Bill Simmons : A hall of justice

Bill Simmons : A hall of justice:

(Bill Simmons takes a fresh look at Mark McGuire and his hall of fame candidacy):

Normally, I enjoy the week the Baseball Hall of Fame inductees are announced. Not this year. With Mark McGwire’s inclusion on the 2007 ballot, we have officially entered the Let’s Blackball the Potential-Steroids-Guy Era.

Mark McGwire

McGwire had his shot at a public redemption … and called for an intentional walk.

Some writers won’t vote for McGwire because he probably used steroids — keep in mind there’s never been proof that he did, other than a visible bottle of andro and those 135 pounds of muscle he added from 1990 to 2002 — which would be fine if they weren’t so pious about it. Not content with simply dismissing McGwire’s candidacy and moving on, they need to climb on their high horses and rip the guy to shreds. Of course, many of them would appear on any radio or TV show for 50 bucks and a free sandwich. We’re supposed to believe they would refuse the chance to take a drug that would enable them to do their job twice as well and make 10 times as much money? Yeah, right.

These people have now become the self-proclaimed moral arbiters of baseball, and they need you to know that Big Mac cheated, disgraced the game, deceived the public, tainted the record books and pushed the sport into a spiritual free fall. They rush to tell you that they can’t vote for McGwire because their conscience won’t allow it. San Jose Mercury News columnist Ann Killion wrote that she can’t vote for McGwire because she wouldn’t be able to explain it to her kids.

I’m with Simmons here. I’ve said before, and I’ll say here — Ann Killion is one of my favorite writers at the Merc, but in this case, she’s dead wrong. The worst they can prove with McGuire is andro — and it wasn’t illegal when he was taking it.

We have a set of baseball writers — the people who vote for the Hall — who’ve turned their duty into some kind of self-defined religious duty. They aren’t just judging who is worthy of entry into the hall, but just how worthy they are, and as a group, the Baseball writers of America have completely lost touch with reality and the task as it should be.

Don’t believe it? Try to explain this rationally: the writers have, over time, come up with this weird rationalization that some players are, in fact, worthy of the Hall of Fame, but just not on the first ballot. Somehow, somewhere, becoming a FIRST BALLOT Hall of Famer is something even better than being a MERE Hall of Famer.

Huh? Either someone is, or someone isn’t, worthy of the Hall of Fame. But that doesn’t give the writers enough of a chance to throw their opinion and attitudes into the process, so they’ve found ways to complicate the decision and add layers of “worth” into the situation — in other words, to make their decision even more important in the eyes of the world.

Or something. If you ask me, the vote should be taken away from the writers, on account of rampant ego and sneering. It’s as if the writers somehow feel their decision is the important thing here, not the players or their actions. And instead of putting the player up on a pedestal, which is, I think, really what the Hall of Fame is about, the writers instead as a group put themselves up on that pedestal, the better to lecture us poor fans on why their votes really mean something important.

All that makes me want to do is find some way to be able to vote on the writers, so we, the poor stupid fans they like to lecture, could get together and vote THEM out of their monastery when they get too uppity. Which the baseball writers en masse have done by deciding to turn Mark McGuire into an ethical issue and they, the writers, prosecution, judge and jury. It’s a Kangaroo court, and the real losers here are the fans who have to listen to all this self-righteous crap.

I expect that from a lot of the people babbling it. I expected better from Killion. Unfortunately, she’s fallen under their sway, and is taking herself way too seriously on this issue. She’s usually smarter than that. Ohwell.

Oh, for the record: I believe that Mark McGuire is a Hall of Famer, first ballot — and I believe he used steroids, but that’s unproven (at best; the baseball writers ought to look up the word “libel’ in their dictionary, unless they have legal evidence they haven’t shared). I believe that Pete Rose is a Hall of Famer, but his infamy — betting on baseball — goes to the roots of the game in a way steroids doesn’t, and his lack of any remorse or apology (even faked and spoken in a high, whiny voice) precludes putting him in the hall — while he’s alive. Once he dies, let him in, but let Shoeless Joe in, too.

And also for the record, it’s pretty damn clear that Barry Bonds is not only a steroid user and a very blatant one, but also a whiny, egotistical, arrogant, spoiled-rotten boy-child who’s one of the most annoying, fan-hating, irritating people I’ve ever had the pleasure to share a timezone with, much less root for. And Barry Bonds would be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, even if he’s some day caught sleeping with a sheep with a syringe stuck in his butt full of shoe polish in a brothel in Mexico. We clear on that? Because he’s also one of the best power hitters — even before he juiced, which merely took him from awesome to unthinkable — and most talented ball players ever to play the game.

And the fact that I even have to use the phrase “first ballot” in this is an abomination and, I think, an insult to the institution of the Hall of Fame, and the writers owe it a huge apology for putting themselves above the institution and turning it into a convenient excuse for their bully pulpits. A pox on all of you who claim to be ‘protecting’ the institution by forcing your parochial views of ethics into the voting in the first place.

(frankly, if it were up to me, I’d make two changes to the Hall of Fame voting:

1) A ballplayer only has ONE chance to make the Hall of fame. Period. Either you are voted in that year, or your eligibility ends. No more first ballot crap. there is only one ballot. If you want to limit inductions to N per year, fine — players are inducted N per year, based on the year they were voted in and the % of votes they got. If that means a player is elected but doesn’t get inducted for a year or two, fine.

2) We keep track of which writers vote for what players. Any writer who, over a two or three year period, doesn’t vote for at least 90% of the players who ARE voted into the Hall of Fame clearly isn’t competent to vote for the Hall, and will have their voting privilege revoked. If a player gets 90% of the voters voting for them, what were that other 10% thinking? And if a player is consistently in that 10%, why are they allowed to vote? Let’s use the QUALITY of their voting, as decided by how well they match the judgement of their peers, to judge when they’ve gone senile and should be retired to stud.

3) No more secret ballots. make the writers votes public, where everyone can see who’s playing what game.

(hat tip: DD)

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