What the Hall: It's never easy

It’s never easy to vote. Sure, the actual process is easy—just put a check mark next to your guy, hope they count it and that’s about it. Easy as that.

However, if your brain is turned on, choosing the right person to vote for is difficult. Forget about politics where a vote determines employment [1], look at something like the baseball Hall of Fame. Simply by voting a person’s life work or legacy is defined and categorized. Folks unfamiliar with the sport will immediately attach some value to a Hall-of-Famer even if they have no clue what the person did to earn the honor.

So yeah, voting is tough. In fact, for those members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who are qualified to vote for the Hall of Fame, this year’s ballot might be the most difficult in recent memory. But in a strange little twist, the difficulty will come not from voting players in, but deciding which players to keep out.

Oh yes, the so-called Steroid Era is not over yet. Call this part of it the aftershocks following an earthquake.

What happens now that Jeff Bagwell, Rafael Palmeiro, Juan Gonzalez and Larry Walker are finally eligible? After all, there are four MVP Awards, two Major League Player of the Year awards and a Rookie of the Year divvied up amongst that group. With credentials like that it would appear that a large Hall of Fame class will make the trip to Cooperstown this August. The thing is, there isn’t a slam dunk in the bunch.

Looking at the numbers on the stat sheet paints a different picture. Palmeiro, of course, is one of a handful of players to collect 3,000 hits and 500 homers. The other members of that club—Henry Aaron, Willie Mays and Eddie Murray—are enshrined. The difference, though, is that Aaron, Mays and Murray never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs after getting that 3,000^th hit, nor did they test positive shortly after wagging their fingers at Congress to scold anyone from thinking he would ever take a performance-enhancer.

Ironically, Palmeiro was the spokesman for Viagra during the latter years of his career.

Gonzalez was the AL MVP in 1996 and 1998 where he slugged his 300^th career homer before his 28^th birthday and became the first player in 63 years to reach 100 RBIs before the All-Star Break. Gonzalez had all the makings of a once-in-a-lifetime career until he reached his 30s and his body seemed to fall apart. Back injuries led to an end that saw Gonzalez bounce from organization to organization before finishing with the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League.

Certainly being named in the Mitchell Report or in Jose Canseco’s tell-all steroid book hasn’t helped Gonzalez’s case much, either.

Bagwell, on the other hand, is the guy no one knows what to do with. More than the gaudy numbers he produced, Bagwell was one of the biggest stars of the 1990s, and though the stats certainly matter, it was something Billy Wagner told me about Bagwell carries much more weight. According to Wagner, Bagwell was the best teammate he ever had. Moreover if respect from his peers counted for votes, then Bagwell is a landslide winner.

We just don’t know about the guy. Sure, he never tested positive nor did he ever show up in the Mitchell Report. But Bagwell seems to be guilty by association for having played with admitted steroid users Ken Caminiti and Jason Grimsley during the era where dabbling in such things was seemingly the norm.

Besides, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds never tested positive during their careers, either, and the consensus is that the record-breaking statistics those guys piled up are tainted. The fact that McGwire hit 583 homers yet never got more than 23 percent of the votes in the BBWAA balloting explains what the electorate thinks of his records.

So is Larry Walker a first ballot Hall of Famer and/or the only guy voted in this year? Is Walker good enough to be considered in such a lofty group and did anyone think he would have a plaque in Cooperstown when he’d come to the Vet to play against the Phillies with the Expos?

If those other guys are guilty of falling prey to the silently accepted norms of the game, does Walker get penalized for playing in Colorado and the performance-enhancing altitude?

Probably not. After all, someone has to get in. Given that only Andre Dawson was voted in last year while Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven fell less than five votes short, Walker could be the lone first-ballot inductee alongside a few others.

Then again, last year the MLB Network set up cameras at Alomar’s home because they were sure he was getting the call. Some suggested that Alomar fell short because of the unfortunate incident where he spit on umpire John Hirschbeck during a disputed call late in the 1997 season. The theory was that some writers held the mistake against Alomar despite the fact that he and Hirschbeck have buried the hatchet and become friends. This protest vote was made despite the fact that Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Cap Anson, and Juan Marichal are Hall of Famers. Among those names are men who attacked a crippled fan, punched an umpire, beat an opponent on the head with a bat, and helped foster nearly a half-century of institutional racism.

Some say without Cap Anson, baseball never would have been a sport that denied the inclusion of some because of the color of their skin.

But, you know, Alomar spit at a guy...

Nice Hall of Fame you have there, baseball. Apparently spitters, steroid users and gamblers need not apply. But for the violent types and the racists, sure, come on in.

