The Bobcat Nation

I was just curious to hear peoples' opinions on the Baseball HOF voting, and Dan LeBatard's Deadspin stunt?

John K wrote:I was just curious to hear peoples' opinions on the Baseball HOF voting, and Dan LeBatard's Deadspin stunt?

I think the stunt was perfect, it made a lot of people react to his "vote". The baseball HOF is a joke, no Pete Rose, no steroids. Steroids were ok to use when baseball needed them. I think they should kick Mickey Mantle out because he drank too much.

allcat wrote:

John K wrote:I was just curious to hear peoples' opinions on the Baseball HOF voting, and Dan LeBatard's Deadspin stunt?

I think the stunt was perfect, it made a lot of people react to his "vote". The baseball HOF is a joke, no Pete Rose, no steroids. Steroids were ok to use when baseball needed them. I think they should kick Mickey Mantle out because he drank too much.

There's a very key difference. Drinking too much didn't help Mantle's performance. In fact, it almost certainly hurt his performance. If LeBartard wanted to voice his displeasure with the HOF, there were lots of better ways for him to do so. I intentionally withheld my opinion initially, because I wasn't quite sure how I felt about it at first, but the more I've thought about it, and as I've listened to other peoples's opinions, I've become convinced that it was nothing more than a lame publicity stunt.

John K wrote:

allcat wrote:

John K wrote:I was just curious to hear peoples' opinions on the Baseball HOF voting, and Dan LeBatard's Deadspin stunt?

I think the stunt was perfect, it made a lot of people react to his "vote". The baseball HOF is a joke, no Pete Rose, no steroids. Steroids were ok to use when baseball needed them. I think they should kick Mickey Mantle out because he drank too much.

There's a very key difference. Drinking too much didn't help Mantle's performance. In fact, it almost certainly hurt his performance. If LeBartard wanted to voice his displeasure with the HOF, there were lots of better ways for him to do so. I intentionally withheld my opinion initially, because I wasn't quite sure how I felt about it at first, but the more I've thought about it, and as I've listened to other peoples's opinions, I've become convinced that it was nothing more than a lame publicity stunt.

Probably lame stunt but the HOF voting is broken, how do you change it. How many guys were not using the juice. Steroids are artificial, what about surgery?

Or corrective lens ... I think that corrective lens use in sports should be banned, as it's not natural (and because the only good part of my body is my eyes, so that would have given me an inside track to pro sports stardom by default ).

As for HOF voting, I like the "all or nothing" approach to the steroid era. We have no idea who did and didn't use steroids, so to reward only those people who didn't get caught (especially since those that got caught only did so by random chance of a lab getting busted, etc.) isn't really fair. For the voters to assume they know who did and didn't use steroids is a mistake.

I think it's funny how much criticism he's gotten. And his ban on voting in the future? ******, he should be so lucky. And he even got banned from attending Marlins games in the future. The MLB in general is a corrupt business.
I love what he did. He got people talking about it and did it in the best way he could have. "His" ballot was better than most I saw. The entire voting process is ******. There are what, 600 ballots cast? My GOD what a joke that is. There are people casting votes THAT DON'T EVEN FOLLOW BASEBALL. The whole process needs to be scrapped, burned, ****** on, and then recycled. It's almost more embarrassing to the sport than cheating itself.

I think the baseball writers association and MLB should be thrilled that someone brought some attention to the all but forgotten sport of baseball. If the sport wants to stay relevant, it needs to make changes to keep people interested. Lebatard called attention to that need for change.

nativecat wrote:I think the baseball writers association and MLB should be thrilled that someone brought some attention to the all but forgotten sport of baseball. If the sport wants to stay relevant, it needs to make changes to keep people interested. Lebatard called attention to that need for change.

"All but forgotten" and "keep people interested"? I think you might be projecting your own feelings...

Total Attendance Avg Attendance
MLB '13 74,026,895 30,464
NBA '12-'13 21,320,299 17,334
NHL '12-'13 12,758,849 17,721

This is just regular season.

MLB also signed eight-year national media rights agreements with FOX and TBS, and combined with the recently announced ESPN deal, the three contracts will deliver a combined $12.4 billion -- more than a 100-percent increase in annual rights fees to MLB over the current arrangements through 2021.

Admittedly, everything is dwarfed by the NFL, but professional baseball is far from irrelevant.

Deadspin voted for every player that Dan would have voted for, so it didn't change anything....