The Crime Dog's in the Hall of Fame!

We’ll give you a deeper rundown on Monday, perhaps, but for now, let me give you four quick thoughts about the Hall of Fame Contemporary Era balloting on Sunday that led to the election of Fred McGriff.

Thought 1: We all were right when we said this vote was set up for McGriff to be elected.

Ever since McGriff fell off the baseball writers’ ballot in 2019, having received just 39.8% of the vote, it was blindingly obvious that he would be elected by a veterans committee as soon as possible. That’s not hindsight. Here’s what I wrote leading up to that 2019 ballot:

Fred McGriff WILL GO to the Hall of Fame. Of this, I have almost no doubt. He obviously will not be elected by the BBWAA. This is his final year on the ballot, and he's never gotten even 25% of the vote. He probably will get 35% or more this year -- most players spike a bit in their last year on the ballot -- but that's not nearly close to the 75 percent he would need.

But he will be elected. The veterans committee will vote him in at its first opportunity … The generosity of these committees has been sporadic. There have been stretches of time when they were Scrooge-like and wouldn't vote in any player (and certainly not any living player). And there have been other stretches of time when they have been Santa Clausian in the way that they've lavished Hall of Fame honors on players.

We're in one of those Santa Claus periods now -- Alan Trammell, Jack Morris, Lee Smith and Harold Baines have been elected in the last two years. The BBWAA considered all those players, three of them for 15 years. In retrospect, those BBWAA votes were a waste of time. I mean that in a literal way. They wasted the players' time. They wasted the fans' time. They wasted the voters' time. If those four players were going to end up in the Hall of Fame anyway, they should have gone in a decade earlier, through the front door, with a true celebration.

Instead, they got beat up for more than a decade, year after year of disappointment and arguments and nonsense.

I've written a lot about Fred McGriff and how much of a borderline case he is for me, and how if you want to be strict about it he might fall JUST SHY of the Hall of Fame. Well, what was the point of keeping him out? He's going to end up in the Hall of Fame. We should have just done it already.

If there’s a surprise surrounding McGriff’s election on Sunday it is that he was elected UNANIMOUSLY. I think that speaks to just how popular he is and was and how stacked the committee was in his favor. Even with his former teammate Chipper Jones apparently calling in sick (replaced by Arizona Diamondbacks CEO Derrick Hall), he still swept the room.

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Thought 2: Wow … the committee wanted no part of Curt Schilling.

If you read my Contemporary Era ballot previews this week, I went out on a limb and predicted that Curt Schilling had a real chance of getting elected. In the end, he did not come close — getting only 7 votes.

I suppose this is a good place to show you the vote chart — remember 12 votes (75%) were necessary for election.

Fred McGriff, 16 votes, 100%

Don Mattingly, 8 votes, 50%

Curt Schilling, 7 votes, 44%

Dale Murphy, 6 votes, 38%

Albert Belle, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmeiro, fewer than 4 votes.

Schilling’s seven votes is a rebuke, no question about it. Schilling had been yammering for a couple of years now that he didn’t even WANT to get elected by the writers, that he would prefer to be judged by players and executives, you know, people who KNOW THE GAME.

So the irony must sting that he got WAY closer to being elected on the BBWAA ballot than he got on this veterans ballot. In fact, if he would have not spent his spare time joking about journalists getting murdered and asking people not to vote for him, he certainly WOULD have been elected by the writers.

Now, if this ballot is any indication, the players and executives and such seem to think he’s a lot more trouble than he’s worth.

If you thought this committee was stacked in McGriff’s favor, you were right. (Ron Vesely/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

Thought 3: I now think Don Mattingly’s going to get elected at some point soon.

I think something fundamentally changed with Mattingly this year. His first couple of times on veterans committee ballots he did not do well at all. I mean, in 2020 he didn’t even get three votes.

But the tide is shifting. Donnie Baseball is such a popular player and figure in the game. And there’s something else I’ve been thinking about that will help him a lot. I see myself right in the sweet spot for Don Mattingly fanhood. When I was a teenager, he was the coolest thing going.

Well, in 2018 and 2020, the people on the ballot were — not my age. They were guys like George Brett and Rod Carew and Robin Yount and Don Sutton and Ozzie Smith and Eddie Murray and Mattingly’s old teammate Dave Winfield. I’m not saying these guys have anything against Mattingly, surely they don’t. But they didn’t fall under his sway the way people my age did. They remember when he came up. They played against him. They didn’t idolize the guy.

Well, this time around, the committee got a LOT younger. Among the players, Frank Thomas, Greg Maddux and Chipper Jones (who, again, was sick) all came up after Mattingly had established himself as one of the coolest players ever. They are all roughly my age.

And it’s even more true of the executives on the committee. Theo Epstein is about six years younger than me — he’s right in the Don Mattingly fan zone. Kim Ng is my age and she was Mattingly’s boss. Derrick Hall is my age. Twins CEO Dave St. Peter was literally born five days before me.

I think the younger the committee gets, the more it will help Donnie Baseball.

Thought 4: Well, at least we won’t have to talk about Bonds and Clemens for a while.

If you were paying attention — and/or reading JoeBlogs — you knew there was no chance that Bonds or Clemens would get any support from this committee. It was a waste of time to even have them on the ballot, but I suppose them getting fewer than four votes each (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were both completely shut out) does tell you where we stand.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The whole issue of how to commemorate 1990s baseballs and how to put two of the greatest players in baseball history in context (not to mention numerous other stars) will require work. I hope the Hall of Fame wants to do that work. I hope they will have the appetite to put together a special committee to explore the steroid era and help bring some clarity to the time.

Until then, Bonds and Clemens are not eligible to be back on the ballot until 2026. And it will be nice to have a break … though I imagine A-Rod and Carlos Beltran will still fill the Hall of Fame season with lots of yelling and hot takes.