Wednesday's Dan Patrick Show on ESPN Radio brought together would-be Hall of Famer Rich Gossage and one of the baseball writers who didn't vote for him, Jeff Blair of Toronto's Globe and Mail. (Here's what Blair wrote about his voting rationale after his radio appearance.)

The tone was argumentative, but remained respectful. Gossage and Blair appeared during the hour of the show when Keith Olbermann joins Patrick. Olbermann made an impassioned -- and to these ears, quite logical -- case for not basing Hall of Fame votes on a player's past performance in seasonal award voting. Those awards, MVP and Cy Young, are also voted on by baseball writers. So if the baseball writers incorrectly didn't see fit to give Gossage a Cy Young Award and are now partially using Gossage's lack of an award to keep him out of the Hall ...

"I love that particular argument," Olbermann said. "... The argument is that we got it wrong when we voted [before], so let's get it wrong again 25 years later."

(One of my colleagues -- who went to an Ivy League school -- pointed out this is an example of sophistry. Yeah, I said. Then I went to the dictionary -- "subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation." Yeah, I said.)

Blair said he votes for only three or four candidates. "I look at this as being an exclusive thing," Blair said, indicating that voters who fill in all possible 10 slots when they vote are doing the Hall a disservice. When it comes to voting in a reliever from that era, Blair said, "I just think that, at the end of the day, Bruce Sutter is what people have in mind."

Gossage countered: "I was a dominant pitcher for 10 years." He said he should have won the Cy Young in 1980, when the Orioles' Steve Stone received the award. (Stone edged the A's Mike Norris in a close vote that year, with Gossage a distant third.)

It was a compelling segment, made better by the way the participants -- all fervid -- maintained a civil tone.