What happened to Ms. Lee in her decline years was a real shame. She never married and had no children, but instead remained very close to her sister. Her sister -- like her father -- was a successful small town lawyer in Monroeville, AL essentially the model for Maycomb, and was very protective of the nearly reclusive author. But upon the death of the sister, another lawyer in town took on a near guardian like responsibility, moved her into a not great nursing facility, began suing people left and right, stopped allowing the publishing of the inexpensive school versions of TKaM and, mysteriously, because Ms. Lee's (almost) sole beneficiary of the literary estate. The publication of Go Set a Watchman was against what Ms. Lee said for years and shouldn't have happenedl.
Love the field station color in your story. Do you really think Neruda in Spanish is significantly better? We have some bilingual Neruda collections, and I don't notice big differences, but my Spanish is merely functional and not very sophisticated.
I cannot tell you how much I enjoy your contributions to the conversations that go on in the comments each day. Thanks for providing your thoughts and for the work you do both in the healthcare arena and as a father. As a type 1 diabetic I also appreciate hearing about your experience with the vaccine as I look forward to getting it one day...though not any time soon with the screw up of the roll out that is going on. I look forward to updates once you get the booster!
The way Florida is bumblefucking the vaccines--shit. The vaccines will expire before the rest of us can get it, and we'll have natural immunity before we're vaccinated at the cost of hundreds of thousands of more dead. I'm an RN like you, but I don't do direct care so I'm at the back of the line. Count your blessings in the NICU. There is no plan for distribution yet unless you count the plan to be as inept as possible since the virus is killing off people of color and poor people the most. Thank you Trump, DeSantis, Scott, and Rubio--the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Cheers.
Perhaps not caring about the Hall of Fame is a rash decision for the author of a daily newsletter. Sure, it would be a continuing source of personal aggravation. But it's also no doubt a reliable continuing source of newsletter content.
Eh, no worries I guess. Craig always finds something else to discuss, and be his daily source of personal aggravation. He doesn't need the Hall of Fame for that.
I think that the moral arguments as they relate to the Hall are tiresome AND wholly unnecessary. No one REALLY cares about the "character clause". Schilling will get in next year. Vizquel will still be old school vs SABR stats.
I also think it's a broader social problem generally. Part of the reason we want to punish Bonds/Clemens/Rose/Vizquel/etc by not giving them a bronze plaque that sort of looks like them is we can't PUT THEM IN JAIL, for abuse at least. The rich cheat and get away with it, and it pisses us off and we can't do anything about it. So we mock and shun and think that makes a difference.
As a culture we're so individualistic, especially the Left for some reason, that we can't even CONCEIVE of a real punishment for anyone besides social shunning. How many articles have their been about Trump or Ivanka not being accepted into NYC Society, getting into the right clubs? Will Ivanka be loaned a designer dress for the Met Gala, or will she have to buy it retail like a common peasant? Who cares! Same with the Hall. We have no language to discuss what to do when rich, powerful, people are garbage.
I won't argue with you about the Hall, Craig, but I am having too much of a good time enjoying Joe Posanski's 100 Best Players Not in the Hall of Fame series and therefore want to keep arguing about who belongs and who doesn't. It doesn't matter much, but it's fun. Usually.
And here is a great article from ESPN's Steve Wulf about Clyde Sukeforth, who no one would argue was a great ballplayer, but whose impact on the game was far bigger than you might guess.
Columbo's first name is probably actually Francesco and not Frank. I kind of see him growing up in a proudly Italian home where some relative, if not his parents, insisted that he would have a proper Italian first name. And he probably kept it till he was drafted, and shifted to Frank. But we all know his REAL first name is Lieutenant.
Of course, baseball is often accused of being drunk on its own history, thus alienating fans who just want to watch and not take a test. There should be a balance, but the history is part of the fun for me.
That was actually in a comment on today’s post from Craig, but it might make a little more sense once you consider the third brother in the family (J. Crew). And if that still doesn’t help, your morning coffee and/or evening champagne might do the trick...
The crazy thing is that there were people who didn't vote for Willie Mays for the Hall. Pretty sure they must have been white supremacists. Which only reinforces the anti-BBWAA argument.
