The Johnny Bingo Awards - The 2010s

My Favorite Books of the Decade


Authors, agents, publishers, and readers: it’s time for the 2019 Johnny Bingo Awards!

Wait, what’s that you say?  I didn’t give out the 2018 Awards?  Or 2017, 2016…jeez, when was the last time I did these things?  2009?!  Well, that’s embarrassing.  I have long mocked the Nobel Prize in Literature for their curious choices, but at least they remember to give out their awards every year (whether the winner shows up or not is another question entirely).

There’s only one option here:  claim it was my intention all along to skip ten years and hand out The Johnny Bingo Awards for the Decade!

These awards have flexible rules.  Indeed there is only one that matters (to which I will make a slight update):

“The Johnny Bingo Award(s) have one judge – me – and one rule: all eligible books must have been finished by me this year decade.   It could’ve been written by a blind Greek poet in the 8th century BC or be an unpublished galley hacked from an MFA candidate’s MacBook in a Brooklyn cafe. As long as I read the final paragraph before the calendar turns, it's eligible.”

I’m going to do this Oscar style: start with some fun awards, then get into the long weird section, and close out with the big ones.  And away we go:

Best Rock & Roll Book
The 2010s brought us a lot of books about classic rock.  I read the “The English Guitarist Memoir Trilogy” (Keith Richards’ Life, Pete Townshend’s Who I Am, and Clapton: The Autobiography).  I enjoyed Pamela Des Barres’ delightful groupie memoir, I’m With the Band.  And Stephen Hyden's Twilight of the Gods was...well, I don't know what it was exactly - part memoir, part classic rock history, but mostly hanging out with a smart and interesting guy who has thought entirely too much about classic rock and what it means to people of a certain age.

But the winner here is The Trouble Boys: The Story of the Replacements.  Bob Mehr’s chronicle of this brilliant but self-destructive band has all the sex, drugs and rock and roll the genre promises.  And it has one of my favorite components of rock books – encounters with other musicians (in particular, the members of REM, who are a steady presence as competitors, counterpoint, and comrades).

It also gave me what I was really looking for: an insight into the creative process.  Townshend’s book does that too, but in a self-consciously intellectual way.  Clapton’s music is ultimately too derivative – his inspiration is other musicians – to provide creative insight.  And Keith Richards, bless his pirate soul, seems to have no earthly idea where the music comes from.

But these drunken nuts from Minneapolis were true artists, and the journey with them was fascinating.

Best Book from a Binge Read
The 2010s brought us binge-watching, and perhaps not coincidentally I did some binge-reading this decade.  Not on authors, but on subjects.

Ben McIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal sent me down a Cambridge Five Spy Ring rabbit hole.  T.H. White’s Once and Future King inspired a quest to learn everything I could about King Arthur and Arthurian legend.  (Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles is a wonderful imagining of how a possibly historical medieval warlord could’ve evolved into the English legend).  And Sherlock Holmes – wow, did I go full Sherlock this decade.   I read every word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, and numerous non-canon Sherlock books by everyone from Michael Chabon to Caleb Carr*.

*  I highly recommend Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian.  Moore published this exceedingly clever novel in 2010, then four years later won the Academy Award for writing The Imitation Game, starring none other than Benedict Cumberbatch, my favorite on-screen Sherlock.

But my most rewarding binge was on Alexander the Great.   And the winner here is Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy (Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, Funeral Games).   Reading Renault's work alongside more traditional biographies (and a bit of Arrian) makes you wonder how Oliver Stone could have possibly made such a boring movie from such thrilling material.

Sidebar
I read hardcovers, eBooks on a Kindle, eBooks on an iPhone, and I listen to audiobooks.  I consider all of this to be "reading".  For example, I listened to the entire English Guitarist Memoir trilogy on audiobook, which I highly recommend.  Pete Townshend reads his own book, and he comes off as much more self-effacing and able to laugh at himself than I suspect he would in print, where his tendency to pomposity would be more obvious.  And Keith Richards' audiobook is a delightful mess: it starts with Johnny Depp, who must have gotten bored halfway through.  Then a replacement bloke with a cockney accent jumps in.  Then Keith decides, what the hell, I'm gonna read a few chapters!   It's all so...Keith.