Nevertheless, here’s one man’s ballot for the 2011 class of the Hall of Fame:

• Larry Walker
• Roberto Alomar
• Bert Blyleven
• Tim Raines
• Jack Morris
• Fred McGriff
• Barry Larkin
• Edgar Martinez
• Lee Smith

---

[1] More than ever it seems as if the only folks who get into the politics business do so because they can’t keep a job doing anything else. Check it out sometime… would you hire most politicians to do a job at your home? Why is it then we give those dregs the keys to everything?

Cry, baby, cry

In the wake of Mark McGwire’s tearful confession to Bob Costas about his steroid use earlier this week, it’s worth mentioning that Big Mac’s effort didn’t quite measure up with some of the all-time tear jerking.

The best?

Easy…

Mike Schmidt announcing his retirement
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOPLJQuVm_I&w=425&h=344]

Schmidty just falls apart here and blubbers to a degree that it's almost decipher what he's trying to say. It was also one of those public cries that makes a guy feel a little funny, but not because it wrestles up some emotions within--it's almost cringe worthy.

But maybe that's relatable to the Flock of Seagulls ‘do than simply the big, juicy tears.

Oh, but we kid because we like to. As such, if a guy is going to cry in public one time Schmidty's is pretty good. Needless to say, it's much better than this one...

Terrell Owens crying about his quarterback
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNO6On7cK1M&w=425&h=344]

As far as put on/phony crying acts go, Terrell Owens' effort wasn't even good enough for the worst soap opera. Funny? Absolutely. But a quality effort... dreadful.

Dick Vermeil crying... well, just because
Strangely, for a guy who cried so much there aren't many videos out there of Vermeil in action. Perhaps we should give him credit for being an old-school crier and getting it done before the proliferation of digital media.

Nevertheless, Vermeil was such an epic crier that people wrote essays about it. The best is from the great Jeff Johnson and his old NFL writing for Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern:

The first time I saw Dick Vermeil cry, I thought: What a jagoff. What is an adult man doing crying about football?

The second time I saw Dick Vermeil cry, I thought: Okay, Vermeil. Calm down. And also, what a jagoff.

The third time I saw Dick Vermeil cry, I thought: The problem is with you, Johnson. You're the one who has to loosen up. Vermeil is in touch with his feelings. Vermeil has a ring, you don't. Let Vermeil cry.

The eighth time I saw Dick Vermeil cry, I thought: Okay, Vermeil. Get on some meds, amigo. Take a deep breath. Let it go.

The fourteenth time I saw Dick Vermeil cry, I thought: This is getting weird.

The thirty-ninth time I saw Dick Vermeil cry: I had just gotten done polishing off a bottle of Drambuie with him. We were at a golf tournament outside Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He told me he wasn't sure if he'd ever eaten a better salad than the one we'd had at dinner. "Those farmers," he wailed, "who are they? The romaine was exquisite. What are you looking at? If you can't—if a grown man can't enjoy a leaf of lettuce—"

The eighty-first time I saw Dick Vermeil cry: It was back on TV. The folks at UW-River Falls, where the Chiefs spend preseason, hadn't followed through on a team-catering request for Rice Krispies. Vermeil was melting down. "Just how tough is it? I'm sorry. I gotta go public with this," the waterworks were on. "My men love their cereal. And now, I don't know what kinda season we're gonna have."

The three hundred and fifteenth time I saw Dick Vermeil cry: It was because of a traffic light that he thought was on the verge of burning itself out. I was on a three-speed in Locust Valley, MO, and I saw him pointing and howling from the driver's seat of his Lincoln. "Some family's gonna get killed!" Several cars honked behind him, but he wasn't budging.

The nine hundred forty-first time I saw Dick Vermeil cry: I was on a cruise ship. Vermeil was at a press conference. One of his kick-returners kept an adult video late and there was a fine. Vermeil, to that day, was unaware of a phenomenon known as porn. It did not make him happy.

The 33,872nd time I saw Dick Vermeil cry: I didn't. It was just an editorial that he wrote for USA Today about the dangers of using magic markers to write kids' names on athletic tape to identify them on football helmets. I assumed he cried the whole time he wrote it. He thought the markers were a bit toxic, that an addiction could develop.

The 198,440th time I saw Dick Vermeil cry: It was an Arby's. A packet of Horsey sauce dared him to open it. He could not.

The 708,814th time I saw Dick Vermeil cry: He said six words and broke down, "Oh, the majesty of a sauna."

