Cal Ripken Still Loves Brady Anderson

And if he had a Hall of Fame vote, by george -- and thank God he doesn't -- he'd be voting Brady Anderson straight in:

"It happens to everybody. You age and you stop playing -- although he seems to have the fountain of youth, somehow," Ripken said recently of Anderson. "He came over in the Mike Boddicker trade and Boddicker's locker was next to mine, so he ended up coming into that locker. We struck up a friendship from that point.

"I don't know how many votes he's going to get, [but] I'll vote for him."

"Brady was pretty much my best friend in baseball, and I enjoyed spending time with him," Ripken said. "It's really weird now, because I don't get a chance to see him as much. We get busy doing other things. As he refers to it, it's the offseason all the time now. Brady's in fantastic shape and it looks like he can still play. I guess he's on the ballot because he's been out five years now. I didn't know he was out that long. It seemed like he was still playing long after I retired."

Unfortunately for Anderson, he is not a Hall of Famer by any standards, even if you throw out the pretty persuasive steroid suspicions surrounding his career. A cursory glance at Anderson's statistics doesn't reveal a Hall of Fame player; it reveals an above-league average player with a short shelf life and one unbelievable season. Fortunately, despite what Woody Paige might tell you, "friendship" isn't grounds for Hall of Fame induction. If only.