I’d read that the Baseball Hall of Fame voting results will be announced today at noon EST (that is, half an hour ago as I write this), so we turned on the car radio at 9 AM on the way to work: nothing. I brought up my favorite sports-related web site just now: nothing. Some further Googling found this:
The results for 2013 will be announced live on MLB Network and simulcast on MLB.com at 2 p.m. ET as part of a three-hour special presentation that begins at noon.
In other words, Major League Baseball is using this as yet another way to induce fans to subscribe to their cable channel, navigate to their website, watch their commercials, read their ads, and waste three hours to learn something that could be communicated in one sentence (e.g. “Biggio, but no one else.”) I understand that this behavior has no downside for them, since I have neither a vehicle to communicate my disgust to them nor any useful way to punish them for it.
Still, it sucks.
Update:
No one made it. 75% of the vote is required. The top 10 are:
Biggio 68.2%
Morris 67.7%
Bagwell 59.6%
Piazza 57.8%
Raines 52.2%
Smith 47.8%
Schilling 38.8%
Clemens 37.6%
Bonds 36.2%
Martinez 35.9%
Isn’t wasting multiple hours to learn something that could be communicated quickly (“Yankees, again”) what baseball’s all about? 😉
Hey-o!
(thus endeth the sum of my baseball knowledge.)
And, of course, ESPN is doing their best to further confuse people by posting their internal results in such a way as to make them look like the official results. For the record, their crack team of voters picked only Biggio. They also offered a reliever, Lee Smith, infinity times as many votes as they did Lofton (7 to 0).
Is Biggio and only Biggio your prediction? That wouldn’t shock me. I could see Morris getting in, as he is nearing the point where folks just give him admittance, even though I think he is highly undeserving.
It wasn’t intended as a prediction, but I think it’s pretty likely.
That’d be my bet. If I were a betting man. And had someone to bet with.