Hall of Hypocrisy
If there’s one thing that will consistently inspire a spirited debate amongst baseball fans come November, it’s the day that the BBWA releases the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot. Once upon a time, the arguments centered around whether to have a “big” or “small” hall, or whether or not only the elite of the elite throughout baseball would reach immortality in Cooperstown. In recent years, analytics and advanced metrics have only clouded that debate, with statisticians taking up the cases for the likes of Tim Raines, Edgar Martinez, and Larry Walker on their way to indication. While that angle of hall voting will never go away, players now find themselves on the outside looking in because of the “character clause” of the ballot, which to be honest, is a load of crap.
Let’s start with the curious case of Curt Schilling as it pertains to the character clause. Well, the case isn’t that curious at all, it’s almost entirely black and white. On the field, Curt is a no doubt hall of famer, maybe even a first-ballot talent. Whether your on the side of the “old school” or “new school” in the stats debate, Schilling’s on-field achievements speak for themselves, as his 79.5 WAR ranks 65th all-time, and his WAR for Pitchers of 80.5 is 26th, which means sabermetrics squarely places Schilling amongst the best to play the game. But, if traditional statistics are more your cup of tea, Schilling’s 216 wins are 86th in baseball history, which is admittedly good not great, but when bolstered by a career 3.46 ERA pitching in baseball’s predominant offensive era, as well as 3116 strikeouts (15th all-time) and the eighth-best strikeout to walk ratio ever, it’s clear Schilling is deserving of a sculpted plaque of his own. And that’s BEFORE we dig into the postseason, where Schilling has three World Series Rings, a World Series and NLCS MVP to his name, and one historic bloody sock along with a dominating 11–2 record and 2.23 ERA across nineteen postseason starts. Hell, the guy won a World Series game at forty!
At this point, you’re probably wondering why Schilling is in his ninth year on the ballot, still waiting to get the elusive phone call that every player dreams of on Election Day. And it’s simple: it’s the “character clause” of the BBWA ballot, which cites a player’s character as criteria for being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Let me make two things abundantly clear; the first of which is I think this clause is a sham because, at the end of the day, the Hall of Fame is recognizing the best players to ever play in the MLB based on their on-field achievements, not what they or do say off of it. To prevent a player from taking their rightful spot in the Hall of Fame based on actions, opinions, or statements that have nothing to do with the game of baseball is unfair; hell, if we held politicians to a similar standard, the swamp truly would be drained in Washington. Here’s the second point I want to make clear; I 100% disagree with almost everything Curt Schilling stands for politically. Many of his comments post-retirement have been offensive to various groups of individuals, and the fact that in jest he made a joke about lynching a reporter is downright frightening. But these comments have absolutely nothing to do with what he achieved as a baseball player, and as a result, should have no impact on whether or not he gets into the Hall of Fame. I know it may be difficult for many writers to separate Curt Schilling the man from the player when casting their ballots each year, but there’s no way you can tell me that based on how he played the game itself, Schilling isn’t deserving of a vote. And for anyone who thinks that “character” should be a part of induction criteria, I ask you to
respectfully take a step back and recognize the hypocrisy of the clause, to begin with, given that one of the Hall of Fame’s first inductees in its initial five-man class was Ty Cobb, a known racist.
Elsewhere on the ballot, the “character clause” is at play on a totally different level, which is whether or not players accused or busted for using performance-enhancing drugs should be in the Hall of Fame. Looks, PEDs are objectively bad for the game; we know this. Cheating is bad! It’s one of the first things we learn as children. For the players my generation grew up watching, the PED of choice was various anabolic steroids, allowing players to bulk up like never before as baseball entered into a wave of unprecedented offensive numbers, and record-setting home run tallies. To illustrate this, in the first hundred or so years the game was played, the only two players through 1998 to hit sixty or more home runs in a season was Babe Ruth in 1927, and Roger Maris in 1961. From 1998- 2001, there were six sixty home run seasons in baseball, including a record-setting 73 from Barry Bonds in 2001. Hell, from 1998–2002, Sammy Sosa AVERAGED 58 home runs a season over five years.
Steroids without question changed the game of baseball forever, causing fans to flock to the stadiums to see the great home run races, but also causing the league itself to look in the mirror and recognize that there was a need for drug testing throughout the league to curb cheating. But here’s the catch-22; through 2003, when the likes of Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa were rewriting the record book, steroids were not explicitly banned from the game of baseball. So even though all these players were working outside the system to improve their game through substances, nothing they did was illegal at the time. This leads me to what will no doubt be a controversial thought, but I don’t think you can punish players who technically did not violate any rules at the time. Sure, what they did may have been immoral, but they did what any successful person would do, which is to use all the resources at their disposal to put themselves in the best position to come out on top. And is this that much different than the rampant amphetamine use throughout baseball in the 60s and 70s? In a roundabout way, I think that era of PED use was even worse because that allowed you to lock in at the plate like never before, while steroids certainly made your muscles bigger, but didn’t do a thing to help your hand-eye coordination. All in all, the fact is, the ultimate goal of the Hall of Fame is to preserve the game’s history, and you cannot tell the story of baseball without Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, seven-time MVP, and Cy Young Award winners respectively.
In case it was unclear after reading the previous paragraph, I am a pro letting PED users into the Hall of Fame, provided they never failed a drug test. That means no Manny Ramirez, no Alex Rodriguez, and eventually, no Robinson Cano on my ballots, as they all took a banned substance that violated the rules of the game. But for the accused, who never explicitly failed a drug test, or never violated the rules? Let them into the Hall. Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, Sheffield, let them all in. Sheffield and Sosa even take the character clause a step further, as their support on the ballot pales in comparison to Bonds and Clemens, who granted are inner-circle Hall of Famers, but all have numbers of no-doubt enshrines, presenting yet another double standard.
Hall of Fame voting will never be perfect as long as the BBWA is in charge of voting, and part of that is the beauty of the voter base, which is comprised of writers old and young all across the nation. No matter what, there will always be fans disappointed that their favorite players didn’t get the checkmark on a writer’s ballot. All I ask is that they try and focus on what each player achieved during their careers, not how they got there, or what they have done in retirement.
