Baseball's Next to Best

With the arguable exception of canonization in the Catholic church, membership in no other institution is scrutinized as is induction in baseball's Hall of Fame. The motives and persuasions of the Cooperstown Sanhedrin, the Baseball Writers' Association of America, are constantly guessed, with some cynics going so far as to suggest that one of the league's greatest ever pitchers is staging a comeback for the sole purpose of pushing back the five-year delay between retirement and Hall consideration until some of the BWAA's generation of scolds have died off.