The Jonah Keri Podcast, Episode 11 (Part 3)
15 December 2010
Continuing our Baseball Hall of Fame Week on the Jonah Keri Podcast (check out my interviews with Tim Raines and Dave Van Horne), today’s guest is long-time Toronto Sun baseball columnist Bob Elliott. Bob was one of 16 people (one of four writers within that group of 16) to sit on the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Expansion Era Committee. The committee weighed the Hall of Fame cases of 12 candidates, finally making Pat Gillick its sole choice on this year’s ballot.
The topics Bob Elliott and I cover:
- 1:25-10:38: Inside the room with the HOF Veterans Committee
- 10:39-16:30: Pat Gillick: what clinched his HOF vote, and personality quirks
- 16:31-20:48: George Steinbrenner’s HOF candidacy
- 20:49-23:00: Marvin Miller’s impact on the game
- 23:01-23:58: Secrecy in the Veterans Committee process
- 23:59-26:44: Cy Young voting
- 26:45-30:09: The evolution of statistics over the years
- 30:10-34:14: Is Tim Raines a Hall of Famer?
- 34:15-41:19: Alan Trammel, Bert Blyleven, and flaws in the voting process
- 41:20-end: Considering performance-enhancing drugs in HOF voting
Player embedded below. To download, right click here.
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Elliott made the argument here, and I’ve seen it made elsewhere plenty of times, that Gillick deserves acclaim for his teams not making the postseason after he left. This makes absolutely no sense to me. I’m willing to give him a pass in Toronto, since he built that team from the ground up, and obviously the Phillies have continued their success since his departure (although it’s worth noting he didn’t have anything to do with acquiring any of the 2008 core), but is he really a Hall of Famer for having short-term success in Baltimore and Seattle before those situations completely imploded? I don’t want to knock the success he had with the Blue Jays, which admittedly is a huge reason why he’s being inducted, but he walked into pretty good situations in Baltimore, Seattle, and Philadelphia and then didn’t stick around to “build” a winner in the true sense of the word.
Absolutely fair point