to be inducted into the HOF on the first ballot, but that Robinson’s case was boosted by his role in breaking down the color line and Morgan was riding the wave of the Big Red Machine dynasty in Cincinnati. Biggio, another primarily second baseman, was neither a civil rights trailblazer nor a member of any dynasty in Houston. Biggio’s only trip to the 2005 World Series resulted in his Astros getting swept in four games by the Chicago White Sox. Historical precedence by position weighs in on the side of “wait ’til next year, Bidge.”

A Wishing Well Thought. Maybe the voters will catch the virus that inundates Houston’s need to feel good about something in 2013. After two consecutive 100-loss seasons and prospects for another coming this year as the largely unpopular move of the Astros to the American League unfolds on the heels of a roster purge of established big league talent, perhaps the HOF voters will be affected by the city’s in-the-air need to have something to feel good about now.

Maybe the voters will get such a bad case of this Houston Sympathy virus that they will vote Jeff Bagwell into the Hall along side of his Astros “salt and pepper” partner, Craig Biggio.

My Final Take. Wishing never makes anything happen. I think Biggio has a chance of going in this first time, but the odds are against it. If he misses this time, which will disappoint, but not surprise, I think he will be close enough to 75% this year to make it next time. Those 3,060 hits scream too loudly to be ignored for long. Just as importantly, Craig Biggio possesses the character cachet that HOF voters would prefer for the faces of both the HOF and the first true-blue Astros inductee.

As for Bagwell, I’m less hopeful. I don’t see him going in this year and I will not be surprised to see him register fewer votes this time. His negative weights are his association by physical appearance and production during the ‘roids era with some of those who’ve come closer to actual conviction of abuse who are now on the ballot to bring that issue back to the public mind. Also, I think the shortfall impact on his career home runs total that was caused by the shoulder damage that brought about his early retirement will now hurt him. “449” and his record for the disastrously lost 1994 season aren’t enough power noise to carry him over the hill with many voters.

The Truth. We’ll all find out in three days.