Best Stephen King Book Not Written By Stephen King
Upon its publication in 2010, Justin Cronin’s The Passage was immediately compared to The Stand.  Followed by The Twelve and The City of Mirrors, King himself called it “a trilogy that will stand as one of the great achievements in American fantasy fiction.”


Worst Stephen King Book Written By Stephen King
I read a lot of fantasy series this decade.  A Song of Ice and Fire (which you may recognize as Game of Thrones).  All 15 books of The Wheel of Time.  Lev Grossman's The Magicians.  His Dark Materials.  The aforementioned Once and Future King*.

So I thought, hey, Stephen King is one of the great storytellers of modern times.  Let's give his fantasy series, The Dark Tower, a shot.  It must be good.

Spoiler:  It is not good.

*  Arthurian legend is the foundation story of all modern fantasy stories, from The Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to Harry Potter. And let's be clear: Star Wars is fantasy, NOT science fiction.  It has knights and swords and magic and princesses.  Obi-Wan Kenobi is Merlin and Luke is Arthur.  In the prequel trilogy Yoda is Merlin and Anakin is Arthur.  And in the new trilogy Luke is Merlin and Rey is Arthur.  Got it?  Good.  


The Book Most Likely to Make My Wife Kick Me Under the Table
There's a certain kind of book - non-fiction, well-written, a colon in the title, and a Big Idea at its heart  - that will make me talk about it for months afterwards.   Eventually, I'm out to dinner with other people and am rambling on for entirely too long about how ancient Romans used memory palaces to commit multi-hour speeches to memory and - thwack! - my wife will deliver a well-placed blow to my shin. 

Here are the nominees:

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
David Epstein

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Joshua Foer

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Steven Pinker

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won't Stop Talking
Susan Cain

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan

If you're an introvert and want to understand yourself better OR an extrovert who lives and works with introverts and wants to understand them better, read Quiet.

If you think the age you live in is the worst ever and am open to being proven dramatically wrong, read Better Angels.

And if you really want to get kicked under the table, read Moonwalking. 


Sidebar
I've kept a book log for 19 years, which is how I'm able to do this ridiculous "awards" program.  But I'm sure these awards are suffering from recency bias.  For example, I just read The Passage trilogy  so it's top of mind.  But back in 2012 I read a novel called The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.  I remembered loving it.  I remember it was kinda sorta about baseball and college.  I remember it was beloved by critics.  But alas, I don't remember anything else about it.

If I had just read it, it probably would have won a coveted J-B Award.  Alas, it just gets a quick mention here.

Best Books I Didn't Actually Read
Over the course of several Christmases Santa brought me The Landmark Thucydides, The Landmark Herodotus, and The Landmark Caesar.  These are beautiful books, objets d'art, that present ancient historical texts in a setting for non-scholars.

For example, The Landmark Thucydides presents a translation of  The Peloponnesian War, complete with maps and introductions and same-page footnotes.   But it also includes a dozen essays by noted scholars on everything from naval warfare in the 5th century BCE to the structures of Athenian government.

I haven't read all the ancient texts from end to end.  But they are books I pick up, read an essay, read some passages - the Athenians' disastrous invasion of Sicily, the Spartans at Thermopylae - and move on.  Perhaps in retirement I'll really dig into these things.


Best Novel
Let's be clear:  every book in this category is better than The Passage and the Replacements book and pretty much everything else.  A great novel is hypnotic - when lost in its pages you miss train stops and meals and deadlines - the world stops around you.  It makes you think and it teaches you things about humanity and philosophy and morality and history and everything that matters.

As Hilary Mantel, one of this year's nominees said, "A novel should be a book of questions, not of answers." 

