Bert Alert!

Bert Blyleven made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame today, on his second to last shot, with 79.7% of the vote (the minimum is 75%), which was a totally awesome birthday present to me, and also made it so I can stop being apoplectic about this podcast Houseboy shared with me last week in which Kevin Goldstein argues that an important consideration for getting into the Hall of Fame should be... "fame." Ok, yeah, it is right in there in the title and all, but I would dare to argue that famous for what should be kind of important, and if he concedes that Bert's stats make him more than worthy (which he does), then the question of how famous he is is inherently subjective. I'm sure there is a significant amount of subjectivity in the voting of a bunch of people who make their money writing about a game and probably ingest more nacho vitamins than can be healthy, but I can tell you as a raised but not born Minnesotan who watches the Twins broadcasts on the Extra Innings package every year, that if he wasn't famous enough then he's certainly famous enough now, and plus there is this:

[Source]

Anyway, all of that doesn't matter now because he's in and so I'm happy... for now...