Baseball, Browns, Ballots

Why is Pete Carroll doing this to himself? Carroll is 74 years old. He’s done pretty much everything a football coach can do. He won multiple college national championships.* He won a Super Bowl. He made a play call that will forever live in infamy. He’s given us countless scenes of him pumping his fist and dancing on the sidelines.

So, hey, go enjoy your life, man! Travel. Write a novel. Start a band. Invent something. I mean, coaching the Raiders? Seriously? How do you think that’s going to turn out?

Lord, grant me the wisdom to know when to leave the stage.

These Browns, I’ve come to realize, are one of the weirdest terrible teams in NFL history. They’re weird because they might have the best defense in the NFL. It doesn’t seem possible to have the best defense in the NFL AND be as bad as they are, but here we are. The Browns had TEN sacks on Sunday. Ten. Myles Garrett had three more sacks — that makes 11 in his last four games, I mean, no one has ever gone on a sack spree like that. Rookie linebacker Carson Schwesinger is playing so well that his coach is comparing him to Ray Lewis. Pro Football Focus ranks Devin Bush as the second-best linebacker in the AFC. Only the Broncos have more sacks. Only the Texans have given up fewer yards. 

Watching that Browns defense humiliate the Raiders on Sunday reminded me: Oh yeah, the Browns absolutely have no business being this bad. There isn’t another bad team out there — and few in memory — that has a defense anything close to this good. When you put the Browns on the field with a truly bad team like the Raiders or Dolphins, you realize: “Hey, these teams are not alike.”

But the Browns earned this — they dumped quarterback Baker Mayfield just before he became a Pro Bowler and bet everything on He Who Shall Not Be Named to take them to the Super Bowl.* They continuously failed to get playmakers. They couldn’t decide who should call plays. 

By the way, on Sunday, Shedeur Sanders became the first Browns quarterback to win his NFL debut since Eric Zeier in 1995. I bring this up for two reasons: 

Sanders made a couple of nice plays on Sunday (and one particularly impressive deep throw on the run). He also made a couple of terrible ones, but that’s to be expected from a rookie — he definitely seemed to have more potential than the Browns’ handpicked rookie starter Dillon Gabriel. Plus, it’s fun that whenever Shedeur made a play, good or bad, we’d get that camera shot of Deion in the stands wearing a cowboy hat. We’ve had so few Taylor Swift appearances this NFL season, it’s nice to get back to the obligatory celebrity shot.

I really, really thought Eric Zeier was going to be an NFL star. I covered Eric at Georgia, and he seemed as NFL-ready as any college quarterback I’ve seen. He just had the look, the quick release, the decision-making ability … it obviously didn’t happen, but I was convinced.

Yep, the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot arrived in the mail over the weekend. I just realized that in all the years of doing this, I’ve never fully gone through what exactly is in the Hall of Fame voting package — this might be because it’s utterly boring. But let’s give it a try anyway:

You get four pieces of paper — if you include the stamped and addressed return envelope as a “piece of paper.”

Front of paper 1: This is a stock letter from Hall of Fame President Josh Rawitch with some basic information — a reminder that candidates who receive 75% or more of the ballots will earn election, and that candidates who receive less than 5% will no longer be eligible for consideration by the BBWAA. The announcement will be on MLB Network on January 20, 2026.

Back of paper 1: These are the Hall of Fame official rules.  There are nine rules listed.

Rules 1 and 2 (“Authorization” and “Electors”) basically explain that the Baseball Writers Association of America votes for the Hall of Fame, and only active and honorary members of the BBWAA are eligible to vote.

Rule 3 (“Eligible Candidates”) is pretty standard stuff — a candidate has to have played for at least 10 seasons and be retired for at least five. One thing I never knew is that if a player dies BEFORE he’s retired for five years, he will be declared eligible in the next election held at least six months after his death. I assume this goes back to Roberto Clemente, but for some reason, I always thought that was a rule made ONLY for Clemente. Apparently not.

Consider Roy Halladay. He died in November 2017. That automatically made him eligible for the 2019 election … which just so happened to be the year he was going to be eligible anyway. But he had died a few months earlier; if I’m reading this right, he would have been eligible a year earlier.

Rule 4 (“Method of Election”) just goes through the basic rules — a screening committee puts together the ballot, we are not allowed to vote for more than 10 players, etc.

Rule 5 (“Voting”) gives you the famous criteria: “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.” It’s actually kind of hard to believe that the BBWAA has allowed this nonsense word salad to be the only instructions for voters, but I guess it’s too late to change it now. Plus, nobody pays any attention to it except when looking for a reason not to vote for Barry Bonds or Curt Schilling.

Rule 6 (“Automatic Elections”) reminds everyone that there are no automatic elections for batting .400 or pitching a perfect game. Nobody has thought this in at least 75 years, but this is a leftover from the days when a pitcher would throw a perfect game, and baseball writers everywhere would write that he’d “entered baseball’s Hall of Fame.”

