No it’s not the most wonderful time of the year.
No, it’s not “He’s in the best shape of his life” time, though I’m really excited for that.
Now, it’s “Let’s moralize about the Hall of Fame” time! Or, more specifically, it’s the “I have no evidence of his PED use but I’m not voting for Jeff Bagwell” time of year, everyone’s favorite!
This, baseball writers, this is why we can’t have nice things.
If you read my article on the Hall of Fame from two weeks ago, you’ll know that I don’t care about PED use and that if I had a vote, I’d vote for anyone, so long as his numbers presented a strong case for induction (again, someone please urge me to vote yes on Alan Trammel. I really want to.). But, I realize that I’m likely in the minority on that decision and that definitely goes for the BBWAA. I guess I can see that side of it, but this sort of garbage–the Jeff Bagwell suspicion–is what drives me nuts. Writers who don’t vote for Bagwell on a statistical basis are nuts because his numbers merit induction. Writer who don’t vote for Bagwell based on this ridiculous steroid theory are embarrassing.
This sort of thinking has bled over into the Ryan Braun issue and whether or not his MVP award should be stripped. Buster Olney said that the sentiment he was getting from voters was something along the lines of “This isn’t a court of law; do the right thing.” That is…a scary thought. The sad thing is, that there are enough people who agree with that in a baseball context. Let’s apply that notion to somewhere else. Hopefully soon, I get a full time teaching job. Imagine you’re the principal of my building and I tell you that since my classroom isn’t a “court of law” I’ just going to “do the right thing” when it comes to grading and evaluating. How fast would you fire me? This ridiculous line of thinking reminds me of what I talked about in my piece about Justin Verlander winning the MVP and how the voters don’t like to define valuable. Moshe discussed it in his piece about Joe Girardi and the Manager of the Year award. The writers are beyond reluctant to define anything about anything and since they do that, they’re able to dictate what’s good and bad on a case by case basis. Sure, there’s a good side to not living in absolutes, the lack of accountability on the writers’ part is beyond infuriating.
Yesterday morning, Olney and Ken Rosenthal were exchanging tweets about the morality issue in MVP and HOF voting. Though I follow both of them, neither can see my tweets since my account is locked (I work with middle and high school kids, so you can guess why I have my account locked). Anyway, what they were saying got me a bit worked up and I got angry. I’d link to the tweet, but this is a family blog. I’ll clean it up and expand: Baseball writers have one job to do when they vote for awards and the Hall of Fame. That job does not include being moral arbiters and deciding what is right and wrong both socially and within the game. The job of the baseball writers when voting for awards and inducting players into the HOF is simple: Give those honors to the players who are best at throwing, hitting, and catching baseballs. That’s it.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
24 Responses to It’s that time of year again, isn’t it?
Leave a Reply
TIQ IQ
I enjoy baseball much more now that I rarely read (or take seriously) anything that 99% of most MSM baseball writers (and yes, this includes Oleny, Verducci, Rosentahl, Heyman, etc. as well as anonymous beat guys and op-ed writers like that clown in Hartford) put out.
If you read or listen to blathering idiots long enough you’re bound to get stressed out by the level of stupidity.
My advice to you Matt is to stop reading and listening to those guys.
Serenity now!
What I’ve come to notice with most MSM writers is that they are, obviously, excellent reporters with generally well placed sources and they’er not too often way off on a story. However, they fall woefully short when they try to moralize or analyze anything about the game.
The funny thing for me is that I don’t read the MSM moralizing, so it doesn’t bother me. But I do read the anti-moralizing moralizing, and that winds up getting under my skin.
Can’t we all just get along?
You’re entirely wrong. First, baseball’s HOF actually means something (for instance, can you tell me who got into the football or basketball HOF last year, or how they determine who gets in?). Second, it’s not just numbers. If so, then why not just legislate numbers and let a computer decide. It’s about more than that. It’s about the integrity of the game. That’s why we care about who gets in, and why we argue about it so much. And Bagwell and all the other guys who didn’t speak out when they saw their teammates cheating (Caminiti), deserve what they get.
I’m all for letting a computer decide. And while we’re at it let’s have a automated strike zone. So long human error!
I’m not sure if you’re replying to me or to Matt but, in either case, what you really mean is that you disagree with one, or both, of us. That’s fine – no problem at all. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
No, I can’t tell you who got into the football or basketball HOF because I haven’t really followed football that closely for many years and I haven’t paid attention to basketball since the 70s. But plenty of other folks do and they’re just as passionate about those HOF as baseball fans are about Cooperstown.
But speaking of “integrity of the game” I’ll bet there isn’t a player enshrined there who didn’t cheat or try to cheat in some way – that’s the reality of professional sports. Players do whatever they can get away with whether it’s PEDs, spitball pitchers, or corked-bat users – you can go on and on.
