Baseball: Past and Present

Recently on Twitter, someone asked my friend and fellow baseball writer Dan Szymborski how many people he’d enshrine off this year’s Hall of Fame ballot. I had to speak up. “Like 15,” I tweeted. It’s been a long time since the ballot has had this glut of talent, maybe 50 years if we go back to [...]

I recently read Harvey Araton’s 2012 book, Driving Mr. Yogi. While the book focuses primarily on the friendship between New York Yankee greats Yogi Berra and Ron Guidry, it stirred up a question for me on why Guidry is not in the Hall of Fame. In the book, Berra (who was enshrined in 1972) offers [...]

By standards of the museum, all players honored in the baseball Hall of Fame are equal. Once a man’s in, he’s in and all players get the same plaque. There is no delineation between the Mickey Mantles and Tommy McCarthys of Cooperstown. Should this be? Over the past month, I’ve run a project at this [...]

Writing often about Cooperstown the past couple years, I’ve come to favor a large Hall of Fame. I don’t apologize for this, nor do I think there’d be anything wrong with a museum that would honor the likes of Dwight Evans, Alan Trammell, or Smoky Joe Wood. That being said, I understand one reason people [...]

Have you noticed what’s been happening recently? The Hall of Fame has been getting smaller, at least in relative size. In one way, the HOF is like the Roach Motel. Players check in but they don’t check out. In absolute terms, the HOF can only get bigger. But I prefer a different view. For HOF [...]

To whom it may concern: My name is Graham Womack, and I am founder and editor of Baseball: Past and Present. I had the pleasure recently to conduct an interview with founding Sports Illustrated writer and celebrated baseball author Robert Creamer for my site. I couldn’t have asked for a better interview, and it’s had [...]

Editor’s note: One thing that I love about this blog is that we have a range of viewpoints among the writers here. I personally differ from Joe Guzzardi on how many players should be the Hall of Fame (he’s an exclusionist, I’ve become more welcoming in the last couple years), but I’m glad to share [...]

It seems lately many members of the Baseball Writers Association of America have been tormented and undecided as to which player should receive their Hall of Fame vote. This not only applies to this year’s ballot but especially in 2013 when the eligible list will be flooded with steroid-aided stars. Should these writers forgive and [...]

A week has passed since I posted the results of my second annual project on the 50 best baseball players not in the Hall of Fame, and things are going well in these parts. We have a new traffic record here with just north of 7,200 unique visitors for the month as of yesterday. More [...]