The nominees are:

The Son
Phillip Meyer

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Anthony Marra

Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders

A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan

Wolf Hall
Hillary Mantel

Matterhorn
Karl Marlantes

Since I have a bias for history wrapped up in literature, particularly history that I'm dreadfully ignorant of, the coveted JB Prize goes to Wolf Hall.  The first book in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, it stands alongside Robert Caro's biographies as a masterwork about how power is gained and wielded.  And it's a helluva story too.


Best History Book
Let's get right to it:

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume IV
Robert Caro

Speaking of Robert Caro's biographies...

I assume there are people will read all 4000 pages of Caro's monumental biography of LBJ (he's at 4 volumes and 3000 pages now).  I doubt I'll be one of them.  

But this volume, covering his last years in the Senate through the assassination of JFK and the first tumultuous year of his Presidency, covers a fascinating period of American history told by a master historian.

Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
Allen Guelzo

What elevates this from a good battle history to a great work of history are the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of little stories he tells.   Stories of valor, tragedy, folly, humor.  Stories of generals and privates, but also of the citizens of a Pennsylvania town that was visited for 3 days by an inferno of death.

Among all these portraits and stories emerges a coherent narrative of this enormous battle. 

Paul Revere's Ride
David Hackett Fischer

Sometimes the legend is true.  Sometimes the truth is even more interesting than the legend.

Paul Revere's midnight ride achieved its legendary status thanks to Henry Wadworth Longfellow's famous poem ("Listen, my children, and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.")  What followed was a century of revisionists correcting Mr. Longfellow.

But Fischer rescues the true story, and it is a damned good one.   (He did the same thing for Washington in Washington's Crossing and corrects the myth of American's "Puritan founding" in The Seeds of Albion.)

Grant
Ron Chernow

If Robert Caro isn't our finest biographer, perhaps it's Ron Chernow?

I don't expect this book to get the same Broadway musical hit treatment as his 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, but it may be a better book - or at least, a more interesting subject.

Grant's reputation doesn't need reviving - and yet Chernow does just that.  He makes you realize he was a greater military strategist than he is often given credit for; nothing like the butcher he is often accused of; and a far better President than historians usually accord him.

And it's a great read taking you everywhere from pre- and postwar Mexico, antebellum California, gilded age New York, a grand tour of Europe - and of course, the great battlefields of The Civil War.

The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-45.  Volume 3 of The Liberation Trilogy
Rick Atkinson

When An Army at Dawn, the first volume of Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy came out in 2002, it was clear that the Second World War had found its Bruce Catton.  Just as Catton focused on the Army of the Potomac in his great trilogy (Mr. Lincoln's Army, Glory Road, A Stillness at Appomattox), Atkinson zeroes in on the Allied triumph in Europe.

The Guns at Last Light is the concluding volume of this great work, and is the winner of the Johnny Bingo Award for History.


LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS
Two of my writing heroes passed away this decade.

Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe became my writing hero early in college. "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" opened up my eyes to what non-fiction writing could be. Then I read "The Right Stuff", and all of the pyrotechnics from his earlier work was gone, and its absence made me realize how good the work was - indeed, how one might go about doing this. If you want to write well, forget all of the books about writing; just read "The Right Stuff" and pay attention.

And then he thought, after proving himself as possibly the greatest non-fiction writer of the century, what the hell, he'd write a novel. 500 years from now, when historians and cultural archaeologists want to know what the greatest city in the world was like before the internet changed the world, they need only read "Bonfire of the Vanities".

(If you care about the novel as an art form, read his essay, "Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast".)


Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard is almost certainly the writer I've been reading the longest.  I was checking out 52 Pickup and Hombre from the Farmingdale Library bookmobile as a kid.   I read nine of his books this decade - the last one, Fire in the Hole*, in 2013.

*  Hollywood has always loved Leonard.  Hombre was turned into a Western starring Paul Newman.  52 Pickup was a Roy Scheider movie.  And Fire in the Hole is a collection that includes the story that inspired the excellent FX series Justified.   My favorite movie from an Elmore Leonard book is the wildly underrated Out of Sight.

The best way to honor Elmore Leonard is to share with you his ten rules of writing.

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Well, that's it for the Johnny Bingo Awards.  See ya in 2030.  Happy Reading!

