During the top of the 6th inning, the YES Network revealed the results of their nightly text poll which asked if viewers thought Ken Griffey Jr. would be a first ballot Hall of Famer or not.It's a really stupid question, right? I mean, he is one of the guys that gets named when you talk about players who people think almost definitely didn't take performance enhancing drugs, probably the most iconic player of his era, played 22 seasons in the Bigs, made the All-Star team in 13 of them, has 630 home runs, won the 1997 AL MVP, has five more top 5 finishes and won 10 straight Gold Gloves while playing a premium defensive position. He has a better chance of becoming the first unanimus HoF inductee in the history of the game than not getting in on the first ballot.
Uh...
Michael Kay and Al Leiter took the results of the vote to task on air, so I'm not exactly breaking new ground here, but I can certainly use more vulgarity than they did.
Seriously, what the fuck? We think HoF voters are clueless, but if the vote was conducted among people who responded to a YES Network text poll, they would have made him wait an entire year (at the least) to get in because... um... they are fucking clueless?
I think there are a few possibilities here:
- People honestly have no concept of what it takes to get into the HoF and/or Ken Griffey's career because 14 year old kids are the only ones who respond to text polls and they weren't mentally conscious when Griffey was in his prime.
- It's a small sample size and, as we've delved into before, that sample is badly skewed.
- They are stupid. No one has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
- The respondents are only Yankee fans, as opposed to baseball fans. But even still, if the only time you watched Griffey was when he played the Yankees and listened to the broadcast, there's a good chance that one of the announcers - amid the praise the were lavishing upon him over the clip of the home run he stole from Jesse Barfield - specifically referred to him as a "first ballot Hall of Famer".
- They just pressed the wrong button.
- Voters are confusing the term "first ballot" with "unanimous". Maybe people have just enough knowledge about the game to know that no one has ever gotten all the vote in their first year of eligibility but don't know the term or aren't paying close enough attention to the question.
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Possibilities:
ReplyDelete* A lot of these Yankee Fans forgot what a great player he really was, before he got hurt.
* A lot of these Yankee Fans dismiss what he did because it was in small markets, Seattle and Cincinnati.
* A lot of these Yankee Fans figure he was probably on the juice, too -- it would explain his later injuries.
* A lot of these Yankee Fans are still mad at him for October 1995.
* A few of these Yankee Fans might even still remember he once made disparaging remarks about the team, something to do with the way he was treated by Billy Martin and/or Stadium security when he was a kid and his father was playing for us.
None of these arguments would be fair to Griffey. But they might explain why 30 percent of respondents wouldn't think he would be a first-ballot HOFer -- which, once we think about it, is not necessarily the same as saying they wouldn't vote for him the first time he's eligible.
But "the most iconic player of his era"? When you consider everything that happened in that era, I think it would be safer to conclude that its most iconic player would be either Roger Clemens or Alex Rodriguez -- for good reasons and bad ones.
Only 30%? It's gotta be more than that.
ReplyDeleteWho votes for those polls anyway? I can't imagine doing it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure it makes a difference but I do note that the question isn't whether he's deserving of first ballot but whether he will get in on the first ballot. So maybe some have such little respect for the voters that they think they'll get it wrong. I think the most likely answer though is some people thinking (mistakenly) that he's been tied to steriods in some way.
Maybe they KGB'd it...
ReplyDeleteWhat I want to know is if Ken Griffy Jr. doesn't deserve a first ballot ticket in (let alone a unanimous vote), then who does?
Nesn Poll would have said 97 percent yes.
ReplyDeleteBecause they are smarter.