Writers Choice: These Stars Need Not Apply

“Who’d want to belong to a club that I was a member of?”— Groucho Marx

At least the voters for the National Baseball Hall of Fame are consistent. They said they weren’t going to let Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens or Sammy Sosa be voted in during their ten years of eligibility. And, by god, they were good on their word.

The three PED-tainted superstars have fallen off the ballot after being ignored for a decade by the voters of the Baseball Writers Association of America. None of them was able to garner the 75 percent of the votes needed to gain admission. (Bonds peaked at 66 percent, Clemens at 65 percent) The Today’s Game ballot in December is a side door for admission; we’ll find out if they’ve made it that way.

There were others in 2021. Six-hundred homer man Alex Rodriguez, suspended for the 2014 season for PED use, received 34.3 percent of the vote in his first year of eligibility. Manny Ramirez finished behind Rodriguez with 28.9 percent of the vote. Ramirez, who tested positive multiple times, has been on the ballot for six years and is going nowhere.

Clemens, the former Toronto Blue Jay, was sanguine. “My family and I put the HOF in the rear view mirror ten years ago. I didn’t play baseball to get into the HOF. I played to make a generational difference in the lives of my family…” Bonds and Sosa said nothing.

Having covered all three during their prime we can attest that they were not always a reporter’s delight. Bonds, in particular, was always nursing grievances from the treatment of his father Bobby Bonds and his own struggles against what he saw as racism. Later he grew surly when pestered about his explosion in size. Clemens was professional but taciturn. Sosa often hid behind his inability to speak English.

So when it came time for the writers to punish them for their (alleged) PED use there was little forgiveness. With none admitting to PED use, the writers decided to punish their silence even as they rewarded David Ortiz, an alleged PED user, with entry into the BBHOF this year. Ortiz, you see, wasn’t full of himself in the BBWAA eyes.

As we noted in July of 2020, the modern sports media may be the most liberal branch of reporting, overflowing with virtue signallers and guys high on their own self importance. They’re so righteous they squeak. “In the U.S. the descent of major sports reporters and their networks to an active arm of the progressive movement is pervasive. There are days where ESPN’s reporting sounds more like a corrective seminar on white entitlement than a news item. Sports, always an escape from reality, has been to turned into a re-education camp for viewers.”

While earlier generations of baseball media were mostly accommodating to the men they covered— underpaid players needed all the good press they could muster—the current media generation took delight in punishing those who betrayed their own Code of baseball.

All-time hits leader Pete Rose was the test case in 1989, a man who flouted the rules posted in every dressing room about betting on MLB. Rose was persona non grata in MLB and, by extension, with MLB writers, who’ve kept him off the ballot since his banishment by Paul Giamatti’s father, then the commissioner of MLB.

This fatwa then extended to the steroid generation— even though there were no rules against the practice of PEDs for much of the era (MLB and MLBPA could never agree on the language governing testing.) Watching Bonds and Sosa explode in size even as they smashed home run records offended the press box. Clemens extending his pitching peak into his late 30s— winning the Cy Young at age 38— also irked the writers.

There are many problems with this sudden desire that inductees be Simon pure. Many Hall members played in the 1960s to 1980s when amphetamines were rampant. (Jim Bouton’s 1969 book Ball Four blew the doors off “greenie” use in MLB.) Yet none of those players assisted by drugs has ever been punished for it.

There are also BBHOF members who cheekily admitted to cheating in their careers. Gaylord Perry was celebrated as a pitcher who used foreign substances on the ball to make it move (His book was called Me And The Spitter). Yankees great lefty Whitey Ford was revealed by Bouton to cut balls with his wedding ring. Never a problem for the BBWAA.

Three-hundred game winner Don Sutton was caught using objects to scuff the ball to make it move differently. But Sutton was well-liked and made it to Cooperstown. BBHOF member Burleigh Grimes was grandfathered in as a user of the spitball. And so it goes.

The other problem with the virtue signallers in the press box is the limit of their wrath. At the peak of the PED age, ‘roiders were everywhere. Second basemen suddenly went from 5 to 15 home runs. Pitchers’ careers were extended into their late 30s. Opposite-field power exploded for skinny guys.

But the writers wish to punish just the famous players who snubbed them or offended them. It’s an unfair standard.

This also brings up another of our hobbyhorses. Why are the people covering the news making news themselves? It might have been understandable to have writers decide who got in when the Hall opened in the 1930s. It was a different time. People had trust in the integrity of the votes.

But this current reductio ad absurdum is corrupt. Why should writers create news and impose their bias on the vote. If MLB wants a body to adjudicate these choices it needs to find non journalists who can reflect MLB’s wishes. The NHL does this. Although the process overflows with bias and pandering the blame at least falls with the NHL, not the people in the fourth estate who need to be seen as neutral.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx