Bert Blyleven and Roberto Alomar will headline the 2011 Baseball Hall of Fame class

For Bert Blyleven the call finally came for him in his 15th year of eligibility. He came up 4 votes short last year. Many had claimed that Blyleven's career numbers were very good, but just short of Hall Worthy. He won 287 games. He had 60 career shutouts, and is 5th on the all-time strikeouts list with 3701. He wasn't flashy but he was good. Over the years a number of statisticians have looked over his career stats using the newer sabermetric stats. His sabermetrics rank him up there very well with other Hall of Fame pitchers, even if the traditional stats fell a bit short in some eyes. Bill James apparently looked over all of Blyleven's losses and no-decisions and determined it was just bad luck that he came up 13 wins shy of 300. There were no more details though as to whether those were cases of poor run support, unearned runs, bullpens blowing big leads, or something else.

Roberto Alomar is one of the best second basemen ever. He's in his second year of eligibility. Many think that the infamous incident where he spit in the face of umpire John Hershbeck cost him first ballot election. The two have long since made up, are friends and do charitable work together, and Hershbeck supports Alomar's candidacy. Alomar was a career .300 hitter and won 10 Gold Glove Awards.

Rafael Palmerio made his ballot debut. He has first ballot numbers, but was the first big name player to be suspended for steroid use. He got only 11 percent of ballots. Mark McGwire dropped to 19%. Jeff Bagwell was in his first year of eligibility and got 41% of votes. He never tested positive for steroids or had his name come up, but he played in that era of suspicion. Now comes the time when we see how the steroid users will be treated. Palmiero's result is very telling, since his numbers would be overwhelmingly first ballot in and of themselves. This bodes poorly for Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens, and Barry Bonds in the upcoming years. Bagwell? We'll have to see whether suspicion of his numbers in the era he played in, versus other known steroid abusers take their toll.