Looks Like the University of Illinois!

Some Thoughts on the College Application Process

As a parent I have been through the college application process twice in the past five years, as have many friends, family, and peers.  I’ve therefore become a collector of theories - theories as to why students get admitted, rejected, wait-listed, early-admitted, blessed with bounteous scholarships or handed retail pricing, and so on at various schools.

Wanna hear them all?

(The names of these theories have been changed, rearranged, flipped, and twisted to protect the innocent and the guilty.   In other words, they have no meaning whatsoever except to me and the person I’m sub-tweeting.)

The Glass Plus Theory
This theory holds that at certain schools, evidence of leadership is paramount.  Sure you have the SATs and the grades, you were a pretty good athlete, and was a member of good standing in the photography club.

But were you the captain of your water polo team?  The president of the photography club?  No?

REJECTED!

The Ice Cream Cone Theory 
So your kid got wait-listed by Michigan State…but received a nice scholarship from the little school with MUCH higher average SAT and GPA scores.  And your kid does not have particularly good SATs and GPAs.  What gives?

This theory holds that the big schools with 40,000 applications lack the time and inclination to lovingly pore over every app.   They run them through an SAT/GPA grinder and out comes the winners and losers. 

But that little school?  They actually care that you volunteered every Saturday at the nursing home.  That you led your Girl Scout troop in cookie sales every year. 

They have discerned, past your numbers, qualities they are looking for at their school.

The Lewispatch Theory
Congratulations!  You are your school’s valedictorian!  You scored a 1600 on your SATs and a 36 on your ACTs!   You’ve won all of your community’s scholarships and your college essay proposed a plausible solution to end the Syrian civil war!   You were captain of the basketball team, president of the photography club, and star of the school play!

You have Ivy League credentials but don’t want to go to Harvard, you want to go to the school 30 minutes away that you’ve loved your entire life.

Your friend, the one with the 1120 SATs who warmed the bench on the football team?  He made it in.  That other kid, currently on probation for a DWI, got wait-listed.  You finally get your letter and…

REJECTED!

This is an actual mostly-true story my friend heard from an admissions director at his alma mater.  Turns out this kid, even though he had been on campus many times, had never registered his presence at the school.   Didn’t do the official tour because he didn’t need to - he knew the school inside out! 

And the school just figured, there’s no way this kid wants to come here.   So why waste a seat on him?

The Ramen Theory
You’ve applied to a very good school – not an Ivy but next level down.  Your SATs are well over the average for this school.   Your grades are right on the average mark.  Easy, right? 

Wait-Listed.

How can this be? 

This theory holds that the admissions folks see a gap between talent and performance.  Hmm, she thinks:  why did this student get these grades with those brains?   If the numbers were reversed – if the SATs were average (for this excellent school) and the grades were well above average, well, that’s the kind of student we prefer!

The Aunt Becky Theory
This is a new one!  Apparently the good spots at the good schools are being taken by the children of Aunt Becky from Full House!

Look, this scandal is delicious, and Americans are mostly tuned in because actors are involved, and if you want to get Americans interested in something it’s important to include people whose job is to pretend to be other people.  But shit like this has been going on for years and we’ve all known it.  We all know seats go to the donors and the legacies and the connected.   Heck, by the time they’ve filled out the slots for those categories, and given the soccer and basketball and fencing coaches all their players, and NOW according to this scandal the fake soccer and basketball and fencing players…well, there’s not a lot of seats left, are there?

And we can be damned sure that this scam artist out in California isn’t the only one of his kind.  Every economist will tell you that humans respond to incentives, and the economic incentives of getting into great schools combined with the love parents have for their children is a force so great it would mow down the Avengers. 

But disincentives are pretty damned powerful, too.  And seeing one of the Desperate Housewives hauled off in cuffs will hopefully prevent future would-be line-cutters and their soccer coach enablers to watch their step.  For a little while anyway.

The Great Gazoo Theory
My bro-in-law summed it all up perfectly.   It’s all a crapshoot and nobody knows anything.