They could set a limit on how many players are in the Hall of Fame, so that to get Derek Jeter in you'd have to throw some less deserving current HoFer. I have a friend who advocates that idea, though mostly in jest. It would probably actually work for quite a while to cut some of the dead wood, but eventually you'd end up throwing out, say, Mike Schmidt to fit in some guy who was even better in the class of 2120.
I have no real opinion on the HOF, but Cooperstown is probably my least favorite town in upstate NY. Corning has a better museum (Museum of Glass). Saratoga is more historic (Glens Falls or Bemis Heights really). For things to do, if you rent a sailboat in Rochester for the day, you can make it to Toronto and back on the fourth best Great Lake or take luge lessons in Lake Placid. Cooperstown is basically a gas stop on the way to those places, if you don't go to the HOF.
Completely agree about the Hall of Fame. Here are some words from Bill James in 1994. These don't necessarily reflect his current views because he doesn't tie himself to his old beliefs, but anyway...
"The Hall of Fame selection process was an afterthought to an accident. Cleland had not set out to create a Hall of Fame: he had set out to create a museum, and this had turned into a Hall of Fame...
...For sixty years the Hall of Fame has wandered this way and that, its border becoming more of a splatter than a map. The Hall teases its suitors with inconsistent favors and uncertain standards: yesterday I did, today I won't; I did for him, I won't for you.
The fundamental questions of how many players you want to honor and how you identify the best players in baseball history are questions that the Hall of Fame has never faced directly, and probably never will....
....My own opinion is that the people who want to put Joe Jackson in the Hall are baseball's answer to those women who show up at murder trials wanting to marry the cute murderer."
That's all from the book which was called "Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?" because the publisher thought it would sell more that way.
Well, Hall of Fame journalism has always provided a rich seam of amusing nonsense, and I look forward to Craig continuing to ridicule it while pointing out that it doesn't matter anyway.
The Baseball Hall of Fame says more about baseball writers than it does about the sport and its history. It’s a members-only club that also unsurprisingly canonizes writers and broadcasters. It’s a fantastic museum to visit for any fan, but not worthy of more gravitas than that. While reading this morning, I realized that I’ve agreed with Craig’s take for a number of years but he articulated it much better.
Spicy Brown, Dijon, and Stadium should be absolute first ballot Hall of Famers. I would vote for Horseradish but I don’t expect the MWAA to get to 75% agreement before its ten years on the ballot run out. And there’s no way I’d ever vote for Yellow - it’s career WARM is way too low, and is way too much of a compiler.
Veteran's committee HAS to induct yellow. It's foundational. Without the work it put in, your spicy browns and your dijons would never have had the opportunities to shine.
Like the Cardinals were owned by Chris Archer, The Wizard of Pitching, in his Pirates debut, yellow mustard is owned by the French, my friend. They even claim ownership of it in the very name of the biggest brand.
Nah. Yellow mustard is a totally different thing - comes from a different mustard heritage. It would be like putting cricketeers in the BBHOF. *Brown* mustard is foundational to dijon and spicy brown and honey mustards etc.. Hmm -probably a whole grain brown mustard would be a good veteran's inductee.
One player whom I often wonder about whether or not he would still be voted into the Hall of Fame by today’s baseball writers is Rod Carew. His family is really interesting, with him being a member of MLB’s 3,000 hit club and a Hall of Famer, his older brother, Jay, founding a modern-day clothing empire, and his younger brother, Rae, reaching the NFL for the Carolina Panthers before being arrested for plotting a murder.
Would today’s old, cranky baseball writers have held Rae’s illegal acts against Rod’s case for the Hall? Additionally, the head fashion designer at Jay’s clothing company took a lot of heat from conservatives in 2011 for painting her son’s toenails pink in an advertisement. You’d have to think that many of today’s troglodyte-level baseball writers, like Rod “Chinese Virus” Beer Temple, would have no problem keeping Carew out of the Hall for that alone.
This is really well done for being so early in the morning. The rollercoaster ride going from “Wow I never knew that!” to “I think this person is insane” to “Ohhhhhhhhh.........” was quite the experience!
