Two camps guard entrance to Hall of Fame
And so, for the third time, the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee, also known as the Get Off My Porch 84, has invited nobody to join them in scotch and Oreos. And the shrieking is enough to make you long for another seven hours of TSN covering the NHL trade deadline piped into your hippocampus.
Well, allow me a dissenting view. Shut the hell up.
There, I think that ought to generate some earnest debate.
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| Chicagoans are for Ron Santo. If you're not from Chicago, well, you're probably not losing sleep. (Getty Images) |
There is, however, a problem here that only someone as cheaply paid as an Internet gasbag can fully deduce and share with you, and that is this: There may actually be such a thing as "the best player not to get into the Hall of Fame," and if you do not have a direct rooting interest in a particular guy -- say, the way Chicago wants Santo -- you're not going to be overly troubled by any of these guys not getting in, either.
The Veterans Committee has been tweaked in the last few years to include more Hall of Famers, but we suspect what the Hall of Fame actually did was bring more people into the process who say, "Well, hell, he wasn't as good as I was." Indeed, the evidence suggests that there is a segment of the current Veterans Committee that does and will continue to view its job as keeping out the riff raff, and for all the moralizing about setting the regular Hall of Fame voters on fire for their tiresome hang-wringing, they are plainly more generous to the candidates than the people they have already voted into the Hall.
And again, no hate-infused e-mails, please. If you want to tell someone he deserves to be force-fed a working wasp hive, Doyel's your guy, for more reasons than we have time to get into now.
This argument gets down to the fact that there are two diametrically opposed and irreconcilable schools of thought on the Hall of Fame, and always will be. One is the Festival Seating Movement, in which anyone who looks like they could get more than five percent of the vote in any given election should be inducted so that every small interest group gets what it wants. Bowie Kuhn and Curt Flood getting the same number of votes would not just be mildly ironic, it would be grounds for giving them side-by-side plaques in Cooperstown -- The Man Who Showed Baseball Players How To Free Themselves From Their Chains, And The Last Blacksmith in Town.
Now that would be funny, in that dropping-trousers-on-the-parade-route-just-as-the-queen's-motorcade-is-roaring-by way.
The other school is the Fighting Against Our Eroding Standards guild, and that stands squarely in the camp of "Hey, if they didn't get those moron sportswriters to vote for them, they have no complaints." That definition alone makes the Veterans Committee superfluous, since the notion that they have been assembled to right the wrongs perpetrated by the regular voters has been soundly rejected by the committee itself.
These two schools of thought do not contend as much as they call the cops on each other, with heartfelt missives like "If you didn't vote for Ron Santo, you are going to hell," and in opposition, "Fine, as soon as I see Zoilo Versalles inducted, you cleverly disguised baboon."
Indeed, the best case for Santo, to pick one example, is that he meant so much to the Cubs, which is not a persuasive argument when posed to a Braves fan. To credit Marvin Miller with a plaque begs a fevered argument with anyone who believes that the only good union is a decertified union.
And lowering the standard from 75 to 60 percent only moves the argument from Santo to Tony Oliva, and there are plenty of people who saw the Twins and would take Oliva over Santo any day. At this stage of the process, subjectivity is even more of a factor than ever, because not even the most generous voter can make the case that anybody on the list was truly wronged. You like a guy, or you don't, but there are no no-brainers on this list. If there were, the no-brains would have found a way to get them in by now.
So as long as there are these two opposing philosophies, there will be a Veterans Committee, and as long as there is a Veterans Committee, there will be a percentage of it that says, "The neighborhood's already too crowded as it is." And the only other fresh idea proposed in the last 20 years is the one in which every new Hall of Famer must displace an old Hall of Famer, which is too weird even to contemplate. And if you must know, we voted for Arnold Rothstein. True, you get into the old argument about performance enhancers, but we contend that him pulling a gun and gut-shooting a rival didn't enhance his performance as much as it inhibited the other guy's, and besides, it wasn't against the rules of baseball at the time.