The 1,933,336th time I saw Dick Vermeil cry: I only sensed it. God had begun wiping out whole cities with His own vomit. Vermeil's crying caused it. I was in Murfreesboro, TN. We were covered in slime. God had registered his disgust. Vermeil was somewhere, bawling with joy about microwave technology. He stopped abruptly and ate a corn muffin before it cooled.

The 174,999,044th time I saw Dick Vermeil cry: He was dead. Vermeil was a damn ghost and he still would not quit crying. He'd met up with Tony Franklin, the old Eagles place-kicker. "How could you have possibly gone through life so darn short, Tony? It just is not fair."

The 12,000,000,000th time I saw Vermeil cry: I got a lousy T-shirt.

The 38,555,400,093rd time I saw Dick Vermeil cry: It wasn't so much Vermeil as the whole world. A book had been written about Vermeil's penchant for tears. It was called The Vermeil Approach. A religion was involved. Millions of people wept. Of course, looking down and seeing this, Vermeil wept.

Why is it that I find the crying of sports figures so funny? That’s simple – because it’s easy to laugh at things that don’t matter. No, I don’t doubt the sincerity of the sadness in dealing with a retirement, a victory, or a 2-2 circle change up that lands just so perfectly in the strike zone. It’s just that people without real problems have lousy perspective. At some point we all had to quit playing sports, but did you cry after the last game of the 10th grade JV basketball season? As far as we can tell Mike Schmidt did not cry when announcing his retirement all those years ago because he was sick or injured and forced out of the game. Nor was anyone in his immediate family facing some sort of hardship that required his immediate attention. In fact, there was no real sadness involved at all. All Mike Schmidt cried about was that he was lucky enough to have a great baseball career.

If that’s not funny I don’t know what is.

Oh, and for the record, the medication won't allow me to make tears. Therefore I cannot cry. So there.

What are words for (again with the Missing Persons)?

I didn’t learn anything today. Not one scrap of information or insight into a topic. Nada. Generally, I approach the day with the hope that some morsel of knowledge will lodge itself into the locus of my mind, but sometimes that’s just hit or miss.

Obviously, today was a miss.

Chalk it up to the company I kept. For instance, I planned my morning around the fact that I wanted to tune into the day-after press conference starring Andy Reid hoping to face a veritable barrage of clichés, doublespeak and non-answer answers. You know, the same reason everyone tunes into those press conferences.

However, this afternoon when Reid faced the music after the ugly, 34-14 defeat in the first round of the playoffs to the Dallas Cowboys, the session was even more flummoxing than usual. In fact, I counted just two instances where Reid claimed that he needed to “do a better job,” and three variations of the phrase “myself” when owning up to the responsibility of Saturday night’s debacle before I quit counting. Those are rather paltry numbers for a man who loves a cliché as much as he loves oxygen, black clothing and pedestrian offensive schemes.

What happened was there was a departure from his regular tact of cliché use and taking the long way around to answer a direct question. Instead, on Monday after noon Reid simply decided he wasn’t going to say anything at all. Nothing revealing, interesting or even the least bit contemplative.

He just said nothing.

Oh there were actual words dropping from Reid’s mouth, but if one gathered them all up from the stew they formed there at the podium and rearranged them, there might have been a whole paragraph. It might have been coherent, too.

No one expected Reid to say much when asked about the future of his quarterback and running back and why his team looked so ill-prepared for a playoff game. But even for a man of Reid’s ability to say nothing, Monday’s performance was particularly exquisite. Every once in a while he taunted the reporters with something that seemed like it was going somewhere, like when he said he had, “three stinking good quarterbacks that could play in this league. … I don’t want to give up any of them. I like them all. The more you have, the better you are.” But then he wouldn’t say which stinking guy he liked best.

That stinks.

If that wasn’t enough, Mark McGwire came on the TV with Bob Costas for his first interview since, well… since he was knocking satellites out of the sky with mammoth home runs on an episode of The Simpsons. But where Reid said nothing, McGwire said a lot. He even got a little weepy when telling Costas about all the people he disappointed either by doing steroids during his playing career, or copping to it on Monday. I’m not sure which.

Where McGwire got off track wasn’t by speaking in circles, because by all intents McGwire appeared to be speaking earnestly. No, McGwire’s problem was that he was just wrong. He was wrong about why he did steroids, why he continued doing them, what they actually did to help him knock satellites to the earth with home runs that went to outer space, and why he was admitting it now.

Either McGwire didn’t understand what he was talking about or he thinks people are stupid… and that’s just mean. But hey, thanks for crying.

