Roy Halladay Elected to Hall of Fame

2018 Topps Salute #TS-34

For the second year in a row, a former player with major Phillies connections was voted into baseball's Hall of Fame.  Roy Halladay, who pitched for the Phillies for four seasons between 2010 and 2013, joined Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina and Mariano Rivera as the latest inductees on January 21st.  We lost Halladay back in November 2017, and his wife announced last week that his hat on his plaque will be logoless.  Her preference is that Halladay be remembered as a Major League baseball player, instead of specifically as a former Blue Jay or a former Phillie.

Harold Baines and Lee Smith were voted in by the Today's Game Era Committee back in December.  I've never liked the somewhat contentious debate that surrounds each years' class of inductees, and I'm not about to revisit the merits of the players enshrined (or yet to be enshrined) here.  But it sure seems to me that if Baines can get in, it's about time for Dick Allen to take his place in Cooperstown as well.  But I digress.

With each year's announcement, I like to check my Phillies baseball card collection to see if any of these new Hall of Famers show up.  Halladay of course is well represented, and as of this writing I have 192 cards of his in my collection.

And then that's it.  Unlike in prior years, in which inductees make cameo appearance on Phillies cards or share a multi-player card with a Phillies player, I don't have any cards in my collection featuring Baines, Martinez, Mussina, Rivera or Smith.

Memory Lane
2012 Inductees - Larkin and Santo
2013 Inductees - O'Day, Ruppert and White
2014 Inductees - Cox, Glavine, LaRussa, Maddux, Thomas and Torre
2015 Inductees - Biggio, Johnson, Martinez and Smoltz
2016 Inductees - Griffey and Piazza
2017 Inductees - Bagwell, Raines, Rodriguez, Selig and Schuerholz
2018 Inductees - Guerrero, Hoffman, Jones, Morris, Thome and Trammell
2019 Inductees - Baines, Halladay, Martinez, Mussina, Rivera and Smith