Now that the Super Bowl is over, look for 7th Inning Stache to start filling the sports void with more great baseball content, like the Barry Bonds Milestones Series.

I recently visited AT&T Park in San Francisco for the first time, and was worried there would be nothing there commemorating the greatest Giant ever, The Greatest Player On Planet Earth, The G-POPE Barry Bonds.  But there is, and I took pictures.  Today we lead off with the glorious career home run record.  Behold….

A post written over at Circling the Bases by Craig Calcaterra got me thinking earlier this week about Pete Rose again. I never saw Charlie Hustle play. I don’t favor the guy because he played for the Cincinnati Reds, my favorite baseball team. But I’ve always felt that Peter Edward Rose belonged in the Hall of Fame.

I take that stance because any man who has walked this earth and collected over 4,000 big league knocks simply must be there for the Hall to remain credible. We can debate about it all day long, and people can argue back with their points on integrity. It doesn’t make them right or wrong; I’m just telling you where I’m at on the Pete Rose issue.

Yes, the guy has failed to be totally honest and come totally clean. Yes, it’s pretty baffling what a liar he is and why coming completely honest has been so hard. The ship has probably sailed on him ever being trused by the fans of the sport. But the fact remains, the guy got more hits then anyone who has ever been born onto this planet. That means something to me.

I have a problem with this particular scenario: Mark McGwire will get cheers from St. Louis sell-out crowds when the season begins, but Pete Rose is still banished behind imaginary jail cell bars, signing balls and pictures somewhere in Las Vegas.

It just doesn’t make sense. And do these guys belong in the Hall of Fame? I don’t fully know how to qualify that question. That’s why I’m not one of the Baseball Writers of America officially. That’s why I don’t have a vote.

But both Rose and McGwire should be welcomed back into the sport because of their contributions to the game’s rich history, which I wrote about in the case of McGwire and the 1998 home run race.

If you don’t wanna put Rose in the Hall; you can make your case easily enough. But at least let him be back into the sport that he dominated for decades.

And that’s where I sit on this issue. Let it be known, let it be written.

What a 29 days it has been for Andre Dawson.  First the MLB Mustache Hall of Fame (as an Expo), and now its little cousin, the MLB Hall of Fame.

I’m a Cubs fan.  I’d like to think I’m a rational Cubs fan, but I’m actually not sure if a truly rational Cubs sports fan exists.  I chose the Cubs, after my Expos ceased to exist (don’t try to suggest to me that the AAA AA winter league slow-pitch beer-league club playing in Washington right now is the same bleu, blanc, et rouge), through a series of  trips across the country to other ballparks, run-ins with fans, and sad attempts to just “cheer for good baseball in general.”  The Canadian Prairies aren’t as close to MLB ballparks as you’d assume, so I put a lot of thought in my decision because I planned to visit a lot in the future.  Through deep soul searching, I realised a team that the last three generations of my family could have never seen win anything was the one for me… or something like that.

I can’t brag about being a Cubs fan from birth, or having my heart ripped out when I was 8 years old when the Cubs <insert a myriad of misfortunes here>, but I did watch my first team die a slow painful death… which is the ultimate baseball heartbreak.  Maybe that’s why I felt a kinship with Cubs fans: heartbreak.  We all love it, eh?

But there’s no heartbreak for Cubs & Expos fans today as we now have Andre Dawson in the MLB Hall of Fame.  Andre Dawson: an ultimate Expos-Cubs connection.  But which cap should he wear into the hall?  Does it matter?  I’m cap-obsessed, so hell yes…

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We here at 7th Inning Stache mainly concern ourselves with the MLB Mustache Hall of Fame, and don’t think too much of that other HOF in Cooperstown.  However, it’s worth noting that 7IS did endorse one candidate and one candidate only for this year’s Cooperstown election.  That candidate was Expos/Cubs legend Andre Dawson.

Today, Andre Dawson was the one and only candidate to gain enough votes to get into Cooperstown, joining a prestigious elite group who are Cooperstown HOFers and MHOFers.

As for Bert Blyleven who missed out by the slimmest of margins, we’ll see what we can do for you next year.