I don’t remember any hue and cry about Whitey Ford getting into the HOF even though it was well known that he cut and scuffed baseballs (or has his catcher do it for him) – I don’t remember Mickey Mantle calling him out in the press about that in the interests of preserving “the integrity of the game”.
OK, that’s “boys will be boys” stuff. Want to talk about the stuff that really creates moral outrage (or should, according to you)? How about Ty Cobb, one of the dirtiest players ever and a truly despicable human being? How about all the players in the 50s and 60s who took greenies (amphetamines) – remember Willie Mays and his “red juice”? What do you think that was? Hawaiian Punch? How many guys (other than Jim Bouton who did it for literary rather than moral reasons) spoke out about that?
How about all of the managers, team executives and commissioners who are enshrined at Cooperstown who conspired to exclude all non-white players from the game? How about outspoken bigots like Cobb, Rogers Hornsby and others who supported the color line? How about the commissioners and team executives who created and fought to preserve the reserve clause, a blatant violation of the anti-trust laws and an extremely unjust labor practice, by promoting the ridiculous legal theory that professional baseball was not a business?
The baseball HOF is not some shrine of morally pure individuals. It’s a museum for guys who happened to excel in playing, managing or supervising major-league baseball. The moral outrage over steroids is frankly silly since MLB clearly turned a blind eye to it as long as they could get away with it and most sportswriters covered it up or ignored it the same way sportswriters in the sixties didn’t write about Mickey Mantle being a drunk and a womanizer.
The “integrity of the game” was sullied far more by the fact that Josh Gibson never got to bat against Lefty Grove and Joe DiMaggio never had to face Satchel Paige in his prime than it was by Jeff Bagwell not ratting on Ken Caminiti.
Just like players who saw players of color not get to play baseball professionally with them, even encouraging it, but still barn storming with them to make money need to be taken out of the HOF right?
Ruth hung out with all kinds of nefarious characters, gambled, drank, showed up to games hungover and drunk. Yet we love to talk about his “colorful personality”. Cobb was a notorious racist, who beat-up a cripple in the stands at one point, and is rumored to have killed a man. Yet most who talk about him love to laugh at jokes such as “he’d spike his mother if he she was standing over a base”.
If you’re talking a moral stand, take it the whole way. To pick and chose which morals YOU find offensive enough to keep someone out of the HOF is hypocritical at best. Either we start erasing history to make it look better than it really is, or we put everyone in, tell the whole story, admire them for they did on the field, and let the people decided what to think of each individual. Once you start legislating sport with morals, you’re on a slippery slope.
T.O. – if you’re replying to me I’m not advocating that anyone be taken out of the HOF (well, maybe Jim Rice and Andre Dawson but that’s another story) or that moral standards be used at all – just the opposite. Sorry, if I wasn’t clear on that – I think I was making the same point you are.
I’m not replying to you. I’m replying to “greg”.
After I posted I saw you made a lot of similar points to me. If anything we completely agree.
That’s a mind-blowing concept–you can’t pick and choose morals, you can only support all morals. That completely changes the whole idea of morals.
I’ll let T.O. speak for himself but I think his point is that people have many different ideas about what’s moral or not so it’s problematic to apply one particular group’s (say the BBWA) view of morality in deciding whose accomplishments should be represented in a museum of sport. Also, views of morality change over time. Plenty of people thought it would be “immoral” to integrate baseball in the 30s and 40s or to allow players to freely bargain with all clubs for their services until the 70s.
It’s better, in my opinion, to honor the accomplishments, and as T.O. pointed out, tell the whole story without trying to to make moral judgments about which accomplishments should be honored. I’ll use Pete Rose as an example. You can’t white out from baseball history the fact that he got more hits than anyone else. What you can do is put him in the HOF without ceremony (no Cooperstown speech) after a reasonable delay and write clearly on his plaque that he was banned for violating the betting rule.
This.
Just because one person views something as moral or immoral doesn’t mean that holds true for the rest of the world. The death penalty is immoral to many people, yet others see it as a necessary part of the justice system.
To start using morals to legislate who does and doesn’t get into the HOF is simply a joke. You can’t act like Alex Rodriguez isn’t the greatest SS, and one of the greatest players of all. Yet many would do just that, simply because he was the only name on a list 100+ players that came out. You can’t erase that for almost a decade Barry Bonds was the greatest hitter in baseball history, with a couple seasons better than anything Ruth ever did. We all watched him do it, it happened. Whether you want argue if it was the same or not is a different story. You have to put these people in the hall, tell the whole story, and then let people decide for themselves how they want to view each person as an individual.
