Jim Rice and the New Hampshire Primary

Yesterday was a big day. You had both the Baseball Hall of Fame announcement for the 2008 inductees and there was also the New Hampshire Primary.

I was very disappointed that Jim Rice failed to get the 75% of votes necessary for enshrinement. I thought for sure that the 14th year would do the trick for #14. As it was - Rice received 392 votes for 72.2% of the vote - just 16 votes shy of the 75% he needed.

As usual - the votes were made in secret. The writers don't have to step up and take responsibility for their actions which of course explains the following:

Rod Beck 2 votes
Travis Fryman 2 votes
Robb Nen 1 vote
Shawon Dunston 1 vote
Chuck Finley 1 vote
David Justice 1 vote
Chuck Knoblauch 1 vote
Todd Stottlemyre 1 vote

That's 10 votes which in my mind are completely unjustified. Yet nobody is ever going to have to own up to being the guy who thinks Chuck Knoblauch was Hall of Fame worthy. In a system worth it's salt - the writers who cast those 10 votes would have their voting rights revoked. If that was the case (those writers getting their right to vote revoked) - then Rice would need just 400 votes for the 75% threshold (400 of 533). I'm also guessing that in a system where the writer's votes are made public - then enough writers who publicly say they support Jim Rice but privately execute their own little private vendettas would also be exposed. The combination would be enough to get Rice over the hump. It's sad to say but Jim Rice's dream of being in the Hall of Fame is being deferred by the petty and frivolous.

Speaking of voting and numbers - yesterday Hillary Clinton edged Barack Obama and John McCain beat Mitt Romney in the New Hampshire Primaries. The sentence from the linked story that stuck out for me was the following:

With 96 percent of the precincts reporting early today, 281,266 votes had been tallied in the Democratic race and 232,804 in the Republican one.

So if McCain beat Romney 37% to 32% (unofficial) - that means that the margin of victory was about 11,700 votes which to put it into context is less than the average attendance for even the worst drawing NHL team.

The Democrats? The margin of victory was about 8,450 which is about the number of people you'd find in just the endzone seats of just about any NFL game.

I throw those numbers out in sports attendance context to make a point. If you swung half of those hockey game votes or endzone votes in the other direction - then you have different winners in New Hampshire yesterday. I think if either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama had publicly and loudly supported Jim Rice's attempt to gain entry into the Hall of Fame then that small move would have been enough to sway a sufficient number of Granite State Red Sox fans who were on the fence and enough to change the results of the primary.

It's a sad commentary about our Presidential electoral process that I'm probably right about this.