Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contribution to the team(s) on which the player played.
There is something quaint about the annual Baseball Hall of Fame announcement. It’s almost like a pureness or something basic about it that all fans (and media types) should love, and that’s the fact that at some point it comes back to the game.
As Harry Kalas once told me, “It’s such a beautiful game,” and he was never more correct about anything in his life. Not to get all NPR-ish/baseball-as-a-metaphor-for-the-intrinsic-universe on you, but the beauty of it is what keep us rapt for 12 months of the year, year after year. Of course part of that is the simple joy of talking about the game and that’s what happened when the Baseball Writers Association of America announced that it had elected Bert Blyleven and Roberto Alomar to the Hall of Fame.
For the briefest of moments it was all about baseball again. Blyleven, the long-suffering righty with an otherworldly curveball and World Series rings from the Pirates and Twins, finally got the votes needed after falling five short in 2010. It was the 14th year Blyleven had been on the ballot with just one more chance remaining. Strangely enough, Blyleven got more than the mandatory 75 percent of the votes even though he got no better than 29 percent in his first six years on the ballot.
Just how does a guy go from drawing 17 percent of the vote in his first year of eligibility where he finished one spot behind Dave Parker (eliminated from the ballot after 15 years), to election to the Hall of Fame? Perhaps Blyleven is the perfect example of a player whose abilities got better and better the further he got from his playing days.
“I thank the [BBWAA] for, I’m going to say, finally getting it right,” Blyleven quipped during a conference call on Wednesday afternoon.
Alomar, meanwhile, was the best second baseman of his generation. He could hit for power, average and was the Gold Glove winner every year from 1991 to 2001 save for 1997. He went to 12 All-Star Games where he started in nine of them and, most importantly, his teams won. Alomar’s teams went to the layoffs seven times and with the Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993 he won the World Series.
Phillies fans will remember Alomar getting 12 hits in the ’93 series with a .480 batting average and six RBIs. He also is linked to the Phillies through newly elected Hall of Famer Pat Gillick, whose shrewdest move might have been the trade with the Padres before the 1991 season in which the Blue Jays got Alomar and Joe Carter for Tony Fernandez and Fred McGriff. Better yet, that trade might be the last true blockbuster considering the four players combined for 25 All-Star Game selections, eight World Series appearances and six rings.
Somehow, Gillick’s maneuver resulted in back-to-back World Series titles for Toronto and induction into the Hall of Fame in 2011.
But just as it is in every year after the votes are counted, the BBWAA vote always proves to be the catalyst to some sort of controversy. Often the voting gives more questions than answers as well as the most perplexing question in finding a logical reason why the trustees of the museum in Cooperstown only allow certain folks to vote at all.[1]
Beyond the voting bloc, which is a facet of this that no bit of outrage or reason will ever sway, it’s the results that resonates the most. And as that pertains to the 2011 Hall of Fame class, the story wasn’t about Blyleven or Alomar and how they rate against the all-time greats. Far from it. Instead, Wednesday’s announcement was about Jeff Bagwell, Rafael Palmeiro and every single person that played Major League Baseball from the mid-1980s until the end of the past decade.
Based on the voting the message was, “We don’t believe you.”
Sure, it’s easy to understand why so many voters failed to vote for Palmeiro even though he is one of four players in history to get 3,000 hits and 500 homers, just as it’s easy to get why Kevin Brown will no longer be on the ballot despite seasons of dominant pitching. Palmeiro tested positive in 2006 and served a suspension for supposed performance-enhancing drug use and Brown was named in the Mitchell Report.
For the taint to be removed from their careers, nothing short of an all-out campaign will save Palmeiro and Brown as well as guys like Mark McGwire.
“Guys cheated. They cheated themselves and their teammates. The game of baseball is to be played clean,” the newly elected Blyleven said during the conference call.
The tough part to reconcile is guilt by association and how Jeff Bagwell (41 percent of the vote) and Larry Walker (20 percent) could rate so poorly amongst the voters despite careers that (statistically speaking) are more than worthy. Neither player was ever linked to illicit drug use, they never tested positive nor did their names appear in the Mitchell Report. Of course most drug users don’t test positive so that proves nothing, but it seems like the crime here is the players’ date of birth.
