On behalf of the entire team here at IIATMS, best wishes for a safe, healthy and happy 2011.

Thank you very much for choosing to spend some of your time and thoughts with us. 2010 was a special year for us thanks to all of you.

Be safe tonight; we want you to hang around to party with us in 2011!

Amidst my time spent looking at pictures of baseball cards for my posting earlier today, there were several interesting little tidbits that jumped out at me:

• Biggio in catcher’s gear
• Gwynn’s jeri-curl
• Maddux’s pedo-stache
• Schilling’s equally troubling pedo-stache
• Mo, By Dockers
• David Arias (pre-Ortiz)
• Pedro’s mullet (and ‘stache)
• CC’s ‘stache (noticing a trend? ‘Staches on 20 year olds are never a good idea)
• Sosa bunting (and that his in-the-prime picture featured elastic sleeves so he could show off the guns)

But most interesting to me is that they have Don Mattingly listed as OF-1B. I grew up with Donnie Baseball but I never, ever remembered him playing anywhere but first base. So I checked. And whaddya know, there it is: Don Mattingly, outfielder.

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There has been a very healthy and strong debate about the Hall of Fame, particularly from two of the industry’s heavyweights: Joe Posnanski and Jeff Pearlman. This debate focuses on Jeff Bagwell most specifically, but really, it’s a proxy for most of the players who played at least part of their career during “The Steroid Era”. To set this up, first Joe Pos:

2. Jeff Bagwell — though he never tested positive for steroids, never was implicated in any public way, was not named in the Mitchell Report or by anyone on the record as a suspected user, and is not even on this rather comprehensive list of players linked to steroids or HGH — seems to have become in some voters’ minds a player who used performance-enhancing drugs.

I can’t even begin to describe my disgust at No. 2 … it makes me absolutely sick to my stomach. This is PRECISELY what I was talking about when I said how much I hate the character clause in the Hall of Fame voting. I think it encourages people to believe their own nonsense, to stand up on high and be judge and jury. It’s something that my friend Bill James calls the “I see it in his eyes” tripe. Bill has finished a book on crime — it is, he says, actually about crime books as much as crime — and one thing he kept running into in his research was people who claimed that they could pinpoint the murderer because “it was in their eyes.” Well, as Bill says, that’s a whole lot of garbage. Eyes are eyes. Some people look guilty when they’re innocent, and some people look innocent when they’re guilty, and most people don’t look innocent OR guilty except when we want to see that something in their eyes. Oh, but we love to believe we know. It’s one of the flaws of humanity. And the Hall of Fame character clause gives voters carte blanche to judge the eyes and hearts and souls of players.

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