The Baseball Writers Association of America let four more guys into their little club in Cooperstown last week--pitchers Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz, along with second baseman Craig Biggio, who becomes the first Houston Astro inducted into Baseball's Hall of Fame.
All four are deserving. Biggio shouldn't have had to wait until his third year on the ballot, but that's a quibble. Some of the baseball writers like to make distinctions between players worthy of getting into the HOF on the first ballot and those who must languish purgatorially for a while, or forever.
I don't agree with that. I think either you belong or you don't, and if you belong the writers ought to vote for you. But, in aggregate, they take a more nuanced approach than I would. They have more rules, written and unwritten, than the League of Folksinging Attorneys.
For example, no player deserves to be an unanimous selection (this year 15 of the 549 voters failed to put Johnson on their ballot for reasons I certainly would like to hear). This one weird trick is given cover by an archaic rule that limits the writers to voting for a maximum of 10 players in any given year. So if, like me, you look at the ballot and see at least 15 players worthy of the HOF, you still have to leave five worthies off the ballot.
So maybe you don't vote for an obvious choice like Johnson because you want to vote for someone like Nomar Garciaparra, who had a better career than half a dozen enshrined shortstops yet was named on just 5.5 percent of this year's ballots. After all, it was obvious Johnson was going to get in, so you leave him off your ballot and cast a strategic vote for Garciaparra. (Who will never get in even though at his peak he was a better player than his contemporary Derek Jeter. At some point, probably back in the 1970s, longevity and the accumulation of career numbers became the most important criteria for election to the HOF. Which makes it even more ironic that Pete Rose, who hung around for four or five more seasons than he should have to amass stats and chase records, isn't in.)
Now maybe the rule of 10 seems reasonable to you because the HOF is supposed to be a very exclusive club and not everyone who had a good, solid career is supposed to get in, right? Well, maybe in theory, but the truth is there are a lot of simply better than average players who are already in. In the late 1960s and early '70s a Veterans' Committee packed with Frankie Frisch's cronies did a lot of damage to the Hall. Frisch (a legitimately great player in his day) was a curmudgeon who saw modern players as inferior to the guys he played with and against in the 1930s, so he prevailed upon the committee to induct a bunch of his buddies, even though most of them were clearly not among the elite players of their time. If all you had to do to make the Hall of Fame is be better than the worst player already in the HOF, everyone on the 2015 ballot has a reasonable case.
I've said all this before--I'm becoming bored with my own arguments. I really wouldn't mind it if there were a really high standard to get into the HOF if the writers hadn't decided to get all College of Cardinals on us and start inspecting the souls of the candidates before allowing them in. Now there's a moral test that players must pass before some of the sportswriters will vote for them.
So Barry Bonds, who was at least the greatest hitter of a baseball since Ted Williams, and very likely the greatest player of all time, passes muster with a little more than a third of the voters. Roger Clemens, in the running for greatest pitcher of all time, is only slightly more popular. We understand why, because they are "tainted" by the specter of performance-enhancing drugs. (Because drugs are bad and the players who take them are cheaters.)
And because the writers don't like them. (For good reason; there's evidence they are miserable human beings.)
For some reason, they don't like Jeff Bagwell either, so he's not in even though he was at least as good a player as his teammate Biggio. Bagwell is suspected of PED use. As is Mike Piazza, one of the three best offensive catchers of all time, who conventional wisdom says might get in next year because Murray Chass--former New York Times writer and self-appointed Javert of the "steroids gang"--can't quite prove the acne on his back was caused by PEDs. (Biggio's induction, by the way, represented a defeat for Chass, who blogged in December that "a reporter friend" had told him that "a dozen or more players told him that Biggio used steroids.")
Now for me the trouble with disqualifying the PED guys is that we really don't know who was clean during the so-called "steroid era," we only know who was perceived to be clean. If Craig Biggio was using --and despite the hearsay nature of Chass' "evidence" I really wouldn't be surprised if he was--then who wasn't? I suspect, that prior to testing, most of the players were juicing. No PED revelation would shock me at this point. It would make me sad to hear allegations against Ken Griffey Jr., but I would not be shocked.
Understand this: Major League Baseball all but suborned the use of PEDs in those days. Everyone who paid attention to baseball--including writers like Murray Chass and fans like me--was complicit in the offensive explosion of the mid-1990s.
Home runs were cheap. Statistics got distorted. Maybe you don't treat 500 home runs amassed in that era the same way as you treat 500 home runs amassed in the first live ball era, or the '60s and '70s. Maybe that's a good reason not to vote for Mark McGwire, because when you adjust his statistics for the time he played, he's more like Dave Kingman than Willie McCovey.
But not because he took anabolic steroids and worked out a lot. Not because he was a surly interview.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 01/11/2015