Baseball's Broken Hall of Fame Process
It may be time for writers to turn in their ballots for good
Sports Biblio Reader 1.31.21
The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture
Also In This Issue: J.G. Taylor Spink; Betting on The Athletic; Barstool’s Business Boost; Back to Normal Down Under; Thurman Munson and Ron Blomberg; A Giants Fan Cult Film Classic; Golf’s COVID Boom; Soccer in Pinochet’s Chile; Remembering John Chaney
I’ll never have a Baseball Hall of Fame vote, so I cannot relate to those members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who have come to dread this time of year, when the votes are counted, the inductees are announced and the primal screaming begins, at least until pitchers and catchers report.
Except this year there will be no inductees. As in none. Zero. No players on the ballot reached the 75 percent threshold, for the first time in eight years. So when a socially distanced ceremony takes place in Cooperstown, N.Y. this summer, it will be for the Class of 2020 only.
Derek Jeter and Larry Walker will get their long-overdue enshrinement. So will the late Marvin Miller, one of the Hall’s most obviously glaring absences.
Pitcher Curt Schilling, who finished third in the BBWAA voting a year ago and was the leading vote-getter this year at 71 percent, came up 16 votes short.
The volatile Schilling, fired from ESPN as a color analyst after making derogatory social media comments about transgender people and a perpetual social-political lightning rod, demanded to be taken off the 2022 ballot for his final year of eligibility.
Whether Schilling’s recent Tweets in support of U.S. Capitol rioters turned off reluctant voters may never be fully known, but he’s certainly basking in persecution complex. His relationship with writers—mostly over his conservative views—wasn’t good during his playing days.
While I think his career was Hall-worthy, that doesn’t seem to be enough for some voters, many of whom continue to shun Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. They also have one more year to go on the ballot, and it’s unlikely they’ll be getting any calls a year from now.
To continue Schilling’s torment, the BBWAA said they won’t take his name off the ballot.
For most of the time since the Hall of Fame was created in 1936, the BBWAA has had the primary responsibility for player voting. But that began long before the steroids era complicated matters, and during a period when character mattered in a superficial manner.
Ty Cobb is in, but Pete Rose is not. Harold Baines (via the Veterans Committee) is in, but Bonds and Clemens, the all-time home run leader and the best pitcher of my adult lifetime, respectively, are not, and probably won’t be, at least not by the good grace of the writers.
This has become an annual ritual, to flog the BBWAA for what has never been a flawless process. I am not here to flog, but the 77 years the writers have voted is a long time, and the process for doing so has become hidebound and frustrating.
Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated insists the process is not broken, but also given some of the other names on this year’s ballot—Scott Rolen, Billy Wagner, Andruw Jones, Omar Vizquel, among them—there’s no excuse for 14 of the 401 members to have turned in an empty ballot.
I can’t imagine the difficulty that’s involved for those who take their voting privileges seriously, but the justification for sending in a blank ballot this time around is just ridiculous. There aren’t “too many questions” about some of this year’s candidates, not enough for none of them to be included.
The continuing moral panic and hand-wringing about Bonds, Clemens and steroids absolves Major League Baseball of its very slow response to addressing the use of performance-enhancing drugs, well after their stellar careers were in high gear.
Perhaps Dan Le Batard was onto something several years ago when he gave his Hall of Fame vote to Deadspin.
That stunt got him a lifetime ban from voting by the BBWAA. But given the backlog building for next year’s voting, and with the very real possibility of another empty class, it’s fair to wonder how many of its members think this is worth continuing as is.
For further reading:
“Cooperstown Casebook,” by Jay Jaffe
A Few Good Reads
More about the Baseball Writers Association of America, which names its meritorious service award after J.G. Taylor Spink, the longtime publisher of The Sporting News. Should that honor be renamed? TSN’s Ryan Fagan thinks so, and took a deep dive into research and interviews about Spink’s racial views, and his anti-integrationist attitudes summed up in editorials even after the arrival of Jackie Robinson:
“This is not cancel culture. This is about taking an honest look at our past — both the Sporting News and the BBWAA — and choosing to honor the people worthy of honoring, while removing those unworthy of adulation from our pedestals. And based on what I’ve learned from my research about J.G. Taylor Spink, the future we want is probably not an America he would welcome, and that’s part of the reason why his name needs to be removed.
“We are not changing history. We are not erasing history. We are studying our history, learning lessons and moving forward. We are growing.”
The Australian Open starts Feb. 8 after most participating players made it through mandatory quarantine in a nation that’s reduced COVID to just a handful of cases after harsh lockdowns. For most of the tournament, attendance will be limited to 30,000 fans daily, with the finals at Rod Laver Arena maxing out at 75 percent capacity. For viewing eyes in other parts of the world, witnessing maskless crowds to that extent may figure to be something of a shock. The players don’t have to muzzle up either;
From The Ringer, a look at the 2009 cult classic “Big Fan,” the Robert Siegel and Patton Oswalt film about a forlorn New York Giants fan who lives at home with his mother;
In the age of COVID, the socially distant sport of golf made something of a comeback last year, with novices helping boost golf equipment sales and more young professionals and casual players hitting the links to get outdoors and make business contacts;
The Athletic has signed a deal with BetMGM to create a new sports gambling hub that includes a full vertical, mobile app and other platforms featuring integrated sports coverage, analysis and oddsmaking information;
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy is no stranger to controversy as the impresario of an edgy—many think excessively crude and lewd—sports media and gambling enterprise that’s become a colossus. But during the pandemic, he’s become a hero to a number of restaurants and small businesses crushed by lockdowns, having raised more than $33 million in direct assistance. Among them is a roller skating rink in Oneonta, N.Y., limited to operating at one-third of its capacity, and which is paying the favor forward by holding a fundraiser next week to help other affected businesses.
Now Hear This
From The Football and Society Podcast, Chilean soccer during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet is examined through the lives of players Elías Figueroa and Carlos Caszely, who had differing views of the country’s political situation during those years.
Sports Book News
Coming in April, former Ron Blomberg’s new memoir, “The Captain and Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson,” by Triumph Books, and written with Dan Epstein. The first designated hitter in Major League Baseball, now 71, not surprisingly endorses the “universal DH” on a permanent basis after the National League employed it during the shortened 2020 season.
Passings
John Chaney, 89, was the longtime men’s basketball coach at Temple University in a Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame career that included 741 wins noted for his smothering defenses, cantankerous temperament and who championed progress for black athletes. His passion and rage—including a threat to kill then-UMass coach John Calipari in 1994 after a heated Atlantic 10 game—was summed up not long after that incident by Gary Smith in Sports Illustrated, who described Chaney’s street-tough Philly coaching style that wasn’t for everyone:
“It might not work at Duke or Stanford, with sons of the middle class at his feet, with rolling lawns and fluted granite right outside the window. But his are the children of America's blight, and right outside the window are row houses with shattered windows and boarded doorways, crack houses, abandoned houses. stripped cars, gutted buses; crazy is right outside the window.
“His are the children, often, who have never known a true father, a man like Chancy, who, day and night, is there. Who's not running off to do commercials or TV shows or radio shows or speaking engagements or clinics, like other successful Division I coaches, a man who freezes up at anything that might complicate his life, who keeps shoving away society's gravy.”
For further reading:
“Chaney: Playing for a Legend,” by Donald Hunt
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 232, published Jan. 31, 2021.
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