mariano is 100% in

Well, they went and did it. They unanimously elected someone to the Baseball Hall of Fame. It's about frickin' time.

As a kid, I had a hard time understanding why great players -- players who's HoF credentials were beyond question -- weren't getting voted in unanimously. How could anyone vote against Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams? You can make a good argument that Willie Mays was the best player ever, and yet he was only named on 95% of the ballots. The only explanation I ever heard was that some writers felt that, if Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson weren't unanimous then no one should be.

Of course that just raises the question of why those early greats, elected on the first ballot, weren't unanimous? The best I've heard came from Joe in my film class. He suspects that, in the days before communications were as advanced as they are now, some of the voters never got to see Babe Ruth play and therefore wouldn't vote for him. I can't say whether that's really what happened, but it sounds plausible.

If I were a voting member of the BBWA, I would vote for a player (or not) depending on whether I thought he should be in the hall of fame. If he should be in, he gets my vote; if he shouldn't, he doesn't. There are some players who were so good that there's no reasonable argument against their induction. Tom Seaver, Carl Yastrzemski and Hank Aaron are all in that category, but they were left off the ballots of, respectively, 5, 24 and 9 voters.

Should Mariano Rivera be the first unanimous entry? I guess he's as good as anyone -- he was the best ever at his position*. But that's the wrong question. Given that no one before him got in unanimously, it's good that he did. But anyone who all the voters felt should be in should have gotten in unanimously.

*or so I'm told -- I haven't really followed baseball in 25 years.