Yet another reason the Baseball Hall of Fame Vote needs an overhaul, and it's a good thing Craig Biggio fell two votes short.
According to hallofverygood.com, Jerry Dowling has one of the precious votes. Dowling is a retired cartoonist for the Cincinnati Enquirer; he worked there from 1960-94. He also published a book in 2008 that featured nothing but drawings of Pete Rose.
In other words, his qualification as a Baseball Hall of Fame voter could be argued as suspect.
Especially when he voted for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire but left Biggio off his ballot because, according to Dowling, Biggio cheated.
In surmising Biggio's two-vote heartache, Dowling actually wrote in his blog, "One of those could have been mine. I refuse to vote for a guy who cheats, as Biggio did with all that armor on his arm, so he could get hit with pitches and trot to first base as a result. He made no attempt to avoid getting hit and actually stuck that arm out further, inducing the ball to smack him.
"That, my friends, is against the rules and umpires should be calling that s--- a ball, but they don't. I once asked umpire John McSherry about that, and he skirted around the question, never answering it."
When some people commented on his blog that Bonds also wore arm padding "bigger than Craig Biggio," his response was, "Bonds wore it because pitchers would much rather give him one base than a four bagger and Bonds didn't want a broken, bruised arm. Remember how many times he was walked?"
Dowling added that he voted for Bonds and Clemens (it isn't known why he didn't include McGwire) "because they both had Hall (of Fame) numbers before they juiced up."
With logic like that, Biggio probably wouldn't want to hear why others left him off the ballot.
For those curious as to how Dowling ended up with a Baseball Hall of Fame vote, he said he was a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America for 25 years and had a vote for 10.
"To be a voter," he said, "you must be a baseball beat writer, a sports editor or a sports cartoonist. I didn't set the rules."
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