Albuquerque Isotope and NewMexiKen favorite Chin-lung Hu was traded from the Dodgers to the Mets yesterday. No more “Hu’s on first.”
Joe Posnanski is writing about the Baseball Hall of Fame this week — ballots are due Friday.
His first installment is here.
I thought this excerpt from today’s essay was thought-provoking. We forget I think how good you have to be to make “the show.”
For instance, last year Todd Zeile was on the Hall of Fame ballot. Todd Zeile? He did not receive a vote, to no one’s surprise.
But you know what? Todd Zeile was a good player. He got 2,000 hits in the Major Leagues. He drove in 90-plus runs five times. He played five positions, and even pitched a couple of innings.
He was not a Hall of Famer, not close to a Hall of Famer, but that’s precisely the point, isn’t it? To play 10 years of Major League Baseball — a qualification just to get on the ballot — means you must be one of the very best baseball players on earth .
You are better and more determined than all those players whose baseball lives stopped in little league, all those good enough to make their high school teams but no more, all those who went on to play college at some small school, all those good enough to go to a Division I school but were not drafted, all those promising and resolved young players drafted or signed outside of North America who stalled in the low end of the minor leagues, all those who topped out low Class A, in high Class A, in Class AA, in Class AAA, all those who made it through it all to get to a cup of coffee in the big leagues, all those who worked their way up to a small and temporary role in the big leagues, all those who endured and became regulars in the big leagues for two or three or four years before being retired.
To achieve so much … to reach the very height of your profession … it is an extraordinary thing to be a baseball player with 10 years of big league experience, an even more extraordinary thing to achieve enough to get on the Hall of Fame ballot. And then, you get there and it is STILL still miles and miles and miles to go before you get to the Hall of Famers. It is still the gap between Todd Zeile and Cooperstown.