I don't think he's an obvious first ballot pick - at his position, that's only Collins, Morgan, Hornsby, and Robinson. I think he's quicker than eventually, though.

I believe the appropriate PR steps have been taken to address the spitting incident. Aren't Alomar and Hirschbeck copasetic at this point? I think that incident will linger a little bit, perhaps enough to delay Alomar's entry, nothing more. He's got to be a lock.

A poster recently suggested that Alomar wasn't a Hall of Famer. I'd like to hear an argument defending that position. I can't imagine what it might sound like.

Well, he wasn't quite Bobby Grich's equal, and he wasn't a better player than Jeff Kent.  Grich didn't go in, and Kent probably won't.  That is a pretty poor devil's argument.

Second basemen in general have a tough time of it, except the really famous ones like Sandberg and Alomar. 

Alomar could miss on the first ballot - he was done at 33, after all.

But I don't think he will.  Sportswriters have been thinking of him as a Hall of Famer for too long to change their minds now.  Which is fine by me, he fell apart early, but he was already a darn good player at 20 and an MVP candidate at 23.  He got more than enough baseball in to merit the Hall.

I have a hard time seeing the anti-Alomar argument as well. Seven times he finished with MVP votes, including five times in the top six. I think that hall of fame selections are all about narratives, as opposed to cold hard facts. People support Jack Morris because of the narrative - most wins in the 80s, the 10 inning WS game, etc., while Bert Blyleven, while superior, has a narrative centred around how he never won 300 games (never mind that Morris didn't come close either). They both received a fairly similar number of votes. For Alomar, throw in ten gold gloves, and the narrative writes itself, rightly or wrongly. Rightly, I'd say.

Alomar missed out on some of the Big Round Numbers, which might hurt his chances. If he'd turned in a couple more decent seasons, he could have had 3,000 hits and 500 steals, which probably would have made him a sure thing. And he was never the best at any one thing - seldom led the league in anything - despite being extremely good at just about everything. It makes it harder to say "Roberto Alomar should be in the Hall because of this."

Not that any of that is an argument against him, it just makes it harder to make an obvious argument for him.