There will be no 2021 class in the Baseball Hall of Fame, as voters closed Tuesday and rejected all 25 candidates for anchorage in Cooperstown.
The state of affairs: The three best candidates – Curt Schilling (71.1%), Barry Bonds (61.8%) and Roger Clemens (61.6%) – all fell short of the required 75%.
What he says: Schilling, who was just 16 votes short, shared a letter on Facebook in which baseball writers were torn and asked to be removed from the vote in 2022.
- “I will not take part in the last year of voting. I ask to be removed from the vote,” Schilling wrote. “I refer to the veterans committee and men whose opinions actually matter and are able to judge a player.”
- Schilling has suffered setbacks over the past few years for the political views he put forward on social media, which apparently limited his support in the vote, according to ESPN. Among these was a 2016 tweet in which he apparently supported lynching journalists, and more recently also his support for the January 6 pro-Trump mob attack at the U.S. Capitol.
Top voters:
- Schilling: 71.1%
- Effects: 61.8%
- Clemens: 61.6%
- Scott gerol: 52.9%
- Omar Vizquel: 49/1%
- Billy Wagner: 46.4%
- Todd Helton: 44.9%
- Gary Sheffield: 40.6%
- Andruw Jones: 33.9%
- Jeff Kent: 32.4%
Remarkable: This is only the ninth time that the Baseball Writers’ Association of America has not elected a Hall of Fame candidate, and the fourth since the rules were changed to eliminate the 1968 run-off election.
What’s next: Voters have ten years to consider candidates, and Schilling, Bonds and Clemens have voted nine times.
- So next year’s election becomes the writers’ final referendum on all three of the controversial players.
- If they are not elected, their fate will fall on a 16-person panel of Hall of Famers, team officials and historians known as the Veterans Committee.
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