Wezen-Ball: HOF Candidates as Prospects

As we wait for the Hall of Fame announcement to come sometime Monday morning - for the record, I’m predicting that Barry Larkin will be the only new inductee this year, with Jack Morris getting dangerously close to the 70% mark - it seems like the perfect time to go back and look at how the main candidates on this year’s ballot looked coming into the major leagues. Using my collection of annual baseball preview magazines from the likes of Street and Smith’s and The Sporting News, I’ve gone back and found each candidate’s name in the various “minor leagues” sections of the magazines. It’s always fun to see what everyone was saying about some of the game’s greats before we knew them to be so.