Rickey Henderson still holds the record for stolen bases.

Ronald C. Modra/SI

Twenty-eight people did not vote for Rickey Henderson to be in the Hall of Fame this year.

Twenty-eight people were wrong.

Those 28 people do not deserve to be allowed to vote for the Hall of Fame ever again.

There can be no statistical argument made in favor of keeping Cooperstown's doors closed to the man who is without question the greatest leadoff hitter the game has ever known. That he is also the career leader in two major statistical categories -- stolen bases (1,406, nearly 500 ahead of second-place Lou Brock) and runs scored (2,295) -- and retired as the leader of a third (walks, with 2,190, since passed by Barry Bonds) should have made him the first unanimous selection to the Hall of Fame. He also had over 3,000 hits, won an MVP award and played a leading role on two World Series championship teams.

Nor is there any other reason to not vote for Henderson. He was never in trouble with the law, he has never been accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs, and he never did anything other than play the game at an elite level for almost a quarter of a century.

In not voting for Henderson, these writers have devalued the entire credibility of having writers vote in the first place and exposed themselves as either too stupid or too stubborn to do what is obvious to even the most rudimentary baseball fan: make sure that those players who are most deserving of their place in Cooperstown are given it as soon as possible.

If the writers can't be trusted to make even the most obvious decisions, if they don't care enough about the game's history or their safeguarding of it, then they don't deserve to have a vote in the first place.