This year’s HOF ballot is impossibly crowded.
Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina, Curt Schilling, and Roy Halladay are all eminently qualified starting pitchers. Mariano Rivera is as sure-fire as a closer can be.
Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez, and Gary Sheffield hit more than 1800 homer between them. Todd Helton and Edgar Martinez were terrific hitters. Larry Walker, Scott Rolen, and Andruw Jones were nearly as terrific at the plate, and a lot better on defense and the bases.
That’s thirteen players.
Andy Pettitte and Roy Oswalt aren’t staggeringly qualified, but their careers were noteworthy enough to deserve a conversation. The same holds for Billy Wagner.
Sixteen. We’re at sixteen.
Sammy Sosa hit 609 homers…that’s more dingers than Manny or Sheffield. Jeff Kent hit more homeruns than Todd Helton, and he did it as a second baseman in San Francisco, not a first baseman in Colorado.Adjust for park differences, and Lance Berkman doesn’t look all that different than Helton. And Fred McGriff hit a lot more homeruns than Berkman and Helton, while playing in a less dinger-friendly era.
Twenty players.
Omar Vizquel collected more hits than anyone on the ballot except Barry Bonds, and he has more Gold Gloves (11) than anyone else on the ballot, though Andruw Jones (10) is close. Miguel Tejada’s most similar batters, according to Baseball-Reference, are Robinson Cano, Ryne Sandberg, Ted Simmons, Alan Trammell, Carlton Fisk, Yogi Berra, Joe Torre, Jeff Kent, Scott Rolen, and Joe Cronin. That’s a pretty good list of comparables for someone who might not get a single vote.
That’s twenty-two players. Not all of them are sure-fire Hall-of-Famers, but all of them deserve to have their careers considered for baseball’s highest honor. That won’t happen: many of them will drop off the ballot, joining the likes of Kenny Lofton and Jim Edmonds and Jorge Posada and Johan Santana and Nomar Garciaparra as recent drop-offs from the BBWAA ballot. The rest will straggle on for a couple years, but the only candidates who are likely to get elected in coming years are the no-brainer candidates like Rivera and Jeter and Beltre and Ichiro, and the occasionally player (Edgar Martinez) who generates, through luck or good manners, enough support to cross the 75% threshold.
The 2019 HOF Ballot is loaded with more talented players than the structure allows voters to consider, and it forces a very obvious question: who is responsible for this mess? Who is the architect of this disaster?
I have an answer. But before we can get to that answer, I need to lay out a few pet theories.
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Pet Theory #1 is that the ramifications of our actions have a longer life than we typically imagine, and a broader reach of consequences than we can guess at.
The consequence of this is that we have a hard time seeing the true causes for the world we exist in. We will ascribe cause to events and decisions that are close to the outcome, either in time or subject, but we have trouble seeing how actions made further back in time, or actions that seem tangential to the subject, can influence our current moment.
That’s Pet Theory #1. You can take it or leave it.
* * *
Pet Theory #2 is about interpersonal relationships. It is something I’ve been thinking about and reflecting on for a good portion of my adult life, one of those weird notions that has helped me find some order in this complicated thing we call our lives.
The theory is this: all interpersonal conflict is a result of one person changing an established pattern.
We are creatures of habit. In our lives we create and maintain thousands of small rituals and patterns that we do not recognize, but that provide order and structure for the bonds that connect us. We do this in big and little ways, and frequently we don’t realize we’re doing it. My partner brings me coffee most mornings; I do dishes in the evening. We haven’t even said those are the rules of our lives together. We haven’t written them down. it’s just what has happened.
Conflict arises when patterns like that - patterns that govern our relationships - are broken.
One way to illustrate this is to imagine a husband who buys his wife jewelry on their anniversary. I apologize for the predictably gendered role of this story, but I want to get this out fast, and it’s easier to write it in a conventional way.
So our husband gives his wife a necklace on their first anniversary. He gives her earrings in Year Two. Year Three is a bracelet. Year Four: another necklace. Year Five: more earrings.
Then, in Year Six, he gives her a sweater. What happens?
She will notice the change, and she will react to the change. She might like sweaters, and she might not care anything about jewelry, but she will notice the change in pattern, and she will react, in some way, to that change.
She might not get upset, of course. But let us imagine, for the sake of our story, that she does get upset. Let’s imagine that she gets ticked off. Who is in the wrong?
