Wednesday, 4 a.m.
There are lessons to be taken from the legends. There are morals in the lore. For all of the stories that will be told, and retold, from this year's Baseball Hall of Fame inductees, there are messages for the rest of us.
All you have to do is pay attention.
1. The Unanimous Guy: It's okay to agree on basic facts. The sun rises in the East. Death waits for us all. There is music on the radio. Oh, yeah. And Mariano Rivera is the best darned closer who ever put on cleats.
How good was Rivera? No one -- no one -- voted against him. No Yankee-haters. No wise-acre guy who doesn't want anyone to be unanimous because, by golly, Babe Ruth -- who played when televisions showed games on the radio -- wasn't unanimous. No contrarians. Four-hundred and 25 voters vote, and all of them had their thumbs up.
It's amazing when you remember that the closer is a relatively new phenomenon. I read a stat Tuesday night that said when Rivera
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started closing games, there were only two relievers in the Hall of Fame. Now, it's as essential as a good shortstop.
Rivera saved 652 games for the Yankees, and he was a part of five World Series winners. If you keep him out of the Hall, you might as well shut it down.
2. DHs are people, too: For a long time, the voters didn't seem to think so. Remember the snarky asides that DH's were "half a ballplayer." But Martinez was a solid contributor.
It was a 10-year wait for Martinez -- who was in his final year of eligibility. Martinez joins Red Ruffing (1967), Ralph Kiner (1975), Jim Rice (2009) and Tim Raines (2017) as the only players to be elected in their final turn.
Martinez didn't play his first full season in the majors until he was 27.
3. Drugs are bad ... still: Neither Roger Clemens nor Barry Bonds, both suspected of PED usage, came close to making the cut in this, their seventh chance. Clemens was named on 59.5% of the submitted ballots while Bonds received 59.1%, falling 66 and 68 votes shy, respectively.
Both players would be shoo-ins without the suspicions. Bonds won seven MVP awards; Clemens won seven Cy Youngs. But any linkage to performance enhancers can ruin a player's chances.
4. Why not the Crime Dog? In his final year on the ballot, Fred McGriff fell far short of eligibility. It's a shame. If you take away the 1994 strike, he would have had more than 500 homers. If you strip away the numbers of the PED users, his would been among the best in the game.
Even at that, it's easy to build a case that McGriff was a better player than Martinez and Harold Baines.
McGriff was 10th in the voting with 169 votes.
5. You don't have to win 300 anymore: For years, that was the golden number for pitchers. But this year, Roy Halladay got in after only 203 wins.
Get used to it. Baseball has turned into such a game of matchups and specialists that a starting pitcher doesn't win as often as he used to. Wins were never a reliable basis of judging a pitcher, of course, which means that from now on, voters will have to look deeper.
Halladay did win enough that he had a perfect game and a no-hitter in the playoffs.
6. The Moose is loose: Mike Mussina barely snuck into the Hall, getting only 76.7 percent of the vote. He made the cut by seven votes.
Still, he seems to fit. He had some of the best stuff in the game, and he left a lot of memories.
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