In reading the part about the Hall of Fame today, it occurs to me that I cannot think of one guy in the other major sports where people say "Yeah, he's a Hall of Famer based on his accomplishments on the field/court/ice, BUT..."
There's no equivalent of a Barry Bonds, or Roger Clemens, or even Pete Rose; Paul Hornung, to cite a direct comparison, is enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame despite his being suspended for a year for betting on NFL games.
I suppose the BBWAA would point to this fact with pride, proof that baseball is special, but it seems arbitrary to me.
Rhetorically, yes. Practically, no. Baseball almost put Pete in the Hall, he was going to have to jump through a few hoops and then Giamatti died unexpectedly and now he's being kept out because no one wants to lose face. The PED twins will eventually get in. Schilling will get in next year.
Baseball handwrings about morals a lot but it's usually pro forma. And it never works the other way. No one gets in based on being a good guy.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is a place every baseball fan should visit. The emphasis of the building is on the latter with the former being an end of tour brief stop in the most dull part of the exhibit.
I treat the plaque room, and membership in it, as a sorta tiered place. For players who were stars when I was young, it is a little bit of nostalgia towards my time of hero worship long since gone. Remembering how 10 year old me felt about Reggie hitting 3 homers or seeing Tom Terrific's drop and drive or Brock's daring on the base paths. Childhood's stars are something special.
For players who were stars when I was an adult, it is pretty dull. I've learned that players are people with, far too often, feet of clay just like the rest of us and no longer come even close to worshiping them for their exploits. I also have formed my own ability to ascertain value without as much reliance on outside voices. I don't want or need the BBWAA or Vets' Comm to tell me about Puckett vs. Mattingly or Morris vs. Steib. My opinion on Barry Bonds or Harold Baines won't budge an inch because of any discussion around Lake Glimmerglass.
But for players who played long before I was alive, induction and the debates around it are a great way to organize history. I would know nothing about Jack Glasscock but for the discussion about whether he should be included. My knowledge of the ABCs - Anson, Brouthers, Connor - is because they were selected. And that is true of players of much more recent vintage too like Robin Roberts or Richie Ashburn.
What I guess I'm saying is that I don't follow the BBWAA choices at all or the modern era VCs either. But I do continue to use the induction debates and history to help guide my study of those from prior years. So (a) the Museum is - by far - the best part of the NBHoFaM and (b) HoF part is still interesting to me as a way to organize my thinking about older generations.
From a pure "performance enhancing" standpoint, why are PEDs bad and LASIK acceptable? What about Tommy John surgery? I think there is a good case to be made that if you can't make it to the Hall with the body parts God gave you, in their original locations, then you don't belong in the HOF at all.
The argument is LASIK (or glasses) is something a normal person takes to bing themselves up to a normal level. If you could get LASIK to get 20/5 vision, people would have a problem with it.
If you eliminated anyone who's ever had a medical procedure, the Hall would b empty and I'm not exaggerating in the slightest.
One thing I should delve into -- did Hall of Fames exist before Baseball's Hall? Had the concept been around for a while?
Anyway, Craig's comments are pretty consistent with my view of the HoF, and I've felt that way for a number of years. A Hall of Fame is inherently a self-defining institution, and that definition usually changes over time to the point where the honor, from an outsider's perspective, is irrelevant. But that doesn't mean that it can't be a decent time waster to discuss a player's HoF merits.
I've had similar conversations regarding the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Talk about a messed up institution -- Bon Jovi and Journey, who are kind of the rock equivalent of Omar Moreno or Steve Garvey are in, while Kraftwerk and The Fall (to give just two examples of really influential rock bands, the former nominated umpteen times, the latter never) aren't. Of course, music is less finite and self-contained than Major League Baseball, so the whole notion of inducted six or seven acts a year might be good for a TV special, but is ludicrous if you're really trying to tell a story about popular music (which I guess they aren't).
And the parallel to the moral indignation over steroids (which I'm surprisingly old school in my feeling about) and abuse and such with ballplayers certainly carries over to music in the Me Too era. Which gets into the whole "separating the art from the artist" argument, where I tend to fall on the side of "yes, I can separate them" while knowing that there are artists that I can't play on the radio show I do every weekend at a local community station, whether it be because of my discomfort with the artist or the perception it might make listeners uncomfortable.