+++

But you know what?  It doesn’t really matter.  MSNBC looked at the CEOs from all the Fortune 500 companies, and guess which school produced the most CEOs?  Harvard?  Stanford?  No, it's the University of Wisconsin, with 13 Fortune 500 CEOs!

The SUNY schools of NY are tied with Yale at 5 each.

And some of you will recognize the title of this post from the movie Risky Business.  Joel Goodson, played by a young Tom Cruise, realizes he's not going to get into Princeton, and will have to settle for the University of Illinois.  Well, guess what?  U of I and Princeton have produced an equal number of Fortune 500 CEOs.

Or as Joel Goodson's friend Miles said, "Every now and then say, "What the f*ck." "What the f*ck" gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future."

The Unanimity Exception

Cooperstown Follows Up The Baines Blunder with The Mariano Mistake

Before I begin, let’s get a few things straight:

• I fully and firmly support Mariano Rivera’s induction into the Hall of Fame.  He is, without question, the greatest reliever of all time.

• I understand that a unanimous selection technically doesn’t mean anything.  Harold Baines was on the ballot for five years and never got more than 10% of the vote – but thanks to the Eras Committee (which should be pronounced 'Errors Committee', ba-dum-bump), he will be as much of a full-fledged member of the Hall as Mariano and his 100%.

• I believe the New York Yankees are the source of all evil in the universe, and I am not to be trusted as any kind of objective source.

That said…

The Unanimous Selection thing is important.  Yes, I know the history, about how Joe DiMaggio didn’t get on till the fourth ballot and how voting was different in Babe Ruth’s day and all of that. 

BUT – things matter because we, collectively, agree they matter.  There is no reason whatsoever that the Nobel Peace Prize should matter.  Over a century ago, the guy who invented dynamite set aside some money and some vague instruction that five obscure Norwegian legislators should give out a peace prize.

Who they pick shouldn’t matter at all.  And yet, it’s arguably the most prestigious prize a human can win because, well, I HAVE NO IDEA WHY IT MATTERS.

It shouldn’t matter.  But it does.  It does because we’ve agreed it does.  

And I can guarantee you that the term “first-time unanimous selection to the Baseball Hall of Fame” is an honor permanently attached to the name of Mariano Rivera.  It will not be attached to the name of Greg Maddux or Tom Seaver or Bob Gibson.  It is how he will be introduced at every speech he ever gives, in every article ever written about him.  It will be in his obituary.  It will be trotted out in every baseball argument about him.  

It matters.

And as great as Mariano is, the idea that this incredibly prestigious honor should go to a relief pitcher, well…

But First, The Good Stuff!

Let’s get all of the good stuff out of the way first.  

Mariano Rivera was the most unhittable pitcher of the modern era.  He has the 13th lowest ERA of all time, and you haven’t heard of most of the other 12 because they pitched in an era when men wore Civil War beards unironically.  There are some legends ahead of him on the list like Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson, but also such forgotten hurlers as Jack Pfeister and Tommy Bond.  

Those other guys I mentioned above – Maddux and Seaver and Gibson?  They are ranked 234*, 125, and 142.

Nobody born after the invention of the bra has been better at keeping the other team from scoring than Mariano Rivera.*

* I'm using ERA as my uber-stat for this post.  It's the one very valuable stat that traditionalists and saberemetricians can all agree on.  If only hitters had such a stat...

And he was truly otherworldly in the post-season.  Over a decent sample size of 96 games – games in which he was facing generally better hitting than he would in the regular season, his ERA dropped all the way down to 0.70.   Are you kidding me?

This doesn’t happen.  Take Derek Jeter, for example.  Jeter and Mariano are unique in baseball history because they are the only two players to have a very long career spent entirely in the Wild Card era on a team that not only played every October, but often advanced deep in the playoffs.  As a result, their post-season stats amount to just about a full MLB season.

And Derek Jeter, in the post-season, was, well, Derek Jeter.  He hit .310 in the regular season, and .308 in the playoffs.  His OPS was .817 in the regular season, .838 in the playoffs.   Give Jeter credit for maintaining his high performance in the post-season, but he didn’t become a better player.  He was almost exactly the same player.  