I for one don’t consider the HOF anything other than a joke at this point. The all time hit and HR king aren’t in it, and in the future Alex and many other greats won’t be either. It’s become a hall of people we like, plain and simple. Bagwell has never had a single piece of evidence against his name for being clean, but he was friends with a steroid abuser so screw him. That’s the mentality of this so called “hall of fame”. Bagwell’s career decline doesn’t even look like someone who did steroids. Yet countless others who did use will get in, simply because the writers like them more and they weren’t as close a friends with other users.
We’ve buried our heads in the sand long enough on this whole steroid thing, now we allow the HOF to do the same.
That’s MY point–that morals aren’t the same everywhere. A moral system, by definition, means deciding what’s important and what isn’t. Whether or not the Hall of Fame should use a particular moral or moral system is a different argument. But to say that you can’t use morals because morals aren’t the same for everyone makes no sense. You might just as well say that there can’t be laws in the US because morals are different for different people. That’s what organizations of all kinds do–decide what’s important to it, usually by compromise.
What it seems like most people are saying is that the Hall of Fame can’t use standards other than their own. But of course, that’s a completely different argument, one you begin to make concerning your own feelings in your response. My take on that is a little different, but my point here is that the moralizing on one side seems to me to be not very much more close-minded than on the other.
My general take on the Hall of Fame, by the way, is that its a wonderful museum, very much worth visiting to get that cool-baseball-history feeling, but that the hall with the plaques is just about the least interesting thing in it.
Your analogy makes no sense. First of all, what “right thing” are we talking about? What are you saying the teacher is doing? If a teacher really is doing “the right thing” and it somehow violates some procedure (I vaguely remember a case where a teacher was fired for buying rulers for her students, or something like that), I certainly would support the teacher. (Full disclosure–my dad and mom were both public school teachers.)
Second, a principal can’t fire a teacher just because he wants to. Teachers have unions, and it’s a pretty complicated procedure to fire one, involving a lot of paper documentation on what the problem is, and chances to correct it.
And lastly, is who gets a baseball award really as important to a society as how our children are taught in public schools?
Personally, I’m anti-PED but wouldn’t have a problem with Bagwell going into the Hall. On the other hand, I do understand people who don’t want to make anirrevocable decision until we have more info. I may not agree (or I may, this is just for the sake of argument), but I can understand.
Best tweet I saw on the subject was a retreat by Keith Law which said something along the lines that the commissioner who inserted the morality clause into the HOF voting, is the same commissioner who fought hard for the color barrier for over 25 years. Scary huh?
Matt,
Reach out to me regarding your desire to be a teacher.
Are you currently in college? Have you student taugh? etc…
The problem with the examples given about past immoral baseball players such as Ruth and Cobb is that their moral shortcomings didn’t give them an advantage on the field. The arguments for spitballs and amphetamines makes more sense in that line of thought. The writers who vote are not making overall moral judgements about players, they are making the judgement that the immorality of choosing to give oneself an unfair competitive advantage through unnatural sources is enough to prevent enshrinement. This train of thought does not need to be applied at a universal standard, but incrementally applied in weight based on severity. For example, one could judge that the immorality of using a spitball exists, but not at a high enough level as to warrant such a serious punishment. Clearly, the writers tend to agree that using PEDs and steroids is enough to deserve non-entrance. The question becomes whether the voters should be allowed to have the ability to apply this moral judgement in their voting process. I personally would approve of this relatively minor power.
I would think that the lack of votes for Bagwell is due more to suspicion of use than as condemnation for not speaking out against teammates for taking steroids. I could see voters rationalizing that its better to not put him in the hall now when unsure of innocence than vote him in and find out later he’s guilty. Its easier to get a deserving player elected in later than it would be to take an undeserving one out, going under the assumption that taking steroids makes one ineligible for enshrinement.
Well, Cobb’s dirty play did give him an advantage in some respects since infielders were probably a bit tentative when in a position to apply tags to him on the base paths or in turning DPs but I would agree that it’s not quite the same thing as taking greenies or steroids. However, once you open the door to moral judgments then where do you stop? Did Pete Rose’s betting activities give him or his team some advantage? Of course not. But he’s been blacklisted from even being considered from the HOF which even McGwire, Bonds and Clemens haven’t been so far.
The problem I have with baseball writers making judgments about the advantages conferred by PEDs is that they 1) have no data that quantifies what those advantages were either in isolation or relative to what everyone else was doing and 2) they have no expertise that would permit them to evaluate the data even if it was available. Thus, we’re left with their subjective judgment that they don’t want cheaters in the HOF. Well, OK – but then you start getting into differentiating categories of cheating and that’s a slippery slope where you have to start saying that it’s OK to have Gaylord Perry in but not Barry Bonds. This is not, as you say, a minor power.
