Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens at HOF Polling Contemporary Era

The Hall of Fame on Monday released its eight-player Contemporary Era of Baseball ballot, and it includes some familiar and controversial names: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Kurt Schilling. Other players in the 2023 class include Albert Bell, Don Mattingly, Fred McGrave, Dale Murphy and Rafael Palmero. Notably absent from the poll: Sami Sosa.

The 16-person panel, made up of Hall of Fame players, baseball executives and veteran sports writers, will vote on the players at the December 4 winter meetings. A player must receive 12 votes to be elected.

Bonds, Clemens, Schilling, and Sosa appeared on the baseball book ballot for the tenth and final time this past election cycle. Needing 75% to be elected, Bonds received 66.0% of the vote, Clemens 65.2%, Schilling 58.6%, and Sosa returned only 18.5%. The four became immediately eligible to join the Contemporary Era panel, which considers players who made their greatest contributions from 1980 to the present era but failed to win election from the American Baseball Writers Association.

Both Bonds, a seven-time MVP who was the sport’s all-time captain and for one season, and seven-time winner of Cy Young Clemens received the highest level of support in their final year on the book poll, climbing from as low as 35% in their early years. on the ballot paper.

Schilling did not have the same PED claims as Bonds and Clemens, and his support reached 71.1% in 2021, just 16 votes short of the election. Schilling then wrote a letter to the Hall of Fame requesting that he be removed from the ballot in his final year, which the Hall of Fame denied, and his support collapsed. Schilling’s numbers – 216 wins, three seasons of 300 strikes, 80.5 career at war, a post-season 11-2 record with three world titles – deserve strong election attention, but he ostracized himself after retirement with hateful comments towards Muslims, transgender people and journalists .

“I will judge a committee of veterans and men whose opinions really matter and who are in a position to judge a player already,” Schilling wrote when asked to disqualify him from the ballot.

Palmiro is one of only seven players to have 3,000 hits and 500 points at home, but unlike Bonds, Clemens and Sosa, he has already received a PED suspension after testing positive in 2005, his last season in the major leagues. It ran for four years on the BBWAA ballot, and was removed after falling below the 5% voting threshold needed to survive.

It would be Palmero’s first time on a Veterans Committee ballot – but not for Murphy and Mattingly. Murphy, a two-time MVP with the Atlanta Braves who peaked at just 23.2% on the BBWAA poll, appeared on both the 2018 and 2020 Modern Era polls (plus previous incarnations), receiving fewer than seven votes in 2018 out of 16. Committee and Three or Less in 2020. Mattingley, the famous New York Yankees first-team player and 1985 AL MVP, also appeared on both cards with the same low vote total.

Depending on how the committee views the excesses of Bonds, Clemens and Schilling, McGriff may be the player with the best chance of being elected. A beloved five-time All-Star who scored 493 home points and led in 1,550 runs, McGrave didn’t get 40% of the vote on the BBWAA ballot, but his 10 years on the ballot came when it was crowded with PED-tainted players and other strong candidates (writers are allowed to vote) for ten players only), and his frontier cause did not have much popular support – perhaps in part because he played for six different teams.

Bale was a lethal player who had 50 home runs and 50 doubles in the same season and finished 381 home runs, but injuries cut his career down to just 12 seasons. He appeared on Game of the Day 2017 and 2019 polls and received fewer than five votes both times.

The revamped Veterans Committee election cycle means that the next vote on the contemporary-era ballot will not come until December 2025 (for the elections in the 2026 class). Next year’s election will feature contemporary era directors, CEOs and governors, then the Classic era (pre-1980) vote will take place in December 2024.

The BBWAA vote will be announced on January 24, 2023. The top voters are Scott Rollin (63.2%), Todd Hilton (52.0%) and Billy Wagner (51.0%). The polling list also includes Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Gary Sheffield and Andrew Jones. The newcomer is Carlos Beltran.