Something about the Hall of Fame voting doesn’t make sense to MLB insider Jon Heyman.
Former Yankees teammates, Alex Rodríguez and Gary Sheffield, are “both confirmed PED cheats,” Heyman wrote in The New York Post on Thursday, yet one trails the other by close to 35 percent in the Hall of Fame vote.
This, the columnist writes, is “Nutty!”
As of Friday morning, 39.5 percent of voters have voted for Rodríguez, the twice-caught user, while 74 percent have voted for Sheffield, who was implicated in the Mitchell Report, according to a Hall of Fame vote tracker. Players require 75 percent of the vote to be inducted into Cooperstown, and neither is expected to make it — but anything is possible.
Over the last few weeks, Sheffield has engaged in a media tour, making appearances on the “Foul Territory” show and former MLB player Xavier Scruggs’s podcast “Show N’ Go with X,” where Sheffield claims he is innocent and wrongfully accused of knowingly taking PED’s in the BALCO case.
“Was I a suspect or was I a witness? I was a witness,” he proclaims on Scruggs’s show in defense.
Rodríguez, on the other hand, seems to have accepted his Hall fate. According to his Instagram account, he’s spent the last few weeks vacationing in the Dominican Republic, visiting his daughter in college and shoveling snow in Minnesota.
Sheffield’s increased votes could be because it’s his 10th and final ballot. It also appears to follow a trend, where his vote has increased in each of the last six years. Rodríguez, who is on the ballot for the third time, has also seen an increase in votes.
As far as the margin between the two, Sheffield never sued MLB or his own team claiming innocence, like Rodríguez did during the Biogenesis saga. Sheffield has never changed his position of innocence, while Rodríguez twice apologized for his wrongdoings, including calling himself “the only jackass that has pocket aces and figures out a way to lose the hand,” via ESPN.
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