Finally, I find the rationalization (and I understand that you’re saying that this is what the writers think – not necessarily what you think although from your comment I suspect you agree with it) about excluding guys who are suspected, without any concrete evidence, of being PED users to be appalling. I think it’s pure McCarthyism and more reprehensible than PED use itself.
Once again this. A thousand times this.
The funny thing is people who are in the HOF have autobiographies talking about greenie use, which almost every player used back in the day. But that just isn’t harsh enough to keep someone out of the hall I guess. If anything it just lends itself to funny little stories about how you were so hung over you couldn’t play, then you popped some speed and were ready to go. Certainly not cheating in any way.
So spitballs? Fine, Color barrier? Fine, being a dick and spiking people? Fine, Methamphetamine and cocaine use? Fine, Steroids? No, no, no, and no!
We’ve got a problem when people get to pick and chose what’s bad, and what’s simply a funny part of history.
People have always picked and chosen what’s bad. That’s life.
Maybe steroids are worse than greenies. They seem to have more of an affect on the game. At that time, very few people knew about them at the time, or understand what they were or what they did. Maybe they weren’t as bad as steroids. In any case, just because some people made that decision years ago, other people now have to make other decisions they don’t like?
To use the jail metaphor you seem to like–just because there are people in jail who shouldn’t be, or people not in jail who should be doesn’t mean we should stop putting people in jail, or put everyone in jail. It means we should try to fix the system and do better from now on.
And in another comment, not this one, you say that not putting Bagwell in the Hall is “not telling the whole story.” I don’t think thats right. The story doesn’t change. The HOF doesn’t say that Bagwell didn’t hit 449 homers, or whatever. it doesn’t change the records, and it doesn’t tell the story of baseball. It just decides who gets an honor that a bunch of people look at. That it’s It’s not a matter of life or death, and it means exactly as much as anyone cares to think it means.
“I could see voters rationalizing that its better to not put him in the hall now when unsure of innocence than vote him in and find out later he’s guilty.”
This is beautiful. So it’s no longer innocence until proven guilty, it’s guilty by association unless you can prove otherwise. Which is something he can’t do even if he wanted.
All this does is allow the voters to completely take the burden off their own shoulders. So instead of actually having to use this “moral power” they’ve assigned themselves, they can simply keep people out just in case they did something wrong. That logic is a complete farce. They want the moral power to keep players out, but they also don’t want to actually have to do any work involved with it. Just shut down the HOF that way no one gets to slip past the grand old Oz.
So one of the greatest players to ever put on an Astros uniform doesn’t get into this so called hall of fame because we don’t want to be burned. Even though it’s clear steroid users are already in the hall, and will be in the hall in the future. They just didn’t have as high profile friends as Jeff did.
Let’s just start putting people in jail then because we don’t want to be burned. I know it’s a little extreme, but hey it’s easier to get someone out of jail than it is to put someone in jail who’s been found not guilty. Let’s simply take the burden off of ourselves with blanket guilty verdicts until proven otherwise.
Innocence until proven guilty only applies in law where it is meant to protect people’s basic natural rights. This does not apply to the Hall of Fame where people are voted in. Players have to earn the right and like it or not suspicion of PED or steroid use will be a detrimental factor. While I am not saying I agree with this way of thinking I can understand the rationale if it is indeed being applied.
I am unsure if any statistics exist that quantify the effect of performance-enhancing drugs on performance, but its generally agreed upon that they give an unnatural advantage. The term “performance-enhancing” is used for a reason.
I don’t really see the argument that its hypocritical players with off the field issues with morality such as racism and being a dick are accepted into the hall while steroid users are. Those off the field issues don’t affect the on-field performance. If anything its a good thing the writers don’t make sweeping moral judgements about the players as human beings and limit it to areas that give a player an unnatural advantage. Amphetamine usage is probably closest to the level of steroids in my opinion, but those were just used to provide (unnatural) energy, not provide the physical benefits of steroids such as increased bat speed and power. Players can drink energy drinks or coffee now, and until recently could take caffeine supplements. An argument for this fact is that these supplements allow a player to maximize their abilities with increased energy, not eclipse them.
There are no doubt players who have cheated in the Hall, but that is no reason to stop living by ideals. I’m not saying that those are the correct ideals, but the fact that they have not been met in the past is not a valid reason for writers to abandon them.
These are not verdicts and this is not a court of law. No one is going to jail, no one is paying any fines. If you can’t see the difference, arguing isn’t going to help. But you’re inability to see the difference calls into question you’re understanding of the issue.
You’re inability to actually respond to any of my points calls into question yours. Clearly, innocence until proven guilty doesn’t apply. Whether that is right or not is a separate question.