MLB great Gary Sheffield may one day get into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but he again fell short in the voting last week.
After his latest miss, he had a message for HOF voters, calling the voting process a “flawed system,” during an appearance this week on Audacy’s The Bret Boone Podcast.
Sheffield was selected on 63.9% of the Hall of Fame ballots this year, below the 75% benchmark for induction. It was his 10th and final year on the ballot, leaving his future prospects in the hands of the Veterans Committee.
“I was beyond surprised. I was real hopeful this year,” Sheffield said on the podcast.
Sheffield isn’t the only one surprised he’s still on the outside looking in at Cooperstown. In a 22-year career, he made nine All-Star appearances, hit 509 home runs and finished with a .907 OPS.
But like a number of other stars from baseball’s infamous “steroid era,” his reputation has been tarnished with some voters. Sheffield feels it was unfair the way his name got linked to a U.S. Senate investigation into the steroid scandal. Sheffield has said no one from that investigation ever spoke to him, yet his name still appeared in the report.
The former star called out the voting process.
“It’s a flawed system based on guys not watching you on a day-to-day basis. Because if they did there’s no way they could look at you with a straight face and say this guy’s better than this guy and his numbers mean more than his numbers,” he said. “Just from that standpoint alone, it’s biased and a lot of it is politics and a lot of other things when you look at it.
“For me, there’s no one way that is going to fix this problem but I can tell you that reporters are human beings, and the fact that they can tell you that they’re not biased, I don’t believe that, whoever believes that is believing a fool because I just know for a fact that they are biased and they do what they want to do and how they want to do it.”
Sheffield gave a shout out to USA Today MLB insider Bob Nightengale for helping make the slugger’s HOF case to other voters. Nightengale wrote a recent commentary on the issue, entitled “Gary Sheffield deserves to be in baseball’s Hall of Fame.”
“He was trying to share my story to each and every reporter to vindicate me but it just didn’t translate,” Sheffield said.
Now, Sheffield’s fate rests with the Veterans Committee.
“The fact is that those guys are there for a reason and they wouldn’t have a committee if they were doing it right every time,” Sheffield said. “So these guys are there to make a wrong a right.
“I just want this for my fans. I have a lot of fans. I get people writing me to this day and I respond back to it, each and every one of them, and I tell them just hold on, we’re going to get there, and when we do I’ll acknowledge them.”
