Seems everyone has an opinion about Wednesday's National Baseball Hall of Fame balloting, and if you're Goose Gossage, the lone 2008 inductee, you have several.
The Baseball Writers' Association of America has posted the ballots of the 114 BWAA members willing to release their votes, and the numbers are just as interesting as the arguments for or against allowing the steroid era's poster children admission into the most prestigious of all halls of fame.
There were nearly as many writers in this subset of voters (nearly 600 BWAA members voted overall) comfortable showing their support for the first-ballot inductions of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens as there were those content to reveal their desire to shut them out, at least for now. The 54 writers who went public with their vote for Bonds invariably voted for Clemens, too. Meanwhile, Mark McGwire again edged his one-time single-season home run rival Sammy Sosa - this time 18 votes to 17 among the BWAA's unabashed. Raphael Palmeiro got a mere dozen.
Meanwhile, Tim Raines, who once confessed to sliding into bases head first to preserve the cocaine he stashed in a vile in the back pocket of his uniform pants (and snorted between innings), easily surpassed all of his PED-affiliated ballot contemporaries, earning 74 votes among the 114 voters who went public. However, his 52 percent of the total BWAA vote in his sixth year of eligibility was still well shy of the 75 percent needed for induction.
