Who's in, who's out, who's next: Historic Hall class' huge effect on future ones

OK, deep breath. This is a cleansing paragraph. Out with all the rage here. No, Randy Johnson was not a unanimous choice in his election Tuesday to the Baseball Hall of Fame. (Ridiculous!) Neither was fellow future inductee Pedro Martinez. (Absurd!) Joining them this July will be John Smoltz, who got in on the first ballot, too. (Standards are too low these days!) And Craig Biggio is finally a Hall of Famer. (Shoulda been already!)

Now that the nonsense that has pervaded the Hall of Fame voting is out of the way, let’s get practical – novel concept – and try to understand what the results of Tuesday’s announcement mean.

Most notably: This is the largest class chosen by the Baseball Writers Association of America since 1955, when Joe DiMaggio, Ted Lyons, Dazzy Vance and Gabby Hartnett got the requisite 75 percent. DiMaggio, by the way, was not a first-ballot Hall of Famer. He failed to get elected in his initial year while Rabbit Maranville, he of the career .258/.318/.340 line, appeared on more than 82 percent of the ballots. Which ought to serve as a reminder to the anger monkeys: Compared to how things used to be, it ain’t that bad today.

Sorry. Hypocritical snarkiness over. Johnson and Martinez were no-doubters. Johnson combined the peak of Sandy Koufax with the longevity of Warren Spahn. He might be the last 300-game winner. He was a mulletudinal, bird-slaying, fastball-slider menace. And he isn’t even the most dominant pitcher of this class. That honor belongs to Pedro, a deserved mononym, author of perhaps the single finest season of pitching ever spun: 2000, the steroidiest of the steroid years, in which he put up a 1.74 ERA and the remaining pitchers in the league mustered a 4.78. He was arguably better the season before, with 313 strikeouts and 37 walks. Together, they are chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream. It is impossible to lose with either.

Smoltz’s case is slightly less convincing, very similar to those of Curt Schilling and Mike Mussina, who remain significant leaps from their warranted inductions. And Biggio, after falling short by two votes last season, made it comfortably in this, his third time on the ballot, and will help clear desperately needed space for the writers hemmed in by a PED-induced ballot glut.

That, actually, is the sneaky-notable portion of Tuesday’s proceedings: The ballot so overstuffed that it forced writers to leave off players may well be a thing of the past. A glance at the next five years reveals just five surefire first-ballot Hall of Famers: Ken Griffey Jr. in 2016, Chipper Jones and Jim Thome in 2018, Mariano Rivera in 2019 and Derek Jeter in 2020.

Meaning: The candidacies of Mike Piazza, Jeff Bagwell, Edgar Martinez, Schilling, Mussina and especially Tim Raines now leap to the forefront. Only twice in the first 75 years of Hall voting had writers selected three first-ballot candidates in the same election. It has happened each of the last two years, and its effect on the cases of the aforementioned six was rather deleterious.

Now, with Junior as easy of a checkmark as possible, it allows Piazza to scratch for that final 5.1 percent after hitting 69.9 Tuesday. And his induction may prompt those holding off on Bagwell because of similar PED suspicion to pocket the speculation and send in Biggio’s running mate. Martinez is their hitting contemporary, his production matching the purity of his stroke. Not a single new starting pitcher worthy of consideration will appear on a ballot until Roy Halladay and Andy Pettitte in 2019, meaning Schilling and Mussina have three elections to gain the necessary momentum.

And then there’s Raines, now at 55 percent, up from his high of 52.2 percent, the path clear for him to make hay in his final two cracks. Were it not for the Hall of Fame’s backward attempt to blackball Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens by cutting the number of chances a player gets from 15 to 10, Raines’ induction would be a fait accompli. Instead, it will be an intense rush to 75 percent, full of the politicking that is unbecoming but necessary when a deserving player finds himself twisting in arbitrary crosswinds.

Bonds and Clemens’ candidacies are, for all intents and purposes, dead. Bonds jumped about 2 percent to 36.8; Clemens the same at 37.5. The 75 percent threshold is too great for such polarizing men, as Mark McGwire (10 percent) and Sammy Sosa (6.6 percent) proved. They join Lee Smith (down from 50.6 percent in 2012 to 30.2 this year), Alan Trammell (25.1 percent with one year left) and Don Mattingly, who in his final season of eligibility mustered just 9.1 percent. The Hall of Very Good is loaded with such players, and Larry Walker, Gary Sheffield, Jeff Kent and Fred McGriff seem destined to join them. Perhaps a few of the players who gain eligibility over the next half-decade can avoid such fate.

In 2016, Trevor Hoffman has two decades of closing ballgames and Billy Wagner has his insane numbers as a closer and Jim Edmonds a sneaky-excellent career with high on-base percentages and incredible center-field defense.

A year later comes the inimitable swing of Vlad Guerrero and three cases with fatal flaws. Jorge Posada’s reputation as good but not great. Pudge Rodriguez’s mid-career growth and subsequent shrinking, like helium being let out of a balloon. And Manny Ramirez’s positive drug tests and for many the dark shadow they cast over numbers that scream Hall.

Come 2018, Johnny Damon and Omar Vizquel can argue for the power of longevity while Scott Rolen tries to burnish his solid-enough offensive output with eight All-Star appearances and seven Gold Gloves. The secondary group in 2019 is perhaps the finest, with Halladay a should-be inductee, Todd Helton another test case to the Coors Field bias infecting Walker, and Andy Pettitte primed to ride his fistful of rings into consideration.

However ugly the discourse on the Hall of Fame gets, whatever nadir its devolution reaches, this day remains a hallmark on baseball’s annual calendar because of just how well it encapsulates the sport. It breathes discussion, thrives on debate, lives for the nuances the voting exposes. The rage is palpable, and only one thing in these cases is certain: It’s not going anywhere.

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