Prospectus Hit and Run

Unfinished Business

by Jay Jaffe

Last week's piece on steroids and the Hall of Fame vote drew a heavy volume of reader responses, nearly as much as that for my entire JAWS series this year. Unsurprisingly, BP's readers have strong opinions on the matter, and they're not shy about sharing them or about challenging my assertions. A handful of those emails are worth addressing in a mailbag piece to be named later, but given the combination of topic fatigue and inflamed passions, I'm going to let things cool down a bit while clearing my notebook of a few other items, including one that's actually relevant to the 2008 season.

What's the Big(gio) Deal

I will take up one area related to last week's piece, that of the 2013 ballot. The admittedly vague idea of the question as to whether a ballot with Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Mike Piazza would be the best class ever to debut was to compare whatever Hall of Fame-caliber big names were up for a vote, not what the values of the top three or four players were. A few readers pointed out that I should have included recently-retired Craig Biggio in the class of 2013; after all, with 3,000 hits, he's a lock for the Hall. Among the top classes I examined, this does level the field at four players apiece, and it pushes the potential class of 2013 well into the lead:

2013: 482.0 JAWS Bonds (166.8), Clemens (141.8), Biggio (93.0), Piazza (80.4)

1989: 392.0 JAWS Gaylord Perry (100.3), Carl Yastrzemski (98.3), Fergie Jenkins (96.8), Johnny Bench (96.6).

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