Cal Ripken 98.5%
Tony Gwynn 97.6%

Goose Gossage third with 71.2%

For those of you unfamiliar, you need 75% to receive induction.

Mark McGwire 23.5%

McGwire - 23.5% i think i just read.

Goose, you'll be in next year my friend!!!

the mcgwire thing reall pisses me off. what makes everyone so damn sure that cal or anyone else who is going to appear on the ballot over the next 20 years never used anything? dumb. the guy mashed, everyone knew he (and everybody else) was juicing, and nobody cared at the time. sports writers are a bunch of dicks.

has it ever been implied that cal ripken doped up? are you serious?

also, mcgwire's stats really aren't great anyway. he just has a lot of home runs and statistics that look good because of them. he'd have the least number of hits of any HOFer, never won an MVP, and one gold glove (at 1B, a position with a ton of HOFers) in '90.

I completely disagree. McGwire was a great player under the conditions of the time, and under the RULES AT THE TIME. He should be in. I wouldn't be surprised if his numbers are way up next year. Maybe he won't get in, but a lot of people just didn't want him to be first-ballot.

i am not one of those people who is against his inclusion to the hall of fame because of substances he may have taken while playing baseball. i am one of those people who simply doesn't think he's HOF-caliber, apart from his contribution to getting casual fans interested in baseball again in 1998. and there is so much of his stuff in the hall anyway from that year. i'm also one of those people who'd probably take out about 20 people who're currently in the hall of fame if i could.

There's easily 20 guys who don't belong but McGwire belongs for his homers & 98 season if it weren't for steroids.

he's got some pretty impresive stats:

HR: 583
RBIs: 1414 (avg 122 a year)
career obp: .394 (higher than gwynn)
walks: avg 114 a year
slg%: .588

and some funny stats too:
tripples: 6
strike outs: 1596

Those numbers are not accurate cause they are based on McGwire playing 162 games a year over his 16 seasons, in which he did not.

in reality, over McGwires 16 seasons, he averaged only 88 RBI's a year, 82 BB's a year, he was only .006 better then Gwynn in OBP.

Did Pete Rose get in this year?

i wasn't implying that he got those numbers for 16 years, there were many years where he was injured becasue he forgot to take his juice.

I'm not saying you were implying. I was just stating that those werent his average stats.

On a relative note, during his rookie year, he was thin as a rail and still hit 49 HR's, so he always had the power.

no, it's never been impled as far as i know by a mainstream source, but i'll go ahead and imply it. the reality of steroids in baseball is something that people like to ignore to the point where they believe rafael palmiero shaking his finger and denying ever taking them. look at it like this... there were no rules against steroids in baseball until a couple of years ago. if there was a drug that i could take that made me better at my job and led to contracts worth millions of dollars more than i could get without it, i'd take plenty of it. are you fucking kidding me?

it is my belief that cal took shit, and that just about everyone who he played with and against did as well. singling out mcgwire just because he didn't treat you like a gullible moron is nuts. oh, and it's worth stating that he wasn't caught taking anything and it's never been proven that he did. now, we all know he did, but officially, he didn't.

and, on the the subject of his hall worthiness, there were multiple mlb seasons where he was a more feared hitter than bonds or anybody else, and he broke a record that stood for nearly half a century while saving baseball's ass from the strike. his numbers are there, but beyond that, he was the face of the league. they can pretend they didn't know he was getting liquid help, but if they wanted to know, they could have asked me, and i was just a kid.

I wonder how much my Tops Cal Ripken rookie card is now worth?

do you believe big papi is a juicer as well?

of course. not only is he a monster compared to his early days with the twins, but he's from the d.r. which is where everybody gets their shit. look, i'm not saying i like it or that i want it to be the way that it is, but people need to grow up and understand that the players were put in the position that they are in by major league baseball and the players union. if papi doesn't use anymore, which is possible, i'm sure he has at some point.

the walks are reflective of pitchers afraid he'd roidmash the ball out of the park. take away the roids & you take away a lot of walks/obp. forced to hit, he wiffs 3 times as much as homers.

I'm sure all the parents of the 80-90 wrestlers who died over the last 8 years are pretty bent out of shape are.

gwynn and ripken are both overrated. jump on me now.

mcgwire should get in. i agree with tim kurkjan - baseball made and enforced the rules in the way they did so its pretty unfair for baseball writers to try to guess who was on roids and who wasn't at this point. on numbers he gets in.

interesting to note that kurkjan didn't vote for him.

regarding your orignial statement, i say that gwynn is underrated still and cal was overrated, but that streak is awesome.

odd on kurkjan. he was just saying on PTI or SC like 2 days ago he was voting for him. maybe it was Jayson Stark now that I think about it.

on espn they had their HOF ballot and it was olney, stark, caple, gammons and kurkjian who voted for mcgwire.