Hall of Awesome

Hall of Fame voting time has come and gone with its normal amount of consternation and bickering. While congrats must go to Derek Jeter and Larry Walker for becoming enshrined, my mind wanders to other players who probably will never make it. So in collaboration with a couple others I've put together a list of nominees for what we are dubbing the Hall of Awesome. Now we're all about the same age so we've watched baseball over a very specific set of time as well as eliminating those who have been tainted by cheating or other punishable offenses, resulting in our nominees being very concentrated in that era. So I will split up the nominees into three categories based on time period and will have a write up for each nominee of our inaugural class.

The Categories are:

Never Say Never - For those nominees who are already expected to be on the 2021 Hall of Fame ballot or have yet to be on the ballot. They still have a chance, even if it is slim, of making it in during the voting process because frankly Baseball writers can be incredibly stubborn but also love to follow trends. So these guys who are awesome but won't be inducted quite yet.

Legends of Yore - For those nominees who built their legend before we could have known them. We mostly only know these players from the stories told about them, their appearances as announcers/broadcasters or as a part of a piece pop culture. I define these players as having at least 4 of their best 7 seasons before 1985. They will be inducted as normal but because of their small numbers will get written about at a later time.

Hall of Awesome - Our kind of players, these are the players with stories that we know and repeat. They may not always be our favorites but they have been the ones who have defined baseball of our lifetimes as much as if not more than anyone who is in the Hall of Fame. These are the guys we celebrate and I will starting writing about nearly immediately ranked in order of their career WAR as calculated by Baseball-reference.com