Every year about this time, a little part of me dies

When HOF ballot time rolls around every year, Yankee fans from my generation (and I have been as adamant as any) rally around our hero, Don Mattingly.

Donnie Baseball was a God to many Yankee fans for a team that was far from dominant. his career seemed to last an eternity, as the team missed out on the postseason year, after year, after year. He had perhaps his best shot at a title ripped away from him by the strike in '94, and there wasn't a single die hard fan who wasn't teary eyed when he dropped to a knee at Skydome and pounded the turf in '95. He worked hard, played hurt, and didn't bitch in the media. Just grabbed his fucking lunch pail and showed up at the ballpark every day. This is why we all identify with Don Mattingly.

Make no mistake though: before all of the sympathy for a veteran whose body was failing, Don Mattingly was the best player in the American League, and arguably all of baseball. He was a great all around player that could hit for average and power, and was one of the top fielding first basemen ever. He had what my friend Spo calls the "Badass Quotient". It's that certain quality that instills fear in opponents. Mattingly was the type of player that other teams had a gameplan for. He might have been the best player in baseball for a stretch of five years or so, and that to me is what makes a Hall of Famer. Not pitching for 100 years and getting almost 300 wins.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame is not a Goddamned weigh station for stat compilers. It is a place where those who were considered SUPERSTARS to be immortalized. Batting titles, MVP's, and breathtaking plays in the field allowed Mattingly to reach what could have been rock star, Joe Namath heights - but that wasn't his style. Unlike some other private players, though, that didn't take away from his appeal to the masses in New York.

I know that the numbers may not be there from a career standpoint (although he was just as good as Kirby fucking Puckett, but I already made that argument), but there was no hitter as feared as Don Mattingly in his prime. That, to me, is what the Hall of Fame is all about.

Congratulations Andre Dawson

Pictured Above: Your entire Hall of Fame class of 2010. I don't give a shit who Roberto Alomar spit on, we will look back some years from now and realize that he was one of (if not the) best second baseman the game has ever seen.

Hall of Fame Moose?

Si's Tom Verducci, a favorite of The Fowl Balls, has provided this excellent argument for the induction of Mike Mussina. I have to say, I was not fuly convinced of the worthiness of Mussina, but this article makes it very clear that Moose belongs with the best.

Some things to keep in mind when weighing the Hall of Fame chances of Mike Mussina:
• He pitched his entire prime in one of the toughest environments ever for pitching: in the American League in the steroid era. He did more than just survive the onslaught of the greatest extended era of slugging. He thrived. From 1994 through 2003, among all pitchers, not just AL pitchers, Mussina won more games and threw more innings than everyone except Greg Maddux.
• He pitched in the same division as the World Series champion eight times. He was 3-8 in 16 games against those eventual champions.
• Mussina finished in the top five in ERA eight times -- more than such greats as Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan, Juan Marichal, Whitey Ford and Bob Feller. Of the 34 pitchers to win 270 games, only seven pitchers had more top five ERA finishes than Mussina.
• His "failure" to win 20 games prior to this season needs explanation. He won 16 games in 1994 but lost nine starts to the strike. He won 19 games in 1995 but lost at least one start to the strike. He won 19 games in 1996 but watched Armando Benitez blow his 20th win in his final start by giving up a tying home run with one out in the ninth to Toronto third baseman Ed Sprague -- the same Ed Sprague who hit a career-high 36 home runs that year and later admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs in his career.
• He finished among the top three winners in his league five times - more than Ford, Gibson, Ryan, Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry, and Don Sutton and just as many as Marichal, Jim Palmer and Tom Glavine.
When you judge Mussina against his peers, he never had the peak of Maddux, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson or Roger Clemens. But his durability and elite consistency in a hostile environment makes him worthy of Cooperstown.

Source: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/tom_verducci/12/02/verducci.shortstops/index.html?eref=T1

Report: Moose to hang up his antlers (We are such hacks)

Ken Rosenthal of foxsports.com reports that Mike Mussina is going to retire. We at The Fowl Balls will respect his privacy and not publicly comment until he has made his announcement to comment further, but in the meantime, I will ask you, our loyal followers; is Mike Mussina a Hall of Famer?

Source: http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/8818830/Yanks