Having just gone through an election cycle, I received dozens of telephone calls urging me to vote for candidates for governor, state senate, state assembly, county freeholder, borough council, sheriff. No one called asking me not to vote for someone.

However, the day before Election Day, someone sent me an e-mail asking me, almost pleading with me, not to vote for someone – Jack Morris.

“Please reconsider & do NOT elect Jack Morris, the anti-Blyleven, to the Hall! Just one more year.”

The writer referred to Morris’ being in his 15th and last year of eligibility on the writers’ ballot. If he doesn’t make it this year, he will be eligible in the expansion era voting after a five-year wait, meaning he will be eligible again in 2020.

The e-mailer, however, was concerned only with the present. He dreaded the thought of …

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Despite “an amazing amount of pressure put on committee members” to vote Bud Selig onto this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, a committee member said, the commissioner fell short and will have to wait three more years for his next chance for election to the plateau he covets.

The ballot, which the Hall announced Monday (Nov. 4), is the one that includes the late Marvin Miller, whose daughter and son were disturbed that the Hall ignored his wishes.

“He did not want to be on the Hall of Fame ballot,” Susan Miller said. “They’re cowards doing it after he died.”

Miller died last November. Four and a half years earlier, he wrote a letter to Jack O’Connell, secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers Association, requesting that he no longer be nominated on the Hall ballot. His request was ignored in 2009 and 2010 and again this week.

“My father’s wishes,” Peter Miller said in an e-mail from Japan, “stated in writing, and reaffirmed to me in person many times, and for the last time within weeks of his death, were that he did not want to be on the ballot.”

In his six times on a Hall ballot in 10 years, Miller has been …

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Operating on the old cautionary adage that says ungrammatically if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I can only conclude that Rawlings thought its Gold Glove awards were broken. Hillerich & Bradsby, on the other hand, finds nothing wrong with its Silver Slugger awards and sees no reason to fix them. Good for Messrs Hillerich and Bradsby.

Since 1957 the Rawlings Sporting Goods Company has awarded Gold Gloves to the players voted by major league managers and coaches as the best at their positions. Two years ago Rawlings added a Platinum Glove award in each league.

Now Rawlings has gone over to the dark side. Not only that, but the company has also gone off the deep end, embracing the kind of statistics that are at the center of baseball’s fiercest debate.

Rawlings has jumped into bed headfirst with SABR, those wild-eyed statistical analysts whom I will refrain from calling …

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