The doors of Cooperstown are swinging wider than ever before. But they aren't open wide enough. Not yet.
The backlog of qualified candidates was shortened with Wednesday’s announcement that the Baseball Writers' Association of America had voted in four new Hall of Famers. All were deserving. Chipper Jones, Jim Thome, Trevor Hoffman and Vladimir Guerrero all hit benchmarks for typical Hall of Famers in Jay Jaffe's JAWS system, Bill James' Hall of Fame monitor or both. But when the voting for next year’s class begins, we’re still going to be looking at a ballot with more viable candidates than slots available for the writers to fill in.