Obviously both players produced some incredible statistics, especially Bagwell. He is the only first baseman in history to hit 30 homers and steal 30 bases in a season (he did it twice) and he hit 39 or more homers in six straight seasons, which is more than Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle and is more than Mike Schmidt and Reggie Jackson, combined. Clearly the game is different in the modern day than it was when Mays, Mantle, Schmidt and Jackson played (smaller ballparks, watered down competition, etc.), but that’s not Bagwell’s fault and it’s not Walker’s fault, either.
Still, to me, the stats are only the extra sweetness to a delicious career. The biggest factor for me isn’t so much the stardom Bagwell and Walker had with baseball fans as it is the cachet they carried amongst their peers. Billy Wagner told me about Bagwell carries incredible sway in the clubhouse and his praises or chides with his teammates was substantial. According to Wagner, Bagwell was the best teammate he ever had. Moreover if respect from his peers counted for votes, then Bagwell and Walker would join Blyleven and Alomar as the newly elected Hall of Famers.
But we just don’t know about those guys, do we? Bagwell is left doing silly interviews where he has to justify his career… his life… because he was once teammates with admitted steroid users Ken Caminiti and Jason Grimsley during the era where dabbling in such things was seemingly the norm.
Look, I talked to several folks who did not vote for Bagwell or Walker and they had solid, well-thought out and objective reasons for filling out their ballots a certain way. If someone believes Bagwell (or anyone else) is not a Hall of Famer and can back it up with solid analysis, it’s difficult to see an error in a personal opinion. The thing is I don’t think most folks looked at that way. My read is that Bagwell is guilty because everyone else is guilty.
In a story he did for ESPN with the great Jerry Crasnick, Bagwell laid it all out there with this winning, money quote:
“Here's my whole thing when people ask me about the Hall of Fame: Would I be honored to death to be in the Hall of Fame? Of course I would. But it doesn't consume me at all. I loved every single part of what I did as a baseball player. But I've got my kids, I've got my family, and getting in the Hall of Fame isn't going to affect my life one way or the other. And it won't make me feel any better about my career.
“I'm so sick and tired of all the steroids crap, it's messed up my whole thinking on the subject. I hate to even use this word, but it's become almost like a 'buzz kill' for me.
“So much has gone on in the last eight or nine years, it's kind of taken some of the valor off it for me. If I ever do get to the Hall of Fame and there are 40 guys sitting behind me thinking, ‘He took steroids,’ then it's not even worth it to me. I don't know if that sounds stupid. But it's how I feel in a nutshell.'”
Regardless, I’m past the black-and-white view of baseball history. There is no sugar-coating things from Hall of Famers like Cap Anson and Ty Cobb, which were far worse crimes than those who used performance-enhancing drugs or wagered on games. Just because something is the norm doesn’t mean it is correct and in the case of Anson and Cobb, institutional racism and violence is a blight from which baseball will never recover.
But if we’re just arguing about statistics then that’s just dumb. After all, who really knows what they mean any more and anyone who says they have a firm grasp of what the so-called steroid era means and its implications of it is way smarter than me. It could be that the era of baseball we witnessed for the past decade or two is something that needs to be set aside and labeled the way record keepers did with the numbers produced before the year 1900 and then the “modern era” from 1900 to approximately 1990.
Perhaps we just watched the “post-modern era” come to a close.
How do we measure the players from the souped-up/watered-down era? That’s a tough one. If you have an answer there are some folks in Cooperstown, N.Y. who would like a word.
[1] The thought here is that baseball should copy the model of football and create voting committees from all sorts of fields. Currently, the BBWAA vote is given to members with 10 consecutive years of service. Once a member has his 10 years, he has a vote forever. It doesn’t matter whether he works in the media or even bothers to watch baseball—10 years with a card is all it takes. Obviously this is a silly criteria and it would probably serve the folks in Cooperstown to devise a voting committee with much more diversity. At least that way agendas and out-of-the-loop retirees won’t have an impact on the voting.