Baseball HOF’s Bankruptcy

So let me get this straight–Harold Baines and Jack Morris are Hall of Famers, David Ortiz is a Hall of Famer despite being caught up in the steroid “scandal” and Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling aren’t Hall of Famers. Someone help me out with how any of this makes sense. As Magary notes, this is just trash and is discrediting the entire enterprise:

This is a delegitimizing event for the Hall. An end. A death. No serious baseball fan will ever have a reason to visit Cooperstown anymore now that the BBWAA has essentially voided out an entire generation of ballplayers. Not only have Bonds and Clemens been blackballed — the balls of these men have endured so very much — but a similar fate visited Mark McGwire (583 career home runs) and it WILL visit Sammy Sosa (609 career home runs), Manny Ramirez (12-time All-Star), Curt Schilling (11-2 postseason record and three World Series titles) and Alex Rodriguez (is Alex Rodriguez). You don’t have to be a baseball fanatic, and I certainly don’t qualify as one, to see the voting patterns of the past decade and come to obvious conclusions. Since Bonds retired, the BBWAA has telegraphed its moral rectitude by inducting only the boringest players and releasing public ballots (BBWAA voters may elect to disclose their own ballots if they wish) that were all disgraceful, but each in their own special way:

That special way is Dan Shaughnessy voting only for Jeff Kent, which is ridiculous on the face of it, though I wouldn’t have any huge objection to Kent being in the HOF, the idea of voting for him and not Bonds is so ridiculous as to just laugh.

So I knew all this was coming, but that doesn’t make it any less enervating. Barry Bonds was not only the best baseball player I’ve ever seen, but also the most IMPORTANT one. I personally hated his guts during the bulk of his playing career, largely because I was taking cues from national media yakkers who pathologically despised him. Strangely, those writers seemed to despise Bonds entirely for his drug use and his churlishness in the locker room, not for his abhorrent history of reported domestic violence. I have never heard a Hall voter say they’re keeping Bonds out because of those domestic violence allegations, but even if they did, their abstention still would have served their own purposes far more than the Hall’s itself. 

Because Barry Bonds’ career, good and evil, is a necessary part of baseball history. One that should be documented and put on display. Even I can understand that. 

Baseball writers cannot. Theirs is a Hall of lifetime grudges. It’s extremely on-brand for the BBWAA — preservationists of a sport whose entire brand essence is preserving old crap — to refuse to acknowledge the obvious even after having a decade to think it over. But it’s also supremely lazy. There was a full story to tell about Bonds. There were things that future generations could have learned about the man outside of his robust accomplishments on the diamond. They could have learned that he was a complete bastard, and that he was part of an era of the sport where performance-enhancing drug use was both widespread and tacitly endorsed. And they could have appreciated that not only did Bonds smash records, but he did so with a swagger that was ahead of its time. You can see his stylistic influence in a lot of modern athletes, especially in the NFL and NBA. Meanwhile, baseball’s Black talent pool is drying up and its World Series champs are a CPAC conference in stirrups. That’s quite a story. Any journalist worth their salt would be eager to tell it.

The Hall of Fame is dominated by old white men who are bitter that these drug users cheated unlike their own drug using stars of their youth. But different drugs or something. Of course, we see plenty of this in LGM comments–how dare Bonds and Clemens be elected to the Hall of Fame when they weren’t good clean boys like Mickey Mantle! But then again, the LGM comment section is also old white men so I guess this isn’t surprising. The Hall can be fixed, but it’s probably going to take a lot of old dudes dying first.

And while Schilling is a different beast here, I can’t see any good argument for him not making the HOF. He’s perhaps the worst person in the world. But who cares, in terms of this? Was he a dominant pitcher in a hitter’s era? Yes. Does he have iconic moments, at least as many as first ballot HOFer David Ortiz? Of course he does. Is he a scumbag fascist? Yes. So is Steve Carlton and everyone knew this then but that didn’t stop him from getting in immediately. Moreover, given that the Hall is filled with terrible people ranging from Cap Anson to Ty Cobb to Roberto Alomar, is the standard here whether your awfulness happens to come to attention of outraged voters at the right time or not? Take the Omar Vizquel situation. Vizquel is a sex pest and seems pretty awful. His vote total plummeted over this. Now, my primary problem with Vizquel in the HOF is that he wasn’t a good enough player for it. He just played forever. But whatever, the real comparison here is Alomar, who is also a sex pest but who will remain in the HOF forever. Of course he deserves it and Vizquel doesn’t, but again, it’s not as if people thought Alomar was some great guy when he was playing. The voters just looked past it before they knew about this one particular bad thing.

So what this has all come to is whether a particular player uses the drugs that voters think are OK or not and whether they have values that the voters think are OK or not at a very particular moment. It’s become the Hall of Random Admissions. It’s really discrediting all of baseball. The only standard for the Hall should be whether you were great enough at baseball. Alas, Alex Rodriguez, one of the 20 best players to ever play the game got 34 percent on the vote in his first year, so this will continue ad nauseam until Boomers die off and a generation of voters without bizarre nostalgia for our youth and who have rejected the war on drugs entirely take over.