Rule 7 (“Time of Election”). Ballots have to be postmarked by December 31.

Rule 8 (“Certification of Election Results.”). Blah blah blah, though this part is not entirely boring: “The results shall be transmitted to the Commissioner of Baseball.” So I guess Rob Manfred finds out before anyone else? 

Rule 9 (“Amendments”). The Hall can change the rules whenever it wants.

Paper 2 offers some basic player information — last year’s voting percentages, players who fell off the ballot, and then this year’s ballot by seniority. Here’s that last part:

10th Year: Manny Ramirez

9th Year: Andruw Jones, Omar Vizquel

8th Year: Andy Pettitte

7th Year: Bobby Abreu

6th Year: Mark Buehrle, Torii Hunter

5th Year: Alex Rodriguez, Jimmy Rollins

4th Year: Carlos Beltrán, Francisco Rodríguez

3rd Year: Chase Utley, David Wright

2nd Year: Félix Hernandez, Dustin Pedroia

1st Year: Ryan Braun, Shin-Soo Choo, Edwin Encarnación, Gio González, Alex Gordon, Cole Hamels, Matt Kemp, Howie Kendrick, Nick Markakis, Daniel Murphy, Hunter Pence, Rick Porcello.

Paper 3: The actual ballot,  which looks like this:

Yeah, I know, they could definitely make the ballots much snazzier.

Lots more to come over the next few weeks, obviously. (If you’d like to vote for our Brilliant Reader ballot, head over to Google Forms. S/O to BR drmagoo for the idea.)

So I don’t know if you’ve heard of this guy Michael Schur. He does television stuff, I guess. A new season of his show “A Man on the Inside” just dropped on Netflix. We binge-watched it on Sunday.

It’s terrible.

Ha ha! See what I did there? No, it’s absolutely wonderful, one of my favorite things that Mike has ever done, one of my favorite things that Ted Danson has ever done, and so on. It’s lovely and funny and sweet and twisty, and it might just make you cry too, but in the best way. I don’t know if it’s like this in your home, but we talk a lot in ours about the desperate hunger we feel in these chaotic days for things that lift our spirits. This season of A Man on the Inside was like an elevator for our hearts.

And, look, there’s no reason at all you should take these thoughts as if they’re objective since Mike is one of my best friends, and we just wrote a book together where we traveled around the world to get to the heart of what it means to be a fan. 

But I’ll tell you this: It has fountain pens. It has an A+ Baltimore Orioles joke. It has an inside Kristen Bell joke. It has Eddie Cicotte. It will make you happier.

It looks like the Mets will be sending the best player ever born in Wyoming to the Rangers for a second baseman with a surprisingly compelling Hall of Fame case, and I have absolutely no idea what to make of it. 

Let’s start with the particulars. The best player ever born in Wyoming is Brandon Nimmo, who was born in Cheyenne and fits beautifully into a category I call the “Mark Ellis Player.”

Mark Ellis played 12 years in the big leagues and never made the All-Star Team. He’s not the best modern player to never make an All-Star team — that would be Kirk Gibson, or Tony Phillips, or Eric Chavez or someone like that.

But it’s actually SURPRISING that those guys didn’t make an All-Star team.

With Mark Ellis, it’s not surprising. You just knew he never made the All-Star team, right?  He’s the perfect Almost All-Star, a player you instinctively know was excellent and also a player you instinctively know wasn’t ever an All-Star. Other Mark Ellis Players include Sixto Lezcano, Bill Doran, Kevin Kiermeyer, maybe Garry Maddox (though Maddox seemed like the sort of guy who might have made one All-Star team — he didn’t, but he might have).

And Brandon Nimmo. He lives happily in the Mark Ellis air space — definitely better than an average player and not quite as an All-Star. That’s the sort of player real fans just love. He feels like one of our own. I know Mets fans feel that way about him.

The surprisingly compelling Hall of Fame case belongs to Marcus Semien, who has posted 49 bWAR in his 13-year career so far and has finished third in the MVP balloting three times. 

It’s been an odd career for Semien, an uneven career, brilliance interspersed with competence. I don’t really know that it’s a Hall of Fame resume yet, but if he can pull out another season like he had in 2019, 2021, or 2023, he’s going to have a real case.

So what do we make of a deal like this? I have to say I really like the Mets’ double play combination of Semien and Francisco Lindor; that seems exciting, at least defensively. And Nimmo feels like the solid everyday contributor who can help the Rangers break ouf ot last year’s sluggishness. But Semien is also turning 36, and Nimmo 33, and they both have years left on their pricey deals, so who knows?

We’re going to do the PosCast live on Tuesday at noon. I’m not sure what it’s going to look like exactly with the holidays approaching and everybody busy (and the Holiday Draft about to record!) — it might just be me! If you’d like to join live and ask some questions, that would be great.