no-one voted for him in his first year on the ballot<\/a>, and so he is off the ballot and not eligible until some Veteran\u2019s Committee (or whatever silly thing the Hall decides to put together to make sure that Gary Sheffield gets a plaque) re-examines his case. And Matt Cain is, I think, an excellent example of one problem with the BBWAA voting as a process, and honestly with the whole conception of Halls of Fame.\r\nAnd it\u2019s this: Matt Cain is obviously not a Hall of Famer. Nobody thinks he\u2019s a Hall of Famer. And so nobody voted for him\u2014why would anyone vote for him when everyone agrees he shouldn\u2019t be inducted? On the other hand, he was a very good pitcher for a substantial amount of time, and it seems harsh that he got zero<\/i> votes. Like, Huston Street got one vote. R.A. Dickey got one vote. Nobody thinks those guys belong in the Hall, either, but someone (someone with a vote) wanted to give them a vote so they wouldn\u2019t have zero. Matt Cain got zero because someone was responsible enough to only vote for people who belong in the Hall.\r\n
The issue, really, is that when you have a Hall of Fame, and you have a list of inductees, everyone is either on the list or not on the list. I mean, there\u2019s no almost<\/i>. Scott Rolen is in; Jeff Kent is not. More people considered Jeff Kent worthy of a vote than Matt Cain is, but also someone voted for Huston Street, so that\u2019s what that is worth.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger predicted, ten years ago, that Matt Cain would be the best pitcher ever to drop off the Hall of Fame ballot after one year. Probably not, but he might be the greatest pitcher ever to get zero HoF votes.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20886"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20891,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20886\/revisions\/20891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}