Hall of Fame Thoughts
1. Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn deservedly were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame today. Both received over 97% of the votes. But Gwynn wasn't named on thirteen ballots, and Ripken was left off eight. That's ridiculous. There's no objective reasoning by which any sane person could deny that Ripken or Gwynn were Hall of Famers. Yet, because some drunk-with-power voter decides it's his duty to enforce some sort of "Hall-within-a-Hall," we see crap like blank ballots to prevent anyone from getting voted in unanimously. It's moronic, it's egotistical, an insult to fans, and (ought to be) an abdication of the honor of being a voter.
Here's an analogy. I'm a lawyer, so I had to take a bar exam. The exam is pass/fail. In most jurisdictions, they don't even tell you how much you passed by. So imagine (this is total fantasy) I took the bar exam and did so well that it looked like I was going to have a perfect score. But some bar examiner somewhere said, "Oliver Wendel Holmes (or somebody) was the only person to ever get a perfect score on the bar exam, and this dork can't be as good as Holmes, so I will deduct points from his score, even though I recognize he's good enough to be admitted to the bar!"
Even if Ripken or Gwynn had gotten all the votes this year, no one would think it meant they were the best baseball players of all time; it would just mean that everyone that year agreed they deserved to be in the Hall of Fame. And of course, they do agree on that! But a few asterisk-loving dillholes have to ruin it. So here's what they ought to do: vote on everyone already in the Hall. Call it a "retention election" if you're serious about kicking some deadwood out, or a "ranking" if you want to let everyone stay in. But let these writers get it out of their system and vote for Ruth and Cobb and Gehrig and Aaron and Ted Williams and Cy Young or whoever unanimously, Ripken and Honus Wagner a few others at 99%, and so on, through Bruce Sutter or Gary Carter or Bill Mazeroski somebody who's last. That way, from then on, they could have the up-or-down vote on admission (and not tell anyone the percentages, just pass/fail), and once the player is in, have a vote like the AP football poll (or hell, even the BCS) to rank that person amongst the others. (You could announce the result during the induction ceremonies.) What we have now conflates those two votes, because too many writers act like a mere vote for admission is the equivalent of saying a player is better than Babe Ruth. No rational fans think that, only writers who want to act like they have the power to declare one Hall of Famer better than another. The writers who omitted Ripken or Gwynn think they're protecting the legacy of Ruth or Cobb or (I guess) Tom Seaver. Trust me: people will still visit Cooperstown to check out the Babe's plaque.
2. After watching the shoo-ins to make sure they don't reach some artificial perch, the next great debates are over the close calls. This year Goose Gossage came closest to election without getting in, with Jim Rice and Andre Dawson within shouting distance. Again, to say those guys are Hall of Famers doesn't take anything away from clearly superior players like Ruth or Ripken. I think the best way to evaluate someone's Hall-worthiness is to compare the player to his contemporaries. Otherwise, there's no sensible way to compare players across eras, due to expansion, integration, the internationalization of rosters, dead/live ball eras, free agency, medical advances, the changing roles of relief pitchers, etc.
But so many players who were big in the late '70s to early '90s (such as Dawson, Rice, Dale Murphy, Jack Morris, Bert Blyleven and others) are being treated unfairly because of two systemic changes out of their control. The first is steroids. I have no problem with downgrading Mark McGwire's numbers because of the cloud of steroids hanging over him. But the voters are implicitly holding those inflated numbers against the previous generation. Murphy's and Rice's numbers don't look so great when held up to McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds. But there's no reason they should if they were clean! (And I'd bet the farm that Mormon Murphy didn't do 'roids.) And it's not just the numbers -- those guys didn't have late-career resurgences like Bonds and Clemens. But one reason they probably peaked and faded was because they weren't on a steroid regimen keeping them in shape. Their bodies behaved like normal 35-year-old bodies and they weren't able to jack homers any longer. Voting against Murphy because he had "only" 398 home runs is just like saying he should have juiced up and gotten to 500.
Here's an analogy. I'm a lawyer, so I had to take a bar exam. The exam is pass/fail. In most jurisdictions, they don't even tell you how much you passed by. So imagine (this is total fantasy) I took the bar exam and did so well that it looked like I was going to have a perfect score. But some bar examiner somewhere said, "Oliver Wendel Holmes (or somebody) was the only person to ever get a perfect score on the bar exam, and this dork can't be as good as Holmes, so I will deduct points from his score, even though I recognize he's good enough to be admitted to the bar!"
