Baseball Hall of Fame

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have Alex Rodriguez and Lou Gehrig on the same team? I often have and wondered if there was a way to make it happen.  

With this idea in place, I decided to compose a 25-man roster complete with batting order and pitching rotation.

The twist on this is some of the convenient adaptations I have made to the team.

Also, I tried not to choose players who had their prime and best years outside Yankee pinstripes. 

before gaining entry to Baseball's Hall of Fame, a player must wait five years after his retirement to become eligible, then be name don 75 percent or more of the total ballots cast by members of the Base Ball Writers' Association of America. Former pitcher Bert Blyleven did not achieve entry until his fourteenth try, and he is not alone in the annals of Cooperstown when it comes to having a long time to wait.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is very much like a gated community, and in order to gain residence, a player must be exceptionally good at politicking with the gate-keepers. Bert Blyleven needed over a decade to gain entry; Ron Santo never did, though he unequivocally ought to have. Finding a way to woo 75 percent of those baseball writers who have votes can be a tricky needle to thread.

At any given time, there are arguably 30-35 active players in the Major Leagues who are deserving of a spot in Cooperstown once they call it a career. Whom among those on an active roster for 2011 are most likely to be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame sometime in the future?

The following is a position-by-position list of players who, in my opinion, can start thinking about their acceptance speeches right now.

This is a difficult time for many of those who believe the game will forever be tainted by the Performance Enhancing Drug era.

I refuse to call it the "Steroid Era" as many of the so-called cheaters never actually took a steroid. If you're going to label something, it may as well be accurate.

I will admit that some of the things MLB players did during this time disgusts me. It's not so much the fact that they cheated, but that they were so smug and arrogant that they thought they could get away with it.

The Hall of Fame selection process has, and likely always will be, the center of much controversy.  The debate rages on year after year about who should and who should not be a Hall of Famer and why.

Take Kirby Puckett as an example.  Puckett was a very productive player whose career was cut short after he lost vision in one eye due to glaucoma.   While his career batting average is an impressive .318, Puckett did not play long enough to accumulate what one might consider Hall of Fame numbers.

On Wednesday, the Baseball Writers Association of America announced the 2011 class of Hall of Famers.

Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven were voted in as the only two players in the 2011 National Baseball Hall of Fame class. Alomar made it in just his second year on the ballot, garnering 90 percent of the vote.

Blyleven, on the other hand, had to wait until his 14th year of eligibility, picking up 79.7 percent of the vote.

I believe that both deserved the honor. If not for Alomar’s infamous spitting incident in 1996, he likely would have been a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer.

Post originally published at the author's blog, with various code removed.

It is the favorite time of year for many a sports nerd like myself: the time when the Baseball Writers Association of America will make their picks for the Hall of Fame, and when the blogosphere is best equipped to mock and ridicule the inconsistent logic of many esteemed writers.

Roberto Alomar was overpaid by the New York Mets for his year and a half of service towards the end of his career, but I was happy to see him get the recognition he deserved with a spot in the Hall of Fame.

His career will always be defined by a select few by the spitting incident, and for those of you who think that is enough to keep him out of Cooperstown, I feel sorry for you.

Some fans will never overlook this transgression, using it as the basis of every argument they ever make about his wrongful inclusion.