With me being off the ballot, what I accomplished during the steroid era meant nothing. You look at the people who voted for the Hall of Fame. I think there might have been 600. They still voted for people who were cheating the game. It boggles my mind that the people you know cheated, who admitted they cheated, are still on the Hall of Fame ballot. That is sad. It’s really sad for baseball. [...] For me to go out and cheat it that way, that’s not respecting the game I love. I just feel the reason these guys cheated was because of the money. They didn’t care about the Hall of Fame. If you would have cared about the Hall of Fame, you wouldn’t have even thought about cheating. It was all about money.
– Former Cleveland Indians outfielder Kenny Lofton, 40, in a recent conversation with Paul Hoynes of The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Lofton, who despite hitting .299 with 2,428 hits and 1,528 runs while making the postseason 10 times, only received 3.2 percent of the vote in one of the more controversial Hall of Fame seasons ever. He will no longer be eligible for the ballot without an exemption from the Hall of Fame’s veteran’s committee — an excruciatingly slow process to endure.
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