If you’re in the mood for more HOF reading, we got some links for youse:

• AUDIO: classic 80′s song proclaiming that Andre Dawson is in fact a hero. [midwest SPORTS fans]
• Sooze seems a little upset about the voting.  Even if you don’t share her outrage, is it possible to see Blyleven’s I Heart To Fart shirt enough? [sports UNTAPPED]
• Great interview with Jonah Keri on Tim Raines and the HOF voting process by B&C’s answer to Barbara Walters, Landon Evanson. [bugs&cranks]
• Blyleven’s chances for 2011. [wezen-ball]
• Sky Andrecheck’s Alternate Universe Hall Of Fame makes a helluva lot of sense.  I hope he approves of our MHOF methods. [the BASEBALL analysts]
• Paulie Rice: How To Spot An Inane Hall Of Fame Argument [7is]
• Kevin Lager: #Dawson4TheHall [7is]
• Kevin Lager: Andre Dawson MLB HOF Mustache [7is]

With this year’s Hall of Fame voting results just around the corner, you’re going to see a lot of BBWAA members publishing columns explaining their ballot and why they voted the way they did. Many of these opinions will be well-thought-out, well-researched, and well-reasoned. Many others will be flat out batshit insane. Many voters looked painstakingly into the numbers of each candidate and compared each player to his contemporaries, the era, and other players who are in the Hall. Other voters drunkenly cast their ballot at two ticks before the deadline only after one of their colleagues had to remind them they had a vote in the first place. Ahem.

How do we differentiate the good from the asinine, though? Surely Hall of Fame voting is a subjective game if there ever was one, but how do we tell which writers actually put thought into their vote, and which ones used their ballot as toilet paper? Well, here are a couple of helpful hints. If, in the next few days, you see a writer use one or more of the following arguments to justify their HOF vote, it’s a clear indication that you shouldn’t be taking them seriously.

1. Blame stat nerds for falling in love with statistics and voting for an undeserving player, and then use stats to make a totally convoluted case for your own guy.

Anti-intellectualism sucks, but it’s rampant once HOF voting season rolls around. Many older BBWAA members make it a kind of sport of ripping the saber-nerds for favoring certain players because they’re looking solely at the numbers. They aren’t taking into account the fire in which they played the game, or how much tobacco they chewed per inning. Calculators don’t win games, and so forth.

What these same voters then do is make their case for a guy by quoting his accumulated career numbers, like how many wins or home runs or RBI he had. That’s perfectly okay, except that by using ERA, wins, and whatnot, this is an argument using, wouldn’t you know it…stats! What’s it going to be, fella?

2. Cite one particular great or famous performance and wrap a player’s HOF case around that.

This occurs with Jack Morris all the time, namely with his 10-inning shutout in Game Seven of the 1991 World Series. Great clutch performances such as that should generally be regarded as extra credit, not a major component of a Hall case. If we’re going to elect guys for awesomeness in one game, let’s start up the bandwagons for Don Larsen, Bobby Thomson, or Fernando Tatis.

3. Dismiss a candidate’s deficiency in one facet of the game by stating that said skill wasn’t understood as valuable in his day.

One of my favorite bullshit arguments, it’s especially popular with players with mediocre OBPs who played in the ’70′s or 80′s, as if not making outs is suddenly some new age philosophy we’ve only recently stumbled on. The best players, players who are Hall-worthy, will have numbers and skills that are generally far better than their peers, relative to the league and position average, in any category. This was true in the 1920′s, and it’s true today.

4. Fun with arbitrary endpoints.

Sometimes voters will tell you that Player X should be in the Hall because he led the league in home runs or total bases or strikeouts from 1985-1996, and no one else came close. Sounds like he was a totally dominant player, right? Well, if this timeframe seems suspiciously arbitrary to you, that’s because it was cherry-picked simply to highlight that player’s peak years, while conveniently ignoring his decline phase. Said voters will then compare their player, using only these selected years, to another sort of similar player, only they’ll use the other player’s entire career, breakdown years and all. Those sly bastards. 

5. Use meaningless blanket statements instead of actual analysis.

If you learn one thing in your life as a baseball fan, let it be this. You may see a writer claim that a player was the “most feared of his era” or “was the grittiest of his era” or “most clutch” or “he just seemed to be a Hall of Famer when I watched him”. This is code for “I’m too stupid and/or lazy to form my own coherent argument for why I’m voting for this (probably) undeserving player so I’m going to throw out meaningless, tough-sounding character traits and dare anyone to question me.” These voters/writers have such a disregard for the intelligence of the average baseball fan that it’s laughable. Beware.

Not for nothing, my Hall of Fame predictions. I’d guess Roberto Alomar, Andre Dawson, and Bert Blyleven get in, with Barry Larkin falling just short and getting in next year.