Weighing Morality in the Hall of Fame

Should it just be a reflection of on-field talent or something more sacred?

A few housekeeping notes:

— For those of you in the Charlotte area, tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern, I’ll be at Park Road Books for a conversation with Danny Funt, author of the incredible (and deeply disturbing) new book, Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. I came to the book with a healthy disdain for sports gambling and a profound sense of what sports have lost by getting into bed with the gambling industry. If you happen to be at my house on a sports-watching weekend, you will hear me — roughly 25 times a game — shout at the television: “Yes, LeBron James and Kevin Hart and Jon Hamm and Jamie Foxx, please give me more ways to lose my money!”

Turns out, I didn’t know even a tiny fraction of how insidious the gambling world is and how corrupt the leagues were when they dove into that swimming pool filled with money.

It will be one heck of a conversation. And come out to see if I dare tell Danny my favorite joke when I was, like, 7 years old. See, Danny is the grandson of Allen Funt, creator and host of Candid Camera, and the joke was: “If Ella Fitzgerald married Allen Funt, she’d be Ella Funt.”

Now that I’m thinking more about it, no, I probably won’t tell that joke.

— We are now less than four months away from the release of BIG FAN, the book Mike Schur and I wrote about what it means to be a fan, and that means we are finalizing our book tour. We’ll get you all the details as they become clear, but for now let me just say I hope to see you on the road. You can preorder BIG FAN more or less everywhere, but if you order it from Joseph Beth Booksellers, you will not only get a copy signed by both of us, you might get one of our special edition signed copies with bonus stuff, fun quotes, and possibly a signature from a special guest star like Amy Poehler or Ted Danson or my dog Westley.

— Mike and I have started our Baseball Card Opening Extravaganza on the PosCast to raise money for the amazing folks at Team Gleason. As most of you know, if you donate to Team Gleason, you’ll have a chance to win some (lots) of the cards that we open on the podcast. In the past week, we’ve had a couple of very cool donors who are sending us AMAZING cards. Like, truly amazing. You’ll want in on this. And I can’t even begin to tell you the amazing work that Team Gleason does to, as their mission statement goes, “empower people with ALS to live purposeful lives.”

Here’s Steve Gleason himself talking a bit about it:

If you can afford to donate even a small amount, it would be so meaningful.

You’ve surely heard the news by now that Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones were elected to the Hall of Fame yesterday. There’s plenty to say about both players on the field, and we’ll be doing plenty of that as we get closer to induction day, July 26.

Today, though, let’s finish off our Hall of Fame trilogy — Monday, we wrote about the meaning of the Hall; Tuesday, we wrote about how the Hall of Fame really works — by talking a bit about the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and the Hall of Fame that they (we?) would have built.

Many people have written in to say how shocked they are that only 41% of Hall of Famers (144 of 354) were voted in by the writers. That actually is quite shocking. Over at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, every Hall of Famer — with the exception of the 15 inducted by a special committee to celebrate pro football’s centennial — was elected by the Selection Committee, which is overwhelmingly made up of media.

The Baseball Hall of Fame takes a much, much larger role in determining who gets in and who is left out. I’m not saying this is good or bad. It’s their place.

What I am saying is that most people don’t realize this. The Hall has always given off laissez-faire vibes, as if they’re just stewards of the place. And the writers have been front and center in Hall of Fame voting since the start. So the feeling has been: “Oh, the writers singularly determine who gets into the Hall of Fame.”

They really don’t, though.

*I’m going to use “they” when talking about the writers, even though I am one of them, simply because “we” sounds awkward and makes it sound like I have a bigger role in all of this than I do.

This comes up today because the Beltrán and Jones elections are both at least moderately controversial votes. Beltrán was not only involved in the biggest baseball scandal of the last 20 years — the Astros sign-stealing mess — he was a ringleader. He was fired from his job as Mets manager before he ever managed a game because of it. People argue about just how bad the scandal was, but plenty of people believe it threatened the legitimacy of baseball much more than the wide use of performance-enhancing drugs

Beltrán was elected.

As for Andruw Jones, he was arrested for domestic abuse in 2012 — specifically for allegedly choking and dragging his wife through their garage — which led to her filing for divorce one week later, which led to an ugly and public custody battle. People will disagree about how much an off-field incident like this should impact a player’s Baseball Hall of Fame candidacy, but certainly, off-field incidents have impacted other cases.

Jones was elected.