The Rock & Roll HoF will *never* be complete unless and until they induct Chubby Checker and The Monkees.
Sure, Hank Ballard & The Midnighters created the Twist - by Chubby Checker told us how to do it and got us moving on the dance floor when R&R was falling into a depression (check out the number of teen death songs popular in 1959....).
And The Monkees basically created the modern music video - while having a bunch of chart-topping hits. So they didn't write their own songs.... Did Elvis?
While I don't agree with the end result of ignoring the hall, I agree with most parts of your argument against it. One positive argument about the proceedings (maybe the one that causes me to still care) is that they are a rare actual, tangible display of progress. Yes, it is stupid that obvious HOFers like Tim Raines are made to languish on the ballot for a decade, but at the same time it is very cool to see a bunch of predominantly old, white guys slowly realize they were wrong and change their ways.
For all the handwringing we do about the character clause, we actually DO just care about on-field performance, and to the extent we make exceptions (gambling, PEDs, and absolutely nothing else) we do it based on the belief that off-field actions directly affect on-field performance. That Pete Rose managed his teams worse than he otherwise would, that Shoeless Joe tanked the 1919 Series, that Bonds and Clemens turned baseball into the WWE. Agree with that or not, but that's the rationale.
Schilling WILL get in, probably next year. Dale Murphy, stand-up guy, likely never will.
The knowledge about Vizquel abusing his wife will have no effect on anyone's vote. It will come down to the same old school stats vs sabermetrics arguments we've all been having since Bill James worked at a factory. People might use it to win an argument, but no one will use it for their vote. And the people who bring up Bonds's and Clemens's personal lives? Are people who are squeamish about PEDs but don't want to make that argument directly, probably because they want to elect Pettitte or ARod.
If I were Emperor, I would ban the phrase "character clause" because the arguments are beyond tedious, but no one is actually using character stuff to pick someone. It IS on-field performance, however the voters choose to measure that.
BBWAA voters and fans. You almost never hear "character clause" invoked for anything besides gambling and PEDs. The writers like to moralise and make people beg but they let in players based on accomplishments. Alomar had to wait a year as penance for spitting on an umpire, but he got in. Schilling will get in. The only exceptions are gambling (and even then I think Pete Rose would have gotten in if Giamatti hadn't died) and PEDs (and even then, it's people are mad that Bonds and Clemens set important records. No one cares about Piazza or IRod or Pettitte).
Now that they've finally voted in Derek Jeter, the Hall of Fame is complete and nobody else needs to be added. We have reached the platonic ideal of a Hall of Famer, and all future inductions will seem comical in comparison.
What happened to Ms. Lee in her decline years was a real shame. She never married and had no children, but instead remained very close to her sister. Her sister -- like her father -- was a successful small town lawyer in Monroeville, AL essentially the model for Maycomb, and was very protective of the nearly reclusive author. But upon the death of the sister, another lawyer in town took on a near guardian like responsibility, moved her into a not great nursing facility, began suing people left and right, stopped allowing the publishing of the inexpensive school versions of TKaM and, mysteriously, because Ms. Lee's (almost) sole beneficiary of the literary estate. The publication of Go Set a Watchman was against what Ms. Lee said for years and shouldn't have happenedl.
I have a good friend who re-reads it every year and cites it as the reason he became a lawyer.
Required reading in high school, but unlike many (*cough* James Joyce) was actually beautifully written. Easily the best one-hit wonder in literature.
Love the field station color in your story. Do you really think Neruda in Spanish is significantly better? We have some bilingual Neruda collections, and I don't notice big differences, but my Spanish is merely functional and not very sophisticated.
Yup, get the shot. Got mine on Tuesday and had an achy arm for a day. Still masking up, too!
I cannot tell you how much I enjoy your contributions to the conversations that go on in the comments each day. Thanks for providing your thoughts and for the work you do both in the healthcare arena and as a father. As a type 1 diabetic I also appreciate hearing about your experience with the vaccine as I look forward to getting it one day...though not any time soon with the screw up of the roll out that is going on. I look forward to updates once you get the booster!
Cur further impresses us by knowing how to make a cedilla (ç). (I don't, I just copied and pasted his)
Just to be clear, are you best a being a Dad, or becoming a Dad?
Could it be you didn't notice the effect of vaccine because you were already in the control of Bill Gates?
I just long press the phone keyboard and, for those that have them, brings up all the accented letters ç or ć or č
I'm imagining her at three. "Stop calling me Grogu, Daddy!" A sad day.
Yeah, you *definitely* should not be calling your wife "Grogu".
The way Florida is bumblefucking the vaccines--shit. The vaccines will expire before the rest of us can get it, and we'll have natural immunity before we're vaccinated at the cost of hundreds of thousands of more dead. I'm an RN like you, but I don't do direct care so I'm at the back of the line. Count your blessings in the NICU. There is no plan for distribution yet unless you count the plan to be as inept as possible since the virus is killing off people of color and poor people the most. Thank you Trump, DeSantis, Scott, and Rubio--the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Cheers.
Perhaps not caring about the Hall of Fame is a rash decision for the author of a daily newsletter. Sure, it would be a continuing source of personal aggravation. But it's also no doubt a reliable continuing source of newsletter content.
Eh, no worries I guess. Craig always finds something else to discuss, and be his daily source of personal aggravation. He doesn't need the Hall of Fame for that.
I think that the moral arguments as they relate to the Hall are tiresome AND wholly unnecessary. No one REALLY cares about the "character clause". Schilling will get in next year. Vizquel will still be old school vs SABR stats.
I also think it's a broader social problem generally. Part of the reason we want to punish Bonds/Clemens/Rose/Vizquel/etc by not giving them a bronze plaque that sort of looks like them is we can't PUT THEM IN JAIL, for abuse at least. The rich cheat and get away with it, and it pisses us off and we can't do anything about it. So we mock and shun and think that makes a difference.
As a culture we're so individualistic, especially the Left for some reason, that we can't even CONCEIVE of a real punishment for anyone besides social shunning. How many articles have their been about Trump or Ivanka not being accepted into NYC Society, getting into the right clubs? Will Ivanka be loaned a designer dress for the Met Gala, or will she have to buy it retail like a common peasant? Who cares! Same with the Hall. We have no language to discuss what to do when rich, powerful, people are garbage.
I won't argue with you about the Hall, Craig, but I am having too much of a good time enjoying Joe Posanski's 100 Best Players Not in the Hall of Fame series and therefore want to keep arguing about who belongs and who doesn't. It doesn't matter much, but it's fun. Usually.
And here is a great article from ESPN's Steve Wulf about Clyde Sukeforth, who no one would argue was a great ballplayer, but whose impact on the game was far bigger than you might guess.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/30555113/the-enduring-bond-jackie-robinson-man-guided-majors
Columbo's first name is probably actually Francesco and not Frank. I kind of see him growing up in a proudly Italian home where some relative, if not his parents, insisted that he would have a proper Italian first name. And he probably kept it till he was drafted, and shifted to Frank. But we all know his REAL first name is Lieutenant.
Of course, baseball is often accused of being drunk on its own history, thus alienating fans who just want to watch and not take a test. There should be a balance, but the history is part of the fun for me.
True. What other sport has broadcasters and officials get genuinely upset when kids don't know or care about Mickey Mantle?
IDK. The anti-trust exemption. Jackie Robinson. Curt Flood. Various strikes and labour rulings. Baseball history IS American history in a lot of ways.
But that isn't the history we debate endlessly. It's only actually important.
Garrison Keiller used to have a character named Senator K. Torvaldson. Not a politician; his first name was Senator.
And on this past season of Fargo, there was a main character named Doctor Senator.
Major Major Major
I had a great-grandfather whose first and middle names were General Harrison.
Bill Mazerosky (36 WAR in 17 seasons) is in the HOF, enough said about "The Hall".
But the museum is great and Cooperstown is beautiful when it's not HOF week!
Joe handled the “small hall” issue brilliantly with his Willie Mays HOF post:
https://joeposnanski.substack.com/p/the-willie-mays-hall-of-fame
That was actually in a comment on today’s post from Craig, but it might make a little more sense once you consider the third brother in the family (J. Crew). And if that still doesn’t help, your morning coffee and/or evening champagne might do the trick...
The crazy thing is that there were people who didn't vote for Willie Mays for the Hall. Pretty sure they must have been white supremacists. Which only reinforces the anti-BBWAA argument.
This was an excellent piece!
They could set a limit on how many players are in the Hall of Fame, so that to get Derek Jeter in you'd have to throw some less deserving current HoFer. I have a friend who advocates that idea, though mostly in jest. It would probably actually work for quite a while to cut some of the dead wood, but eventually you'd end up throwing out, say, Mike Schmidt to fit in some guy who was even better in the class of 2120.
Only 95 years. Class of 2120 would have retired by 2115
Or would the be sufficiently dysfunctional?
That's the topic I'm musing on for my eventual Cup of Coffee guest post...
I have no real opinion on the HOF, but Cooperstown is probably my least favorite town in upstate NY. Corning has a better museum (Museum of Glass). Saratoga is more historic (Glens Falls or Bemis Heights really). For things to do, if you rent a sailboat in Rochester for the day, you can make it to Toronto and back on the fourth best Great Lake or take luge lessons in Lake Placid. Cooperstown is basically a gas stop on the way to those places, if you don't go to the HOF.
Arguably the best 2B defender ever. There are worse people.
Completely agree about the Hall of Fame. Here are some words from Bill James in 1994. These don't necessarily reflect his current views because he doesn't tie himself to his old beliefs, but anyway...
"The Hall of Fame selection process was an afterthought to an accident. Cleland had not set out to create a Hall of Fame: he had set out to create a museum, and this had turned into a Hall of Fame...
...For sixty years the Hall of Fame has wandered this way and that, its border becoming more of a splatter than a map. The Hall teases its suitors with inconsistent favors and uncertain standards: yesterday I did, today I won't; I did for him, I won't for you.
The fundamental questions of how many players you want to honor and how you identify the best players in baseball history are questions that the Hall of Fame has never faced directly, and probably never will....
....My own opinion is that the people who want to put Joe Jackson in the Hall are baseball's answer to those women who show up at murder trials wanting to marry the cute murderer."
That's all from the book which was called "Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?" because the publisher thought it would sell more that way.
Well, Hall of Fame journalism has always provided a rich seam of amusing nonsense, and I look forward to Craig continuing to ridicule it while pointing out that it doesn't matter anyway.
That title was given to the 2nd edition; the first edition (which I have) was called "The Politics of Glory," a much better and more apt title.
The Baseball Hall of Fame says more about baseball writers than it does about the sport and its history. It’s a members-only club that also unsurprisingly canonizes writers and broadcasters. It’s a fantastic museum to visit for any fan, but not worthy of more gravitas than that. While reading this morning, I realized that I’ve agreed with Craig’s take for a number of years but he articulated it much better.
Sure, but it's fun. The world is terrible, let me argue about something that doesn't matter much.
Spicy Brown, Dijon, and Stadium should be absolute first ballot Hall of Famers. I would vote for Horseradish but I don’t expect the MWAA to get to 75% agreement before its ten years on the ballot run out. And there’s no way I’d ever vote for Yellow - it’s career WARM is way too low, and is way too much of a compiler.
Veteran's committee HAS to induct yellow. It's foundational. Without the work it put in, your spicy browns and your dijons would never have had the opportunities to shine.
Yellow is Harold Baines - useful, been around a long time, fine as far as it goes, but absolutely nothing special.
Like the Cardinals were owned by Chris Archer, The Wizard of Pitching, in his Pirates debut, yellow mustard is owned by the French, my friend. They even claim ownership of it in the very name of the biggest brand.
Nah. Yellow mustard is a totally different thing - comes from a different mustard heritage. It would be like putting cricketeers in the BBHOF. *Brown* mustard is foundational to dijon and spicy brown and honey mustards etc.. Hmm -probably a whole grain brown mustard would be a good veteran's inductee.
Different species too! Brassica alba for yellow mustard vs usually the more pungent B. juncea.
Honey had a great run in the 80s, high peak.
I had no idea COLUMBO had such a nice run.
The stuff on ABC isn't so well regarded, though. As I am one episode from ending the "classic" era, I will soon find out.
Well played
One player whom I often wonder about whether or not he would still be voted into the Hall of Fame by today’s baseball writers is Rod Carew. His family is really interesting, with him being a member of MLB’s 3,000 hit club and a Hall of Famer, his older brother, Jay, founding a modern-day clothing empire, and his younger brother, Rae, reaching the NFL for the Carolina Panthers before being arrested for plotting a murder.
Would today’s old, cranky baseball writers have held Rae’s illegal acts against Rod’s case for the Hall? Additionally, the head fashion designer at Jay’s clothing company took a lot of heat from conservatives in 2011 for painting her son’s toenails pink in an advertisement. You’d have to think that many of today’s troglodyte-level baseball writers, like Rod “Chinese Virus” Beer Temple, would have no problem keeping Carew out of the Hall for that alone.
This is really well done for being so early in the morning. The rollercoaster ride going from “Wow I never knew that!” to “I think this person is insane” to “Ohhhhhhhhh.........” was quite the experience!
In reading the part about the Hall of Fame today, it occurs to me that I cannot think of one guy in the other major sports where people say "Yeah, he's a Hall of Famer based on his accomplishments on the field/court/ice, BUT..."
There's no equivalent of a Barry Bonds, or Roger Clemens, or even Pete Rose; Paul Hornung, to cite a direct comparison, is enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame despite his being suspended for a year for betting on NFL games.
I suppose the BBWAA would point to this fact with pride, proof that baseball is special, but it seems arbitrary to me.
Would OJ Simpson have been included in Canton had the murders happened a decade or so earlier?
Hard to say. He wasn't convicted for the murders, remember; he served time due to a robbery conviction for a crime committed in Las Vegas.
Rhetorically, yes. Practically, no. Baseball almost put Pete in the Hall, he was going to have to jump through a few hoops and then Giamatti died unexpectedly and now he's being kept out because no one wants to lose face. The PED twins will eventually get in. Schilling will get in next year.
Baseball handwrings about morals a lot but it's usually pro forma. And it never works the other way. No one gets in based on being a good guy.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is a place every baseball fan should visit. The emphasis of the building is on the latter with the former being an end of tour brief stop in the most dull part of the exhibit.
I treat the plaque room, and membership in it, as a sorta tiered place. For players who were stars when I was young, it is a little bit of nostalgia towards my time of hero worship long since gone. Remembering how 10 year old me felt about Reggie hitting 3 homers or seeing Tom Terrific's drop and drive or Brock's daring on the base paths. Childhood's stars are something special.
For players who were stars when I was an adult, it is pretty dull. I've learned that players are people with, far too often, feet of clay just like the rest of us and no longer come even close to worshiping them for their exploits. I also have formed my own ability to ascertain value without as much reliance on outside voices. I don't want or need the BBWAA or Vets' Comm to tell me about Puckett vs. Mattingly or Morris vs. Steib. My opinion on Barry Bonds or Harold Baines won't budge an inch because of any discussion around Lake Glimmerglass.
But for players who played long before I was alive, induction and the debates around it are a great way to organize history. I would know nothing about Jack Glasscock but for the discussion about whether he should be included. My knowledge of the ABCs - Anson, Brouthers, Connor - is because they were selected. And that is true of players of much more recent vintage too like Robin Roberts or Richie Ashburn.
What I guess I'm saying is that I don't follow the BBWAA choices at all or the modern era VCs either. But I do continue to use the induction debates and history to help guide my study of those from prior years. So (a) the Museum is - by far - the best part of the NBHoFaM and (b) HoF part is still interesting to me as a way to organize my thinking about older generations.
From a pure "performance enhancing" standpoint, why are PEDs bad and LASIK acceptable? What about Tommy John surgery? I think there is a good case to be made that if you can't make it to the Hall with the body parts God gave you, in their original locations, then you don't belong in the HOF at all.
The argument is LASIK (or glasses) is something a normal person takes to bing themselves up to a normal level. If you could get LASIK to get 20/5 vision, people would have a problem with it.
If you eliminated anyone who's ever had a medical procedure, the Hall would b empty and I'm not exaggerating in the slightest.
One thing I should delve into -- did Hall of Fames exist before Baseball's Hall? Had the concept been around for a while?
Anyway, Craig's comments are pretty consistent with my view of the HoF, and I've felt that way for a number of years. A Hall of Fame is inherently a self-defining institution, and that definition usually changes over time to the point where the honor, from an outsider's perspective, is irrelevant. But that doesn't mean that it can't be a decent time waster to discuss a player's HoF merits.
I've had similar conversations regarding the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Talk about a messed up institution -- Bon Jovi and Journey, who are kind of the rock equivalent of Omar Moreno or Steve Garvey are in, while Kraftwerk and The Fall (to give just two examples of really influential rock bands, the former nominated umpteen times, the latter never) aren't. Of course, music is less finite and self-contained than Major League Baseball, so the whole notion of inducted six or seven acts a year might be good for a TV special, but is ludicrous if you're really trying to tell a story about popular music (which I guess they aren't).
And the parallel to the moral indignation over steroids (which I'm surprisingly old school in my feeling about) and abuse and such with ballplayers certainly carries over to music in the Me Too era. Which gets into the whole "separating the art from the artist" argument, where I tend to fall on the side of "yes, I can separate them" while knowing that there are artists that I can't play on the radio show I do every weekend at a local community station, whether it be because of my discomfort with the artist or the perception it might make listeners uncomfortable.
The Rock & Roll HoF will *never* be complete unless and until they induct Chubby Checker and The Monkees.
Sure, Hank Ballard & The Midnighters created the Twist - by Chubby Checker told us how to do it and got us moving on the dance floor when R&R was falling into a depression (check out the number of teen death songs popular in 1959....).
And The Monkees basically created the modern music video - while having a bunch of chart-topping hits. So they didn't write their own songs.... Did Elvis?
While I don't agree with the end result of ignoring the hall, I agree with most parts of your argument against it. One positive argument about the proceedings (maybe the one that causes me to still care) is that they are a rare actual, tangible display of progress. Yes, it is stupid that obvious HOFers like Tim Raines are made to languish on the ballot for a decade, but at the same time it is very cool to see a bunch of predominantly old, white guys slowly realize they were wrong and change their ways.
For all the handwringing we do about the character clause, we actually DO just care about on-field performance, and to the extent we make exceptions (gambling, PEDs, and absolutely nothing else) we do it based on the belief that off-field actions directly affect on-field performance. That Pete Rose managed his teams worse than he otherwise would, that Shoeless Joe tanked the 1919 Series, that Bonds and Clemens turned baseball into the WWE. Agree with that or not, but that's the rationale.
Schilling WILL get in, probably next year. Dale Murphy, stand-up guy, likely never will.
The knowledge about Vizquel abusing his wife will have no effect on anyone's vote. It will come down to the same old school stats vs sabermetrics arguments we've all been having since Bill James worked at a factory. People might use it to win an argument, but no one will use it for their vote. And the people who bring up Bonds's and Clemens's personal lives? Are people who are squeamish about PEDs but don't want to make that argument directly, probably because they want to elect Pettitte or ARod.
If I were Emperor, I would ban the phrase "character clause" because the arguments are beyond tedious, but no one is actually using character stuff to pick someone. It IS on-field performance, however the voters choose to measure that.
Who's we?
BBWAA voters and fans. You almost never hear "character clause" invoked for anything besides gambling and PEDs. The writers like to moralise and make people beg but they let in players based on accomplishments. Alomar had to wait a year as penance for spitting on an umpire, but he got in. Schilling will get in. The only exceptions are gambling (and even then I think Pete Rose would have gotten in if Giamatti hadn't died) and PEDs (and even then, it's people are mad that Bonds and Clemens set important records. No one cares about Piazza or IRod or Pettitte).
There are all manner of awful people in the Hall.
Now that they've finally voted in Derek Jeter, the Hall of Fame is complete and nobody else needs to be added. We have reached the platonic ideal of a Hall of Famer, and all future inductions will seem comical in comparison.
I take it you aren't a Marlins fan.