Part of the reason I think I’m not as big a baseball fan as I once was is all the numbers folks have created to try to explain how good/bad a player was/is. Not saying they may not be valid, but the days of watching a game and thinking “Okay, our clean-up hitter is coming to bat with two outs and the bases loaded in the ninth” have been replaced by “But the clean-up hitter is only batting .215 at night against Asian lefties when the barometric pressure is falling”. And that ruins it a bit for me. Kind of like basketball point guards now being called “ones”. It annoys me to no end.

So, when I come across a discussion about who should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame and numbers that would make my 7th grade math teacher dizzy are thrown on the table, I tend to shy away. Just such a discussion popped up yesterday at ALOTT5MA, with the announced retirement of Mike Piazza. The claim is that with his retirement, the 2013 (or is it 14?) HOF class could include Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Craig Biggio and Piazza.

Now, I don’t know if they’re all qualified or if the numbers agree one way or the other, but what I do know is if that happens, Biggio would be the only inductee that year that never had another man stick something in his ass.