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| Dale Murphy hit 398 home runs in his career. (Getty Images) |
One of the most talked about portion of this year's Hall of Fame ballot is the so-called "character clause." While it's being used to argue against the likes of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa -- the same could be used for two-time MVP Dale Murphy.
While Murphy's son Chad wrote an open letter to voting members of the BBWAA and another son, Taylor, started a petition on change.org entitled: "Dale Murphy and the Hall of Fame: BBWAA Needs to Observe and Honor Their Own Voting Guidelines," another son, Tyson, took a different route.
Tyson Murphy writes on his Tumblr page, "I’m not smart enough to argue his career, his numbers, or to compare him to other players (I only know a few others), and I can only remember bits and pieces of his career."
Tyson, who now works as a character artist for Blizzard Entertainment, honored his father with a drawing, reprinted here with permission from the artist:
Nope, that's not a tear in my eye, dangit. OK, it is. Tyson said in an email that his dad called him after seeing his cartoon and told him how much it meant to him.
Tyson wrote that his father always encouraged his interest in art, helping him get where he is now. While I remember Dale Murphy on TBS, Tyson remembers, "sitting in our art room in Georgia, tracing the outlines of our feet onto planks of wood, whittling sticks and bars of soap on the back porch, admiring my dad’s doodles that he would do of all our names, and carving our initials into trees as we tried to hunt bats with our BB guns."
We may all have different opinions on whether Dale Murphy belongs in Baseball's Hall of Fame, by all accounts he's a first-ballot inductee in the Father Hall of Fame.
H/T: Big League Stew
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