Even if Ripken or Gwynn had gotten all the votes this year, no one would think it meant they were the best baseball players of all time; it would just mean that everyone that year agreed they deserved to be in the Hall of Fame. And of course, they do agree on that! But a few asterisk-loving dillholes have to ruin it. So here's what they ought to do: vote on everyone already in the Hall. Call it a "retention election" if you're serious about kicking some deadwood out, or a "ranking" if you want to let everyone stay in. But let these writers get it out of their system and vote for Ruth and Cobb and Gehrig and Aaron and Ted Williams and Cy Young or whoever unanimously, Ripken and Honus Wagner a few others at 99%, and so on, through Bruce Sutter or Gary Carter or Bill Mazeroski somebody who's last. That way, from then on, they could have the up-or-down vote on admission (and not tell anyone the percentages, just pass/fail), and once the player is in, have a vote like the AP football poll (or hell, even the BCS) to rank that person amongst the others. (You could announce the result during the induction ceremonies.) What we have now conflates those two votes, because too many writers act like a mere vote for admission is the equivalent of saying a player is better than Babe Ruth. No rational fans think that, only writers who want to act like they have the power to declare one Hall of Famer better than another. The writers who omitted Ripken or Gwynn think they're protecting the legacy of Ruth or Cobb or (I guess) Tom Seaver. Trust me: people will still visit Cooperstown to check out the Babe's plaque.
2. After watching the shoo-ins to make sure they don't reach some artificial perch, the next great debates are over the close calls. This year Goose Gossage came closest to election without getting in, with Jim Rice and Andre Dawson within shouting distance. Again, to say those guys are Hall of Famers doesn't take anything away from clearly superior players like Ruth or Ripken. I think the best way to evaluate someone's Hall-worthiness is to compare the player to his contemporaries. Otherwise, there's no sensible way to compare players across eras, due to expansion, integration, the internationalization of rosters, dead/live ball eras, free agency, medical advances, the changing roles of relief pitchers, etc.
But so many players who were big in the late '70s to early '90s (such as Dawson, Rice, Dale Murphy, Jack Morris, Bert Blyleven and others) are being treated unfairly because of two systemic changes out of their control. The first is steroids. I have no problem with downgrading Mark McGwire's numbers because of the cloud of steroids hanging over him. But the voters are implicitly holding those inflated numbers against the previous generation. Murphy's and Rice's numbers don't look so great when held up to McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds. But there's no reason they should if they were clean! (And I'd bet the farm that Mormon Murphy didn't do 'roids.) And it's not just the numbers -- those guys didn't have late-career resurgences like Bonds and Clemens. But one reason they probably peaked and faded was because they weren't on a steroid regimen keeping them in shape. Their bodies behaved like normal 35-year-old bodies and they weren't able to jack homers any longer. Voting against Murphy because he had "only" 398 home runs is just like saying he should have juiced up and gotten to 500.
Light saber bat, yes, but not the juice.The other systemic change being held against these guys is the rise of SABRmetrics or "Moneyball" or whatever you want to call this trend. As this guy from the Baseball Prospectus notes, "All were strongest in Triple Crown categories, while perhaps not providing value in other areas (walks, doubles, defense)." As if it's a bad thing to hit for average, drive in runs, and hit a few homers! Fair enough: ding these guys for not being Gold Glove defenders. (Check that: Murphy won five.) But these guys were doing what their teams asked of them, and it wasn't to get doubles and walks! (Similarly, votes against Goose Gossage don't value highly enough that he wasn't asked to be the shutdown closer like today's Mariano Rivera.) And for the record, Dale Murphy's per-162-game averages in doubles and walks compare favorably to Ripken's and Gwynn's. These guys were the best in the game in the 1980s. Today's stat-obsessed Bill Jamesian is missing the forest for the trees.
3. I don't even watch baseball anymore, except when I can make it to a game in person, so I'm not going to get too upset about this. I just get cheesed at self-appointed guardians of a game that Terence Mann tells us will get along just fine without their help. The Hall of Fame lost its remaining shreds of credibility with me when they didn't let Buck O'Neil in last year, and this year's mistakes are a trifle compared to that traveshamockery. And given all the hand-wringing over the steroid boomers to come, I'm about ready to throw up my hands. I've always been staunchly against letting Pete Rose or Joe Jackson in the Hall. But maybe we need to let those guys and the 'roiders in as well, and include the warts on their plaques: gambled on baseball, conspired to throw games, took steroids, whatever their sin is. And revise Gaylord Perry's plaque to mention the spitball. This would allow fans to evaluate those players for what they're worth when compared to the ones who did it honestly (or, to be fair, didn't get caught).
Ultimately, I still have to come down against this because I think there are some sins that qualify as "cheating" (like steroids and gambling, and should be a bar to enshrinement) and some that qualify as "gamesmanship" (like scuffing the ball or stealing signs, and shouldn't bar enshrinement). But it's tempting to give up my standards and throw the doors open, if only because it will shut up all the whining, especially from that jerk Rose. If we let those guys in, they'll have their one day in the sun, and will immediately cease to be a cause; they'll be just another face on the wall. No one knows that better than Rickey Henderson. In a brilliant profile of Rickey in the 9/12/05 New Yorker, Rickey said that one reason he trolled through the minors and independent leagues long after his prime is that once he retires and has his flareup of attention at his Hall of Fame induction, he'll be forgotten. Rickey wants to put that off as long as possible. He may never retire. I'm all for forgetting about Pete Rose, and given the current state of the Baseball Hall of Fame, I'm almost willing to let him get plaqued if it means I never have to hear about him again.
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