Today, baseball will announce who, if anyone, will be joining Fred McGriff on the podium in Cooperstown this summer being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Is there anyone on the writers’ ballot who deserves induction into immortality. Every year, some writers make their ballot public and being what the social media world is, many of them are skewered for not voting for certain players.

We don’t do this, because, after all, it is the voter’s choice. We are sure they can give you a reason for their selections, although again, they can probably give you a bunch of reasons why a certain player should be inducted.

First of all, we favor a “small” Hall of Fame. Meaning, the elite of the elite. That doesn’t mean a player can only get in on the first ballot, so only the obvious players get in. When Tim Raines first was eligible, we weren’t positive he should be in, but over time, looking at his numbers, we changed our mind, and we were glad he got in.

FYI…hopefully, the various Veterans’ Committees will do the same for Kenny Lofton.

On the other hand, we think the analytical experts out there can find a reason for any candidate to get a vote. One writer on the MLB Network said he voted for Torii Hunter because he was one of four players to play 1500 games in centerfield, hit 350 home runs, and win nine Gold Gloves.

We like this writer’s work. But Hunter spent most of his career in the AL Central Division (Minnesota and Detroit) and at no time did we think we were watching a Hall of Fame player. He was a very good player, but as many have stated, the building isn’t the Hall of The Very Good.

If we had a vote, we would not vote for anyone who was involved with performance enhancing drugs. We understand there are players already enshrined who did use them, but if we knew about it, those players wouldn’t have received our vote.

We would also stay away from Carlos Beltran because of the Astros’ cheating situation. He has 435 career homers and was an excellent defensive player and baserunner, and he’s a guy with a very good case.

And we refute the argument of “they were great before they started using” too.

All of this said, we would vote for Jeff Kent, who is in his final year on the ballot. We have supported Kent’s candidacy for several years. He is the all-time leader for home runs at his primary position, second base, with 354, won the 2000 NL Most Valuable Player Award, and finished in the top ten three other times.

He also knocked in 100 runs eight times in a nine-year span from 1997-2005 and had a career OPS of 855.

We could be convinced to cast a vote for Scott Rolen as well. Rolen had several outstanding seasons but finished in the top 10 in the MVP voting just once, in 2004.

It is strange to us that neither Kent nor Rolen ever led their respective leagues in any major statistical category. And while Kent’s Bill James Hall of Fame Career Standard is 51 (the average enshrinee is 50), Rolen’s is just 40.

Todd Helton is another in that class. Helton is a victim of playing at Coors Field for his entire career, where he had an OPS of 1048, compared to 855 on the road. He has just three top ten MVP finishes, the highest being 5th in 2000, when he led the league in batting, hits, on base percentage, slugging, OPS, and runs batted in.

Other than that year, he led the league in a major category just one other time, on base percentage in 2005.

It’s also probably not fair to players like Dale Murphy and another player on the current ballot, Andruw Jones, that they had a bad ending to their careers. Had Jones retired after 2007, when he was just 30 years old, he would probably garner more support.

But he didn’t, and spent the last five years of his career with a batting average no higher than .247, and in none of those years was he a regular.

As we said, we don’t want a Hall of Fame where the very good are honored, or guys who had a very good five-to-six-year stretch. It should be for the best of the best.