Afternoon reading: Rubin gets his Sandy, NJ Baseball on Hall

You may have missed this tweet from Adam Rubin on Friday which I posted late afternoon.   Mr. Rubin may have been expressing frustration that he hadn’t heard from Sandy.

Earlier today Sandy gave Adam 20 minutes.  Good read.

Also a good read is NJ Baseball’s take on the Hall of Fame discussion I started yesterday. Here’s an lengthy excerpt from a longer piece which I hope you will check out:

It’s one thing to debate McGwire’s stats or compare Palmeiro’s numbers to his contemporaries’ (for this argument, I’m speaking of all players as if they had the numbers that, otherwise, would represent a Hall of Fame career), but to cut off the discussion before it even begins just because you don’t like the way he put up those numbers is cheating the game’s history. The players’ actions may have been unethical, but with the one exception of Palmeiro, whose one positive test came at the end of his long career, what they did — or what we presume they did — wasn’t against the rules of the game at the time.

So now we’re supposed to forget that managers were so afraid of what Bonds could do that they walked him twice as much as the next guy (Hank Aaron) in history and three times as much as nearly every other player … ever. We’re supposed to believe that pretty much anything that happened from the mid-’90s until 2005 — no matter who did it — can’t be believed. We’re never going to know how many players were unethical, but the writers have taken it upon themselves to make that decision for us.