You're gonna need a bigger boat.

Wow! The special committee of Negro Leaguers and Pre-Negro Leaguers—what no Post-Negro Leaguers?—didn't miss when given an opportunity. They selected 17 (count 'em! 17!) individuals for Hall of Fame induction this summer, including the Hall's first woman and the first white man selected for his work in the Negro Leagues.

My first reaction was how are they going to fit all those plaques? When I last went to the Hall, about five years back, they had just finished a renovation that allowed them to expand the Hall area itself quite a bit. But 17 plaques?!?

To put that in perspective, the two long-standing voting bodies, the baseball writers and the veterans, have inducted 17 in total this decade. That's seventeen in seven elections (2000-2006). And two of those 17 were Negro Leaguers (Hilton Smith and Turkey Stearnes).

With Bruce Sutter joining the group, this will be the largest induction class ever, 18. It blows away the previous leader, the infamous 1946 group of 11 inductees, all selected by the extremely cronyistic Old Timers Committee, the precursor to the Veterans Committee. That was the class that brought us probably the worst Hall of Fame player, Tommy McCarthy, not to mention Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance en masse.

And yet, I am pleased as Pudge, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I correctly picked 13 of the 17 that selected by the committee (even though I picked the wrong Taylor brother…twice…and predicted that the voters would be overly impressed by Buck O'Neil's press). I can't wait to take my kids there this summer though it all might be lost on a seven- and a two-year-old.

I like the idea that a committee of credible individuals might have completed the Hall discussion on one of baseball's tougher Hall issues or at least settled the bulk thereof. That was the original intention of the old timers, to take care of the nineteenth century players.

I also get the feeling the powers that be at the Hall might apply a bit of pressure to get the remodeled Veterans Committee to get off their duffs and actually pick somebody.

So some may quibble about the size of the class and the largely unsubstantiated qualifications of some of the individuals selected. And then there's the fact that the population of Negro Leaguers in the Hall practically doubled overnight (from 18 to 35). But overall I'm OK with it.

For the record here are the biggest Hall classes of all time:

And if one table isn't enough, here are the largest classes for any voting body:

Now, this class does tip the balance of Hall of Famers more into the Negro Leagues' favor. In fact in 1945, there was actually one more Negro League Hall of Famer than there were in the major leagues (17 to 16), helped in part by World War II.

Overall, during the segregated era (1883-1945), the ratio of Negro Leaguers to major leaguers who ended up in the Hall was about one to three. Here is the entire era broken down by year:

Note the number of total active Hall of Famers peaked in 1930 at 73 but remained above fifty pretty consistently from 1922-1941. And still Bert Blyleven can't get in the Hall. I guess my biggest problem with the vote today is that it perpetuated to the prejudice favoring players from the Thirties. Sheez, you kill one prejudice while you deepen another. Go figure.