Hall of Fame Breakdown: Corner Outfield

Before getting into today’s Hall of Fame breakdown, a little bit of PosCast news: Mike and I are once again opening up sports cards to raise money for ALS! Mike came up with a much pithier name for this that you will hear on this week’s PosCast, but the background is that last year, on a lark, two things happened:

1. Mike said, “You know what we should do? We should open up a bunch of old baseball card packs on the PosCast. That would make for great audio content.”

2. We decided, “Hey, why not turn it into a fundraiser for ALS in the name of our dear friend Sarah Langs?”

None of it made sense at all… until we raised more than $100,000 for the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig AL(C)S Center at Columbia University in Sarah’s name.

So we’re doing it again this year, bigger and better (or at least bigger). We have no illusions of repeating last year’s wild success, but we figure we’ll probably raise SOME money for ALS and, anyway, we want to open boxes of old sports cards.

This year’s charity is Boog Sciambi’s Project Main Street—well, it’s not entirely his charity, but he’s on the board—and it’s a wonderful foundation that focuses on care for ALS patients. It also partners with Team Gleason, another wonderful ALS charity founded by Steve Gleason, who I just wrote a chapter about for my new book, WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL, coming out Sept. 17.

What would this place even be without a little book pitch in it?

In any case, here’s what we’re doing: We’re asking people to donate $25-plus (or whatever you can afford) to Project Main Street—which you can do here. And in conjunction, we’re having a big ol’ Poscast raffle with a whole bunch of super-cool prizes, including the card(s) of your choice that we open up*, signed copies of our books, a variety of old wax packs, probably a typewritten and signed essay about your favorite football player from me, and, I imagine, a whole bunch of other things that really cool people will donate.

And all you have to do to enter is gmail us at PosCastRaffle—if you want to include a copy of the Project Main Street receipt, that’s cool, but we’re trusting folks—and tell us your favorite player, your PosCast memory, your ATM password, seriously, anything you like. We’ll choose the winners randomly, BUT, if you’re among the first 100 to donate and enter, we’re having a special raffle just for you.

*We’ve already pulled some cool cards—not to spoil anything, but we’ve pulled a signed Tom Glavine card, a Wade Boggs Fleer rookie, several cool Ken Griffey Jr. cards, etc. Oh, and you should know the winning boxes will come directly from Mike and that just throws all sorts of unexpected stuff into it.

Anyway, that’s the whole deal. Listen to the PosCast (optional). Donate to Project Main Street. Enter the PosCast Raffle.

OK, on to the corner outfielders!

Corner Outfielders

Percentages below, as always, are pulled from the Hall of Fame survey that thousands of you filled out a couple of weeks ago. If a player doesn’t have a percentage, that’s because he was not included in the survey.

Fully qualified Hall of Famers

1. Ichiro Suzuki, 99.3%

2. Barry Bonds, 81.1%

Strong Candidates

1. Shoeless Joe Jackson, 74.8%

2. Dwight Evans, 67.3%

3. Dave Parker, 51.2%

4. Sammy Sosa, 51.0%

Fringe Candidates

1. Roger Maris, 37.8%

2. Albert Belle, 36.3%

3. Frank Howard, 29.8%

4. Reggie Smith, 26.1%

5. Bobby Bonds, 25.9%

Admirable but not Hall of Fame careers

1. Pete Browning, 16.9%

2. Juan Gonzalez, 15.1%

3. Rusty Staub, 15.1%

4. Sherry Magee, 14.3%

5. Rocky Colavito, 11.0%

On this year’s ballot