Photo by Derral Chen via Wikimedia Commons
Gary Sheffield - Detroit Lions
Gary Sheffield playing for the Detroit Tigers September 22, 2007
He came up short in 10 consecutive years on the BBWAA ballot, but this fall one controversial former Brewer will get one last chance for a fresh committee to consider his candidacy for Cooperstown.
Gary Sheffield played professional baseball for 24 seasons and was a member of eight franchises in his career, but one of his longest stops was his first one: The Brewers made the then-high schooler the #6 overall pick in the 1986 draft and held onto him until the spring of 1992, when they traded him to the Padres. That long run with the Brewers featured some highlights but significantly more memorable lowlights. It took Matthew Prigge two parts to catalog them all back in 2017, and they’re a big part of a removed chapter from Dave Parker’s biography about his time in Milwaukee. Much of the handling and criticism of Sheffield reads differently in a modern light. At best, however, the most charitable reading of the situation likely still finds fault on both sides.
Sheffield hit 509 home runs in his MLB career, posting a near-.400 on-base percentage across more than two decades in the majors, made nine All Star teams, won five Silver Slugger Awards and was a part of six teams that made the postseason, including the World Series champion 1997 Marlins. He was also traded five times, mentioned in the Mitchell Report as part of an investigation into performance enhancing drug use and implicated in the BALCO scandal. All of this greatly complicated his Hall of Fame candidacy, but he did gain momentum over time: Just 11.1% of BBWAA voters had him on their ballot in 2018, his fourth season of eligibility, but 63.9% voted for him in his final season of eligibility last year. However, 75%, is the threshold for induction and he did not clear it.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Possible Inductions
Sheffield did not have to wait long, however, for a second chance: the Hall of Fame’s Contemporary Baseball Era Committee (formerly known as the Veterans Committee) meets every three years to consider the candidacies of eight players who were not initially selected for the Hall of Fame, and this is one of those years. They’ll gather at baseball’s Winter Meetings in December to vote on possible induction for these eight candidates:
- Barry Bonds
- Roger Clemens
- Carlos Delgado
- Jeff Kent
- Don Mattingly
- Dale Murphy
- Sheffield
- Fernando Valenzuela
This year’s committee discussion might be more controversial than most because of the charged topic of performance enhancing drugs: Bonds, Clemens and Sheffield all had some level of direct tie to that scandal, and it was likely the sole reason Bonds and Clemens weren’t voted in by the BBWAA. This is a new group to vote on those three but it’s also a smaller group and any candidate still needs 75% of the vote to be inducted, so if as many as five of the members are unwilling to support a candidate with PED ties then they won’t get in.
There’s also a significant mathematical challenge for any player to be inducted by the committee: There are 16 members on the committee, but each one is allowed to vote for a maximum of three players, so in effect every vote for one player is a vote against another. Even if every member of the committee voted for the maximum and the votes were perfectly distributed, no more than four players from the list above could reach the minimum threshold for induction.
That’s not to say it can’t happen, of course: One-time Sheffield mentor Dave Parker was inducted into the Hall by a similar committee just last year. For now, however, Sheffield seems more likely to remain one of the game’s most interesting mercurial characters but not one of its enshrined Hall of Famers.