No one is in the wrong, of course. The husband isn’t wrong for not buying her jewelry. A sweater is a perfectly acceptable gift, and the rules for gift-giving on their anniversary weren’t written in stone. And the wife isn’t wrong for coming to expect the same gift that she had received every anniversary of their marriage: she expected what he set her up to expect, and was disappointed. No one has acted in malice. No one has acted badly.
But one party has caused the conflict: the husband. He is the person who has changed a pattern. That he didn’t recognize the pattern as existing doesn’t fully get him off the hook. He changed things, and there was an onus on him to recognize that a change had occurred, and acknowledge that change directly.
One thing I’ve come to understand, in seeing this pattern happen time and time again, is that it is very easy to figure out who has broken the pattern in an interpersonal conflict, and who has had the pattern or routine broken on them.
- The person who has had a pattern broken is the person who is showing an extreme emotional response.
- The person who has broken the structuring habits or rituals of a relationship is the person who is utterly confused: s/he is person who has no idea what happened to set the other person off.
If you’ve even been in a relationship and you’re even slightly empathetic, you know this sensation. It’s any of the small moments when your partner is suddenly standoffish, or acting differently, for reasons that you cannot understand. You ask ‘what’s wrong?’ and they don’t really say anything. They cross their arms and tell you it’s nothing. They shrug.
Why are they shrugging? Why don’t they say anything?
Because they’re just as unaware of the way that we create patterns as you are. All of us are oblivious to patterns, because that is the point of patterns: patterns exist to allow us to think about other things.
If you think through any interpersonal conflict you’ve had with a friend or partner, and if you think through that conflict deep enough, you can actually figure this out. Work it backwards: ask yourself who brought the emotional energy into the conflict, and who was defensive, or blindsided. The person bringing the heat was the person who experienced a pattern being broken. The other person…the calmer person or the startled person…was the one who actually started it.
And you can fix interpersonal conflicts, of course. Fixing them requires a) identifying the relationship pattern that has been broken, and b) agreeing to either maintain the earlier pattern, or recognize the change and adapt to a new one.
* * *
Which brings us back to baseball.
Let’s work the crowded Hall-of-Fame ballot backwards.
We have dozens of names of baseball players who would have been slam-dunk candidates in previous generations either lingering on the ballot or getting booted. Five hundred homers was a surefire way to get into the Hall-of-Fame, until Mark McGwire showed up. 3000 hits was a slam dunk,until Rafael Palmeiro blew that one. Three MVP’s was a marker of inner-circle talent, and then Barry Bonds doubled that count, and added one more. 300 wins? Not enough, Rocket.
These players have been all been kept out because they took performance-enhancing drugs to help improve their appearance.
Is this an appreciable ‘break’ in the pattern of baseball players?
Of course it’s not. Baseball players have been using any and all avenues to gain a competitive advantage since people started making money playing the game. Pud Galvin drank potions made from dried monkey testicles in the 1890’s. Players during the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s popped amphetamines like they were candy: a writer for Sports illustrated called the 1968 World Series a battle between the pharmacies of Detroit and St. Louis. Players during the 80’s worried about breaking vials of crack cocaine when they slid into bases. And the steroid epidemic didn’t begin with McGwire: pitcher Tom House said that he used ‘steroids they wouldn’t use on horses’ during his playing career, one that started in 1971 and ended in 1979.
The players of the steroid era didn’t break any pattern: they did exactly what baseball players have always done.
And baseball players don’t have any say in the process of electing players to the Hall-of-Fame, at least not in the initial round of voting. That responsibility rests with the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.
So let’s go there. Has the BBWAA changed their pattern?
Certainly, they have.
The voters for the Hall-of-Fame showed no inclination to hold a generation of players accountable for excessively using amphetamines, and they showed no inclination to hold a generation accountable for using cocaine. They showed no moral panic when steroids entered baseball in the 1970’s, and they turned a blind eye to the possibility that any stars from the 1980’s might have been using steroids to enhance performance. It is only with players from the 1990’s that the BBWAA has decided to draw a line in the sand on the issue of performance enhancing drugs.
And they haven’t merely drawn a line. The BBWAA voters…mostly the older ones…have spent the last twenty years grandstanding about the issue of steroid abuse. They have hemmed and hawed about the moral failures of a generation of players, and have shouted enough to make an entire era of baseball seem tainted. They have kept the very best players of a generation out of the Hall-of-Fame, and have so blurred the line so much that the casual baseball fan can no longer see the difference between, say, the obsessive pursuit of chemical enhancement chased by Barry Bonds, and the lesser lapses in judgement credited to Roger Clemens. Everyone has been tarred with the same brush.
