Chicago White Sox pitching legend Mark Buehrle gets a statue but likely will never get voted into the Hall of Fame

Mark Buehrle received the second honor on the checklist of the ways a franchise should show appreciation for one of their legends.

The Chicago White Sox announced that a statue of him will be placed outside Rate Feld. This is in addition to his No. 56 already being retired.

It is a well-deserved honor for a legend who threw a perfect game, a no-hitter, and helped the White Sox win the 2005 World Series in dominant fashion.

One honor he will likely not receive anytime soon is getting voted into the Hall of Fame.

It will not be because he is not deserving.

Buehrle has five All-Star appearances and four Gold Gloves. He also has 214 career victories and is a 58.1 career bWAR player. Those wins matter as he picked up those victories when you can still say a starting pitcher was a major part of a victory.

Well, at least in Buehrle's case since he threw over 200 innings in all but two of his 16 seasons.

It was not like his arm was just healthy enough to eat innings. He was a top-of-the-rotation pitcher that the Sox could count on to take the ball every five days and give the Pale Hose a shot at a victory.

Here is the problem, the BBWAA will likely not vote him in.

He got just 11.4% of the vote this year. That is three percent better than his 2024 total, however, he was tracking toward 12.7% among the released ballots before the final tally was officially announced.

At least Buehrle will stay on the ballot.

CC Sabathia going into the Hall of Fame should give Buehrle some hope considering some of their key numbers are similar.

Buehrle has a career 3.81 ERA while Sabathia has a 3.74 ERA. Sabathia's bWAR is 62.3 and he won 251 games.

Where Sabathia deviates from Buehrle is CC has a Cy Young and over 3,000 strikeouts. Those are critical areas BBWAA voters are still going to look at

Buehrle was never a flamethrower to get a ton of strikeouts and the best he ever finished in the Cy Young voting was fifth.

What is also going to work against Buehrle is a lot of these voters have terrible dogmas when it comes to filling out their ballot.

You literally had one voter deny Ichiro Suzuki unanimous induction because for some reason that cannot be a thing. Well, unless it is Marino Rivera, then that's fine. Although, maybe that voter decided to help some others since it was assumed Ichiro was going in.

Even then, voters can choose up to 10 players, and you have voters ignore that. Imagine if all the voters decided to use all 10 votes, maybe it would not seem so insurmountable to get to 75%.

It's not to say it cannot be done.

Billy Wagner just got elected his 10th and final time on the ballot. He was at 10.2% of the vote in 2017, so there is hope. However, he is the first player to ever have three years of receiving fewer than 15% of the vote and eventually getting in.

Plus, there is always someone new showing up on the ballot to take away votes.

The purpose of this is not to say Buehrle will never get into the Hall of Fame. It just likely means he will have to go down the road Dick Allen and Harold Baines did by getting elected by the Era Committees.