I voted for both players, so I am certainly not making a judgment. My point is that I believe this is the baseball writers’ will. I believe that the writers — well, the sizable majority of writers — given enough time and freedom, would shape the Baseball Hall of Fame to be about baseball. They would like the Baseball Hall of Fame to feature all the greatest players, no matter their flaws, no matter their transgressions, no matter their crimes or misdemeanors.

I think the overriding feeling is: Baseball has featured all sorts of cheaters and liars and violent men, just like it has featured all sorts of heroes and pioneers and profoundly decent men. Baseball is a big, complicated, messy, and beautiful world. I think most baseball writers believe the Hall of Fame plaque room should reflect that world. It should feature the greatest of them all.

Maybe you know the Dan Bern song?

“I went to the museum to see Pete Rose
They said he’s at the museum
Across the street
I went to the museum to see Barry Bonds
They said he’s at the museum
Across the street

The writers, en masse, have shown again and again that they don’t want the greatest players to be in the museum across the street.

But the Hall of Fame DOES want that. The Hall of Fame wants the plaque room to reflect the romance and sanctity of baseball. The plaque room obviously doesn’t really reflect that — you know all the rogues, cheats and troubled people in the Hall of Fame — but they would like for people to be able to walk into the plaque room, suspend their disbelief, and feel like they’re in someplace holy.

Barry Bonds? Pete Rose? Roger Clemens? Shoeless Joe Jackson? Curt Schilling? It’s harder to suspend your disbelief when their plaques are on the wall.

Now, here’s where you say: “Wait a minute, the writers are the ones who didn’t vote in Bonds and Clemens.” And that’s true.

But …

Well, let’s take a quick look back at the Bonds Hall of Fame journey.

He first came on the ballot in 2013. That was a crazy year, so many fantastic players came on the ballot for the first time — Bonds, Clemens, Mike Piazza, Craig Biggio, Kenny Lofton, Sammy Sosa — that nobody knew what to do. The writers were frozen. They didn’t elect anybody. Bonds got 36% of the vote, which was not a bad first showing, given that the PED talk was white-hot then.

A year later, in 2014, Bonds actually went down slightly in support to 35%. This was a blip. Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas all came on the ballot that year (as did Mike Mussina and Jeff Kent), so a couple fewer people voted for Bonds.

But something else happened in 2014, something that was overlooked at the time: Craig Biggio and Mike Piazza both gained significant support. Biggio fell just two votes shy of election. Piazza jumped up to 62%.

It was clear that both would be elected sooner rather than later.

Neither of them had ever tested positive for PEDs. Neither of them appeared in the Mitchell Report. Both of them had denied ever using. But both of them, fair or unfair, had PED suspicions swirling around them. The writers had made it clear that they were going to look the other way.

And that July, the Hall of Fame changed its rules so that players could only remain on the ballot for 10 years rather than the 15 years it had been for many decades. The Hall of Fame insisted this new rule change was NOT intended to hurt Bonds’ chances of election, but instead to clean up the process.

Wrecking Bonds’ Hall of Fame chances was apparently just a happy side effect.

But cutting the ballot time was not enough. In 2017, support for Bonds increased significantly — he drew 54% of the vote. With five years to go on the ballot (according to the new rules), Bonds’ chances to make the Hall of Fame suddenly seemed very real. Something had to be done.

And that November, Joe Morgan — in his acting role as vice chairman of the Hall of Fame board — sent out a letter to every single BBWAA voter PLEADING with them to not vote for steroid users. The P.S. on that letter tells the tale:

“P.S. Families come to Cooperstown because they know it’s special. To parents, it’s a place they can take their kids for an uplifting, feel-good visit. It’s a place where kids can see what true greatness is all about. It’s a place where youngsters can dream that one day they too might get in. This place is special. I hope it stays that way.”

It’s not the most discreet case I’ve ever heard.

I don’t know the true impact of that letter. What we do know is that Bonds’ momentum stalled. He gained only 3% in 2018, 3% more in 2019, and barely 1% in both 2020 and 2021. Maybe that happens anyway. Maybe there was never going to be 75% support for Bonds.

Or maybe the Hall of Fame put its thumb on the scale.

Either way, Bonds got 66% of the vote in his 10th and final year on the ballot, he’s received no support at all from the Hall of Fame committees, and now he’s been removed from consideration for at least the next few years. There does not seem any path for Bonds to be elected to the Hall.

I feel quite sure that if the Hall had not changed the rules, the writers would have voted in Bonds and Clemens.

Again, I’m not discussing right or wrong; that’s for you in the comments. I’m just telling you that, after so many years of this, I feel confident in saying that the vast majority of writers don’t want the Hall of Fame plaque room to be the morality play that it has become. They want it to be a hall of the best baseball players who ever lived.