But Mariano Rivera got into the playoffs and – I mean – what the hell?  He takes the best regular season ERA since Hoover was President...and shaves 2/3rds of that in the offseason?

My only question is:  how did he throw that cutter with his Superman cape on?

The Dubious Value of Closers

And yet…there is significant, powerful, arguably irrefutable evidence that the Closer is just about the most useless position in all of professional sports.

Now if you're one of those people who rolls your eyes at the truths uncovered by baseball researchers lo these past many years, you should click away from this page.  Here's a crotchety old "get off my lawn" anti-stats piece for you.

Project Retrosheet is an organization that goes back and looks at old box scores, at every inning of every game ever played.  And one thing they learned - I should say, one thing they proved, because we all kind of know this anyway - is that teams with 9th inning leads tend to win those games.

And I mean, they win them all the time, and they win them regardless of what relief pitcher strategies team employ.   Back when guys were starting 65 games and going 40-15, they won 90% of the games.  Back when Goose Gossage was coming in for 3 innings and blowing 1/3 of the save opportunities, they won 90% of the games.  And now, in the age of the 9th inning specialist, they win 90% of those games.

Specifically, for all of baseball history, going back to the days before basketball was even a thing:

- teams leading by one run after 8 innings win 85.7% of the time
- teams leading by two runs after 8 innings win 93.7% of the time
- teams leading by three runs after 8 innings win 97.5% of the time

Do you know what Mariano Rivera's save rate is?  89.1%.  Which is, you know, almost as good as Joe Nathan's.

In just about every game Mariano has ever played, the Yankees were going to win anyway.

But Wait, There's More!

There are, of course, other reasons to wrinkle your brow at a closer getting the unanimity honor.

• Rivera pitched 1,282 innings in his career
• Mike Mussina, Rivera's Hall of Fame classmate and Yankee teammate, pitched 3,562 innings in his career
• Tom Seaver, who used to be able to say he was elected to the Hall of Fame with the highest %, pitched 4,783 innings in his career

When you're only pitching 70 innings per year...when you don't have to go through the lineup 3 or 4 times in one night...it is a LOT easier to be dominant.  That's why Rivera has no ERA titles, despite that tiny ERA; he never pitched nearly enough innings in a season to qualify*.

  *  Last year, Jacob DeGrom won the ERA title, posting a glittering 1.96 ERA over 217 innings.  But this guy you never heard of, Blake Treinen, had a 0.71 ERA for the Oakland A's.  He pitched only 80 innings, a total Rivera only reached once as a reliever


Want more proof that closer is kind of an easy gig?

Terrible starters become great closers (like, um, Mariano Rivera; turns out having just one pitch isn't particularly useful for a starter).

Mediocre starters can have epic seasons as closers (see Isringhausen, Jason).

And legitimately good-to-great starters like Dennis Eckersley and John Smoltz?  Tell them they only have to pitch one inning a couple times a week, and they set records.

Some Trivia!

- Who is the only closer in major league history to blow a Game 7 World Series lead in the 9th Inning?

o Hint: it’s not Kent Tekulve

- Who is the only closer to blow two saves as their team blew a 3-0 lead in a Championship series?

o Hint: it’s not Dan Quisenberry

Okay, now I'm just being a jerk.  But also making a point.  Mariano Rivera mowed people down in the post-season, but he wasn't perfect.  In fact, he was 42 of 46 in save situations which is 91.3%.  It's very good.  But 5 closers in baseball last year had better save %'s.



In Closing
So everyone enjoy this year's Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, where the inductees will be:

- One guy who only pitched 70 or 80 innings a year
- One guy who didn't play defense
- One guy who never got more than 10% of the vote while eligible
- Two guys who would never have gotten in with their Wins totals if not for the impact of advanced metrics on voting

Meanwhile, the greatest pitcher of all time and the greatest hitter of all time will be denied entry once again.  But that's a subject for another day.