“I did this for health purposes. There’s no way I did this for any type of strength purposes,” he said, noting that he was ready to retire when injuries limited him to just 74 total games in 1993 and 1994.

Yet when he was healthy, he kept on taking it and even dabbled with HGH, “once or twice.”

No, he could not pinpoint the number of times he injected a needle full of human growth hormone into the folds of his stomach.

Still, the part that makes one arch the eyebrows, scratch the head and/or chuck a shoe at the television set was when McGwire claimed that steroids did not help him when he played. They helped his health, sure, but not his performance.

So why was he crying again?

“I truly believe I was given the gifts from the man upstairs of being a home run hitter, ever since … birth,” McGwire said. “My first hit as a Little Leaguer was a home run. I mean, they still talk about the home runs I hit in high school, in Legion ball. I led the nation in home runs in college, and then all the way up to my rookie year, 49 home runs.

The strangest part, of course, was when McGwire kept saying that he wished that he never played in the so-called “steroid era” of baseball.

“I wish I had never touched steroids,” he said. “It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era.”

Oh, so that’s it… it was the era. And here we were thinking a guy just made a bad choice and he was on national cable television confessing to Bob Costas. But now that we know it was just the era we can keep our eyes open. For instance, if it was Dec. 31, 1889 people knew that the “Gay Nineties” were about to begin and they could act accordingly. One hundred years later, Mark McGwire realized that the “Steroid Era” was in bloom and got to work.

You should have seen how greedy he was in the 1980s and how he could strut like John Travolta in the ’70s.

So that leads us to the main point—is it better to be terse and unrevealing like Reid or a veritable chatter box and wrong like McGwire.  Easy call if you ask me.

Shockingly, Big Mac comes clean

When I sat down in front of my computer and saw various updates from general acquaintances on their Facebook pages, I didn’t quite know how to react. First of all, the news was so head-spinning and mind-blowing that my first reaction was to drop to one knee in attempt to catch my breath.

When I finally pulled myself off the ground a good three hours after hitting the floor, I grabbed my head and squeezed my temples as if I were shopping for the perfectly ripe melon. Like most people, I like to get my hands on the melon and give it a thorough once over because it’s not just the eating of the fruit I’m concerned with—it is the artistry of nature.

Still, my head was not as ripe as a luscious cantaloupe for the news. Why did I have to hear it on Facebook from Trenni Kusnierek instead of a breathless—yet dashingly composed—Brian Williams with a break-in of the regularly scheduled daytime programming?

If that wasn’t bad enough, Trenni continued her taunts from Twitter.

Why? Why now? No one was sworn in, or being extorted. There was no good reason to break that oh-so sacrosanct code of the clubhouse, which is nearly exactly like the oath the guys in the major motion picture, The Hangover, only on… ahem… steroids.

An admission? What in the name of Pete Rose was going on here?

"I wish I had never touched steroids," Mark McGwire revealed in a press release sent out on Monday afternoon. "It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era."

McGwire didn’t stop there, either. Oh no, a baseball player admitting to something as mundane as using performance-enhancing substances is like a politician admitting he did something that might be construed as unethical. It just happens from time to time when a ballplayer is hanging around the clubhouse with his teammates and they are all flexing and snapping towels at one another. Ballplayers have an innate competiveness that a guy pushing pencils in a cubicle can’t fathom.

First it’s a flex here, a towel snap there, followed by a round of batting practice where the guys point and giggle at your warning-track power. Then, the next thing you know you’re in a bathroom stall with Jose Canseco with some needles and a dose of winstrol.

That’s how it always starts.

But McGwire didn’t stop with the admission because that wouldn’t be shocking at all despite his riveting testimony in 2006 before the Congressional House Government Reform Committee. That’s where he shakily claimed that he was not there "to talk about the past." Instead, McGwire outlined the past and gave dates and reasons for his drug use.

"I never knew when, but I always knew this day would come," McGwire wrote. "It’s time for me to talk about the past and to confirm what people have suspected. I used steroids during my playing career and I apologize. I remember trying steroids very briefly in the 1989/1990 off season and then after I was injured in 1993, I used steroids again. I used them on occasion throughout the ‘90s, including during the 1998 season."

The 1998 season, of course, was when McGwire and Sammy Sosa had that homerific lovefest as they assaulted all the standing single-season home run records as well as the good will of the believing American public. They duped everyone, especially the baseball writers who just didn’t whiff at the biggest story in their sport for forever, but didn’t even take the bat off their shoulders. Even when there was a dosage of andro wantonly strewn about his locker with the spent wrist bands, soiled batting gloves and muddy spikes, the scribes (and baseball people) attacked the one writer who wiggled away from the fairy tale to look behind the curtain.

