For pretty much as long as I've been aware of these things, there have been two guys who were, clearly and beyond all reasonable dispute, by far the most worthy eligible players not in the Hall of Fame: Bert Blyleven and Ron Santo. Now, of course, thanks in some part to a big push by the stathead crowd, they're both in.
So now what? Rob Neyer tackled that question yesterday. Kind of. I'm not entirely sure what he conclusion he comes to, though; he asks the question much more than he answers it. And I guess (as Rob hints) the question of "who should the next cause be" isn't that interesting right now. We're in kind of a transitional period where nothing we do matters much anyway; in a couple years, it's going to be all about Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and so forth, and I'm going to hate every bleeding second of it.
I guess the question I'm interested in is: if you could throw all your support behind one candidate and wake people up to his cause, who would it be? Or, if you prefer, a slightly different but closely related question: who is getting ripped off most royally? I've said that Scott Rolen "is set up to take over for Santo as the new most egregious snub," and Kenny Lofton and Jim Edmonds will have a strong claim to that title, too, but they're not eligible yet, so technically, we don't know that they're going to get jobbed (even though they totally are). So we'll just consider candidates that already have been considered and (more or less) rejected.
Here's a chart of what I think are the ten best candidates:
