Cooperstown: Museum, or Shrine?

Hmm. Well, I can see a difference between Rose and some others. It’s not that Pete Rose was a worse person than others who have made it into the Hall, it’s that he was caught gambling on MLB games. When it comes to doing steroids, greenies, using spitballs, sliding in spikes-up, and so forth — those are all morally dubious practices, and often downright cheating, but they are at least attempts to gain a competitive advantage. By doing those things, you’re trying harder to win games, which at its essence is what you’re supposed to do as a ballplayer.

When it comes to gambling, as Rose did, or throwing games in order to win bets, as the Black Sox did, it strikes at the very foundation of the sport. Your motivation switches from competing to win a ballgame and instead towards making money by gambling on it. Given that, I can see why gambling brings the proverbial “death penalty” for any MLB player.

I understand that Rose says he never bet against his own team or tried to throw games, but the problem is that once he’s made those bets, it’s impossible to know if he’s really doing his job as a player or manager. Was the punishment harsh? Yes, but I can see the reasoning behind doling out harsher punishments for that kind of behavior.

I’ve lately been pondering an entirely different kind of HOF question: given that HOF induction weekend is essentially the institution’s Christmas season, what are the financial repercussions going to be of a generation in which they might go years without any inductions?

I suspect that if it gets to this point, the HOF may well change the rules and start letting in some of the ’roiders. Ultimately, the BBWAA gets to vote in players as a privilege, not as a right. If the HOF wants to take away that privilege, they can.

Personal feelings towards contemporaries plays a big role, and it’s always been that way. We’ve almost forgotten now, especially now that he’s been dead nearly a decade, but Ted Williams was loathed by his contemporaries in the local media that covered the Red Sox. Williams and the beat writers had just as antagonistic a relationship as BLB did with everyone at the Chron and the Merc who thought Bonds treated them like shit.

I am very much in this camp. For better or for worse, the years of 1994-2003 are a very interesting part of baseball history. Sometimes wonderful, sometimes intensely frustrating. But if the cloud of steroids clouds the history of every major leaguer during that era, we run the risk of eradicating it entirely from the closest thing baseball has to a museum. If the Hall has first crack at gathering artifacts and defining the legacy of every member of major league baseball, then I feel they have a certain duty to be objective in their judgment.

To completely reject an era of players on the tenuous assertion of competitive imbalance feels like it would be a greater crime than anything that the players did in a time when game itself did not do an adequate job with enforcement. If anyone from this era should be blacklisted, it should be Bud Selig.

I would like for the BBWAA to back off of their personal agendas and frankly arrogant moralizing and give serious consideration to every candidate; that is their job as trusted voters in this process. If they are so insistent on the pageantry involved in voting, then let nobody from this era go in on the first ballot. Fine. Whatever. That’s your tradition. It can be a symbolic gesture that shows your disapproval of what happened, but for the love of Pete let us move on with our lives and give some of these players their due. And then we can build a little corner in the Hall of Fame, next to Bonds and Clemens and apparently Jeff Bagwell that in the 1990s there was this thing that happened, and that we may never really know the full impact it had on the game. But steroids or not, there were a lot of really great baseball players who shouldn’t be written out of the tapestry of the game.

+1

:) thank you. i try!

To my surprise, I’ve noticed that I care less and less about whether Bonds makes it into the Hall of Fame.

Part of that may be that I fear he won’t be voted in during my lifetime, and perhaps subconsciously I’m preparing myself for that disappointment ahead of time.

More than Bonds just not being voted in, I think the thing I’m really not looking forward to is the annual “debate” over whether Bonds and others like him should be inducted. That debate, I fear, will be exceedingly ugly, with oceans of invective, hysteria, and self-righteous moral grandstanding—on both sides.

Whatever the outcome of Bonds’ (initial) HOF candidacy…

• fully in
• fully out
• in, but with asterisks and explanations
• not fully “in”, but sort of “in”; meaning, “in” some special wing off to the side for miscreants and other moral lepers.

…I expect that whatever is decided will stick in the craw of a great many—myself very likely included.

This is why I so appreciate the block-quoted point above. For me, it’s the centerpiece and the real takeaway of your post. The Hall of Fame may have once been a shrine. It once was special. I think it probably still is to a large extent. But what I see coming, I believe will change that—at least for me I believe it will. And as that time approaches, I think I’ve begun to realize that the Hall in Cooperstown really doesn’t matter as much to me as my own memories, and the players (Barry Bonds included) and events associated with those memories, that I’ve already enshrined in my own Hall of Fame.

Yes, this article really lays out the problem with keeping steroid players out of the Hall. On its face, it sounds like a great moral stand, but when you think a little deeper, it falls apart.

There’s a great passage in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (hey, don’t laugh, it’s a brilliant comic), where Commissioner Gordon uses a war metaphor to explain his reasoning for supporting Batman, despite the fact that he is basically an urban vigilante:

“It bounced back and forth in my head until I realized I couldn’t judge it. It was too big. He was too big.”

That’s the steroid era in a nutshell. It was cheating, but there was no actual MLB rule against it. It’s illegal, but being a criminal has never been a bar to HOF entry before. It messed with the historical statistics, but the statistics are already skewed from a lot of eras because of changes in rules, equipment, ballparks, etc., anyway, so why is this so different? It probably helped players who used steroids put up better stats and have more impressive careers, but you don’t know exactly how much it helped, or how many players used (if a ’roided up batter hits a homer off a ’roided up pitcher, was it really a fraudulent homer?) The issue is too big.

At some point, you have to just throw up your hands and judge players from this era against their contemporaries. The best ones get in, no matter whether or not they took steroids. I’d also say it’s reasonable for voters to exact a small penalty against players who used, so that if you’re a borderline candidate then steroids keep you out. (I’d also say it’s reasonable to not apply a penalty — there’s room for argument here.) I don’t think it’s reasonable to keep the players who were clearly the best of their generation (like Bonds and Clemens) out of the Hall just because they used steroids. That sets the bar so high that you have to keep out virtually everyone from that time period, and that’s no longer reasonable — you’re basically saying that steroid use really is that much worse than every other illegal, immoral, rule-bending act that ballplayers have been doing since the game began. I wouldn’t want to make that call.

Cooperstown itself is based on the old false premise that Abner Doubleday “invented” baseball. He didn’t, nor was it first played a Cooperstown or any of the other fabled untruths. The game of ‘base" was already known in the 1700s in England, got developed further in the Hudson Valley and New York City and Northeast New Jersey, and had it’s variations codified by Alexander Cartwright so an amateur league could form. Cartwright didn’t invent Base either.

I think it’s lind of like the Vietnam Memorial. On the whole, it’s breathtaking, but can get boring if you try to read each individual name.

Solid argument.

Barry Bonds is as important a baseball player as we’ve had in the last 30 years. And you don’t get to be important by being bad at baseball.

In the end, nobody cares about the Marvin Benards, or even the Andersons. The iconic hitters of the era were Canseco, Sosa, Mcguire, and Bonds… and Bonds stands head and shoulders above the rest of them. To deny that he belongs in the Hall of Fame is is to deny history.

They might be pricks, but so was Ty Cobb. Bonds and Clemens go in.