Put it in the category of throwing good money after bad.

The bad money is what Alex Rodriguez has squandered on his team of lawyers, publicists and advisers of other kinds. He has wasted it on a lot of bad advice. The good money is what A-Rod is about to spend on challenging the arbitrator’s decision in Federal court. Those millions will be wasted, too, because judges don’t overturn arbitrators’ decisions.

All right, so Alex Rodriguez has a lot of money; he has earned $360 million in salary and signing bonuses since he became a free agent in December 2000. It’s his money, and if he wants to throw it away, that’s his right.

But he didn’t have to throw it all away. Instead of losing his entire 2014 salary of $25 million, instead of missing the entire season as he will under the arbitrator’s ruling, the New York Yankees’ third baseman could have …

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Baseball writers get enough criticism for their Hall of Fame voting from bloggers and fans without one of their own piling on, but they have asked for it and I am piling on.

Seventeen players made repeat appearances on the Hall of Fame ballot this year. Two of those players saw their 2013 vote totals increase, Craig Biggio by 39, Mike Piazza by 26.

The other 15, however, suffered voter falloff, some seriously. In all, they lost 545 votes from a year ago. With 571 writers voting, two more than last year, 15 players who were deemed Hall of Fame worthy a year ago lost their Cooperstown luster.

How does that happen? How does a writer put an ‘x’ in the box next to a player’s name last year, silently saying he belongs in the Hall, and then this year declaring with an empty box this player was not a Hall of Famer?

I can understand …

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Members of the Baseball Writers Association of America began voting players into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936 with a 10-vote limit on their ballots. As no single year has seen more than five players reach the 75% threshold for induction, 10 players per ballot exceeds the realistic number of players a voter might expect are worthy of Hall of Fame recognition that year. For more than 50 years, this limit wasn’t a problem; in recent years, with only one or two players being elected to the Hall every year, it’s even harder to imagine voters needing room for double-digit players on their ballot. But the 10-player maximum has come under fire this year, with a number of BBWAA members running out of spots for candidates they deem worthy of the Hall.

The 10-player limit did not pose a problem to voter Murray Chass, whose aversion to voting for players accused or suspected of steroid use eliminated many popular names from consideration. Instead, he checked boxes next to four names on his 2014 ballot and left his six remaining slots blank.

SB Nation’s Rob Neyer criticized Chass for not …

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