Gordon: Twitterverse decries Biggio exclusion Live

Greg Maddux is headed to the Baseball Hall of Fame. So is his longtime Atlanta Braves cohort Tom Glavine.

Frank Thomas also made the cut, but poor Craig Biggio -- one of the all-time great Cardinal killers -- missed election by just two votes.

Perennial also-ran Jack Morris fell short for the final time, making this native Detroiter sad. That guy was a monster on the mound in big games, although there is no way to quantify presence with statistical formulas.

The latest balloting of the Baseball Writers Association of America triggered lots of hand-wringing and spleen venting. There are many problems with the Hall of Fame voting process, including:
 
  • The panel of baseball writers is much too large, including voters have been gone from the press box for a long time -- and too many who never really reported on the sport with any depth or frequency.
  • Voting rationale is all over the map. Some voters think too hard, others don't think hard enough. Some use their vote to further an agenda. Some use it to draw attention to themselves. Some are slaves to sabermetrics, others rely on only the simplest statistics to make their cause. Some vote for players they liked personally. Some shun those who were mean to them.
  • Some voters complain they get to select just 10 names. Others refused to vote for 10 players, preferring to honor only a select few.
  • Voters are all over the map over steroid abuse, which is just one of the many ways players have used chemistry to enhance their performance. That process began decades before Mark McGwire went all Paul Bunyan on us and it continues today. (Old school example: How did Denny McLain win 31 games in one season? Chemistry.)
  • Those voters who insist on banning steroid cheats from the Hall can only guess which players juiced and how much they juiced. Dabblers are lumped in with heavy users. Innocent are lumped with the guilty. And many players voters believe to be clean were, in fact, juicers too. They just didn't get caught or implicated.


Anyway, here is how the Twitterverse responded to today's news:







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