So think how confused the old ballwriters are after Monday’s admission. First they go from organizing the national group hug with the brawny slugger to slapping him with metaphors not even a decade later after the showing before Congress. If your brain hurts, what about those poor, misguided writers?

Or better yet, what about Tony La Russa? Not only was La Russa the manager of McGwire’s teams in Oakland and St. Louis and is set to be his boss as the ex-slugger begins a new gig as the Cardinals’ hitting coach, but also the manager has been the big guy’s staunchest defender. La Russa was so far in McGwire’s corner that even when shown evidence to the contrary, the manager refused to believe that his guy would do anything like steroids.

In other words, unless La Russa was in the bathroom stall with Jose and Mark to see that plunger filled with those sweet, muscle-building chemicals injected into the hind parts in question, then it did not happen.

"I have long felt, and still do, there are certain players who need to publicize the legal way to get strong," La Russa told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in March of 2006. "That’s my biggest complaint. When those players have been asked, they’ve been very defensive or they’ve come out and said ‘Whatever.’ Somebody should explain that you can get big and strong in a legal way. If you’re willing to work hard and be smart about what you ingest, it can be done in a legal way."

Nothing has dissuaded La Russa from believing McGwire was clean.

"That’s the basis of why I felt so strongly about Mark. I saw him do that for years and years and years. That’s why I believe it. I don’t have anything else to add. Nothing has happened since he made that statement to change my mind."

What a plot twist! What must La Russa be thinking now? If you see a dark-haired older gentleman on the deck squeezing his head as if shopping for a cantaloupe, you know why.

Day 2: McGwire is going to have to talk about the past

INDIANAPOLIS—Tony LaRussa was in the media room on Tuesday afternoon for his shift in front of the media and for the most part things went rather smoothly. LaRussa has a pretty keen baseball mind whether or not his methodology jibes with you.

Give credit where it’s due, the folks like to say.

But there was one topic that the Cardinals’ manager had to discuss for longer than he probably cared to during Tuesday’s session in the media room. Needless to say, LaRussa likely knew it was going to be a hot topic when he decided to give the hitting coach gig to Mark McGwire.

And clearly LaRussa knows there is many more coming.

For those who merely halfway followed baseball during the past few years, ex-slugger Mark McGwire went from national hero during the Summer of ’98 to pariah following his embarrassing testimony in front of the congressional House Government Reform Committee. Since then when McGwire repeatedly stated that he was not there “to talk about the past,” he has not given a single interview and has largely stayed out of the public eye.

There’s good reason, too. Though he has admitted to using androstenedione during his playing career, a steroid that was once sold over the counter in the U.S., McGwire has also been tied to more explicit steroid use during his playing days. Not only has Jose Canseco chronicled his steroid use with McGwire, but also the ex-Cardinals’ star was named in the infamous Mitchell Report.

However, hitting coaches in the Major Leagues talk to the press. In fact, it’s nearly unavoidable for them not to have many interactions with the media during a typical day at the ballpark. In a story that came out yesterday, newly-elected Hall-of-Fame manager, Whitey Herzog stated that he believes McGwire may quit his job because dealing with the press and the questions might not be worth it.

“He's going to be asked questions about steroids, he's going to be asked so many things, and he's got to be open and he's got to answer,” Herzog said. “And Tony can't get mad about it. He's got to put up with it.”

Yes, Tony knows this. Moreover, he says he would not have put McGwire in the position of being a distraction if the old slugger wasn’t up for the job.

“I know how seriously I've personally considered it before I presented it to our owner and general manager and our coaching staff, and I know the seriousness of my conversation with Mark, and I know how seriously he thought about it before he accepted,” La Russa said. “I think it's going to work, and I think he has demonstrated to some of us that he has a lot to offer as a hitting coach.”

McGwire worked privately with several Major League hitters privately from his home base in Southern California, but has no other coaching experience. Meanwhile, LaRussa said that McGwire will address the media regarding his new job and whatever other questions the press may have for him sometime in the near future.

So far that hasn’t happened because LaRussa says no one wanted to steal the spotlight from the World Series, awards season or winter meetings.

“I talk to him a lot,” La Russa said. “I talk to him about hitting. He's already had conversations with some of our guys. He's worked with guys over the winter in the past. He's studying tape. I mean, I'm the beneficiary of those conversations. I know what he has to offer and how excited he is about it.”

He might not be as excited to talk about the past, though.