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Committee Chairman

Committee Chairman

Kirk Buchner, "The Committee Chairman", is the owner and operator of the site.  Kirk can be contacted at [email protected] .
This is kind of our Christmas morning.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has announced their 2017 Class, and let’s get right to it.

Pearl Jam, enters on their first year of eligibility and did this surprise anyone at all?  When you think of what the RRHOF is looking for in an inductee they met every criteria and the discussion to enter the Cleveland probably didn’t even exist.  They didn’t have to debate it all.

Tupac also joins as a first ballot inductee.  No word yet as to whether his hologram will be making an appearance at the ceremony, but like Pearl Jam this was largely expected.

Journey, who won the fan vote, also got in on their first nomination, though they have been long eligible.  This is the fourth year in a row where the winner of the fan vote gained entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Progressive Rock finally saw Yes get in after twenty plus years of eligibility.  Arguably, this was of the biggest bands of their genre who had yet to get in.

The Electric Light Orchestra will also be inducted.  Jeff Lynne has long been one of the most respected musicians in the industry and for what it is worth, now all of the Wilburys are Hall of Famers.

The surprise inductee was Joan Baez, who also got in on her first nomination, albeit after thirty-four years of eligibility.  Baez was a folk icon, and she is the lone female to enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year.

Perhaps the biggest relief (in our eyes) is that Chic’s Nile Rodgers will be entering the Hall as the recipient of the Award for Musical Excellence.  Chic had been nominated annually without getting in, and this is likely going to put an end to that debacle. 

Those not selected were Depeche Mode, Janet Jackson, Bad Brains, Jane’s Addiction, The Cars, Chic, The J. Geils Band, Kraftwerk, MC5, Steppenwolf, The Zombies, Joe Tex and Chaka Khan.

We will have a deeper look at this later in the week and we will also begin work on reworking our Notinhalloffame.com Rock and Roll list in late January.
This isn’t going to be Curt Schilling’s year is it?

We have another Baseball Hall of Fame writer who has stated that he will not be voting for Schilling and furthermore, won’t be voting for anyone for the 2017 Hall of Fame Class.  That person is Wally Matthews, a former beat writer for the New York Yankees who had this say to say in a column regarding Schilling:


“If baseball’s Sabremetricians could come up with a way to quantify character, Curt Schilling’s would be a negative number.

But a guy’s personality is not supposed to be the criteria for voting, his performance is. However, voters are human beings and sometimes it is difficult to separate the man from the player.

That is where the question of Curt Schilling’s candidacy comes up for me this year. I have voted for Schilling in the past, based on his superior career WAR (80.7, higher than that of Tom Glavine, Don Sutton, Jim Palmer, Bob Feller, and yes, even Sandy Koufax) and his outstanding post-season numbers.

His personal views have often troubled and at times offended me — he is an unabashed collector of Nazi memorabilia — but I have kept that out of my thought process.

Until, that is, about a month ago, when he retweeted a photo of a man wearing a T-shirt advocating the lynching of journalists, with the comment, “OK, so much awesome here . . .”

Beyond the offensiveness of any reference to lynching, which is profoundly racist in itself, is the threat to the men and women in my profession. That is something I take personally and if Curt Schilling really wants to “lynch” journalists, he can start with me, in a boxing ring with 10-ounce gloves on. That will put an end to his sick little fantasy.”


Did he just challenge Schilling to a fight?

This wasn’t all that Matthews had to say, as other comments showed how he was disheartened with the baseball players in general and their attitude towards the media in general:


“I thought I had reached my breaking point a couple of years ago when, while covering a Yankees road game in a Midwest city, a pitcher who had recently been voted into the Hall of Fame — he was a borderline candidate at best but I voted for him, I must admit, under pressure from some colleagues — came upon the Yankees beat crew waiting for the elevator down to the post-game clubhouse.

This borderline Hall of Famer looked at the group of people, many of whom had voted for him, and turned to a companion. “Look at all the sheep,” he said, derisively. Then he began making ridiculous bleating noises. I couldn’t decide whether to belt him in the mouth or refer him to a psychiatrist. All I know is in that moment, I was profoundly sorry I voted for him and his slightly-better-than average stats.”


We are not sure who sounds more bitter, Matthews, or the former baseball player he is describing. 

Matthews also vented about the hypocrisy of the Today’s Game Era Committee selecting Bud Selig for the 2017 Hall:


“As if trying to determine whose numbers are real and whose were inflated by artificial (read: chemical) and therefore illegal means weren’t difficult enough, the Hall has further complicated matters this year by voting in Bud Selig, a  co-conspirator with Donald Fehr and Gene Orza in allowing the steroid era to occur in the first place.”


While his argument on the induction of Bud Selig is sound, the fact that someone is just throwing away a ballot is absurd and juvenile.  Certainly there are other baseball journalists who would love to have this opportunity.

Either way, the tally for Schilling is not looking like it could possibly be higher than last year.   

Yes, we know this is a very slow process!

We have another Top 50 All Time to announce and we have returned to the National Football League, specifically the NFC North, where we tackled the monstrous legacy of the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions previously.  This time we look at their division rival, the Minnesota Vikings.

Minnesota went to four Super Bowls in the 1970’s, all in losing efforts, but to get to that many title games you know that team was loaded with talent in that era.  Not surprisingly, that is where many of our Top 50 come from.

This was a very hard process for us, perhaps the hardest one to date!

The entire list begins here:

We invite you to click through to see where Fran Tarkenton, Adrian Petersen, Cris Carter, Alan Page and Randy Moss are, but we will tell you who we ranked #1, and we know it will shock you a little.

It is Hall of Famer, Carl Eller.

We bet while you weren’t expecting that one, were you?

This list is up to the end of the 2015 Season.

We look forward to your feedback and remember the intent is to change this annually, so your opinions and comments do matter!
As we move onward and upward in our slow trudge to naming all of the Top 50 players from the North American “Big Four”, our eventual follow up will be the look at how those organizations honor their former players and executives.

As such it is news to us (somewhat big actually, though completely expected) that the New York Yankees will formally retire the number #2 of their eventual first ballot Hall of Fame infielder, Derek Jeter on May 14, their Mother’s Day home game against the Houston Astros.

Going through the accomplishments of Jeter would be exhausting, but just to recap the tip of his iceberg, he is a member of the 3,000 Hit Club, a five time World Series Champion and a fourteen time All Star

Twenty-one former Yankees have had their number retired, and the retirement of #2 mans that their can never be another New York Yankee who will wear a single digit number as all of the others have been retired.

We here at Notinhalloffame.com would like to congratulate Derek Jeter for this much deserved honor and the Yankees for doing this is an appropriately timed fashion.