The Company You Keep & The Company You Don't

The happiest fellows on the 2008 Hall of Fame ballot must surely be Goose Gossage, Jack Morris, Don Mattingly, Jim Rice and Bert Blyleven. What do all of these returning candidates have in common? The likelihood that no newcomers on the ballot will draw votes from them.

Among the newcomers, only Tim Raines seems certain to receive serious consideration from the voters. Among the returning candidates, Mark MacGwire is unlikely to receive much support. This paucity of sure-fire winners will likely mean that Gossage at the very least will finally get the support he deserves. Jim Rice will appear on the ballot for the fourteenth time. He remains a long shot to get the necessary votes, having slipped a little last year.

Will the voters fail to elect anyone? Not likely.

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With the news that former Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was one of five people elected to the Hall by the Veterans Committee it is worth remembering the time he voided the deals made by long-time nemesis and adversary Charlie Finley. Finley, always crying poor, had begun the wholesale dismantling of his highly successful Oakland teams by working out deals to sell Vida Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million and Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Boston Red Sox for $2 million. Kuhn vetoed the sales. (Remember, we are talking 1976 dollars here.)

At the time Kuhn said ''Public confidence in the integrity of club operations and in baseball would be greatly undermined should such assignments not be restrained." Years late he added, ''If we let Finley's deals go through, how were we going to stop the weaker clubs from selling off players to the stronger ones, and what would become of competitive balance?''

The Florida Marlins have been dismantling their team piece by piece for years, selling or trading veterans who were about to command serious money just before the players were going to collect, but yesterday's blockbuster trade of Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis to Detroit puts an end to their wheeling and dealing. The Marlins literally have no veterans left to trade. With the exception of Hanley Ramirez, they have no bonafide stars remaining on their roster and Ramirez is years away from a big payday. There are a lot of middling veterans in baseball making more money per annum than the entire Marlins' roster. Bug Selig and his brethren could care less. Perhaps their silence is a conspiracy to allow the Marlins to hit rock bottom before moving the franchise, probably to Las Vegas.

The Marlins are the strangest franchise in baseball. They've won two World Series in their brief history yet no one goes to see them. They had the worst attendance in MLB last year and are always at or near the bottom. If ever a locale cried out for a domed stadium it is hot, humid and rainy Miami, but the Marlins continue to play in an outdoor football stadium and cannot convince the 18 voters in greater Miami who do come see them in person to persuade several hundred thousand others to fund a new pleasure palace.

Pity the poor Marlin players who perform in front of tens of thousands of empty seats every night. Their best hope is that the Marlins' ownership will either sell the franchise or move it.