It’s gross and immature and small. The legacy of two decades of baseball, and the careers of some of the finest players in history, have been forever tarnished by a generation of sportswriters who decided to get on a moral high horse to gripe about a problem that they had known about and ignored for the better parts of fifty years.
The sportswriters changed. The BBWAA changed.
But they brought, in that change, a high level of emotional intensity. They were the scorned wives of our story, unhappy about their sweater. They were acting with passion, and anger…except the reality is they were reacting. All of the articles complaining about the steroid era were articles of reaction. They were a response to a broken pattern.
So what pattern was broken? What caused the change?
I’m going to posit an answer that I haven’t heard anyone ever suggest. I’ll hazard that 95% of you are going to take one look at it and shake your heads and decide that I’ve gone off the rails. That’s fine, of course.
For the rest of you, I want to take a moment to reiterate the two pet theories:
1. The ramifications of our actions extend further than we imagine, and in more dimensions than we recognize.
And
2. All interpersonal conflict occurs when one person changes an established pattern.
* * *
Okay.
The person who broke the Hall-of-Fame ballot was A. Bartlett Giamatti.
Giamatti broke it when he convinced Pete Rose to accept a permanent place on baseball’s ineligible list.
The Baseball Hall of Fame made the break permeant when their board voted to formally commit to a policy that players on the ineligible list couldn’t be considered for the election by the BBWAA.
A. Bartlett Giamatti had no idea that he was breaking a pattern, and his actions weren’t undertaken with any ill intentions towards baseball writers. It is unlikely that Giamatti, dealing with the intense attention and furor over the Pete Rose case, gave more than an iota of thought to how his decision might feel like a slap in the face to the BBWAA. And he didn’t get the chance to recognize it: he died eight days after the decision, felled by a heart attack.
The Hall-of-Fame, in voting to support Giamatti, weren’t acting to cut the legs of the BBWAA out from under them: they voted to support Giamatti’s decision. They wanted to honor his decision, and they imagined that that was the best way to ensure that his decision would be protected. It is doubtful that they gave much thought to what the decision meant to the BBWAA, to how the writers would react.
But a pattern was broken. Until the Pete Rose case, the established pattern was that the writers would choose who deserved enshrinement into the Hall-of-Fame. The established pattern…the pattern that Giamatti inadvertently broke, was that writers were the gatekeepers to baseball immortality.
Giamatti took that from them, and the board of the Hall-of-Fame codified that theft. There would be no trial of Pete Rose by the writers: no earnest editorials about his candidacy, and no vote on the case. The executioner had swung an axe as the jury was sitting down for opening arguments.
Giamatti changed the pattern.
And the writers reacted. Boy, did they react.
Baseball writers were furious that they had been denied The Trial of Pete Rose. They were furious that after sixty years of sound judgement, the powers that had always granted them the sacred trust of deciding what players deserved enshrinement weren’t going to trust them to make a fair decision about Pete Rose. They had made the Hall-of-Fame, after all: they had granted the institution legitimacy and importance, and now they were being told, ‘Thanks for the hard work, but we’ll tackle this one. We’re worried you might screw this one up.’
You can read articles about this. You can put ‘1991 decision to uphold the Rose ban’ into your search engine and find troves of articles about writers threatening to submit blank ballots for the Hall, about protests over the decision, and about write-in efforts to get Rose to be considered.
It is crucial, in understanding what happened, to understand the nature of the violation. The decision to make a decision on Rose ahead of the writers communicated…unintentionally and indirectly…that the writers could not be trusted to uphold a standard of ethics.
And maybe they couldn’t have been trusted. The writers liked Pete Rose. The sportswriters on the BBWAA in 1989 or 1991 had written more collective words praising Pete Rose than they had written about anyone else from his era. He embodied all of the values that they cared about: hustle and grit. Effort. Dog-headedness, and an obsession to play, just as long as he was able to do it. And he embodied something else: in an era where athletes were starting to use ‘professionalism’ as a shield, Rose never seemed hidden. He was exactly who he was, and the writers loved him for it.
But I think the writers wouldn’t have voted for Rose. I think, if he had shown up on the ballot, Rose wouldn’t have come anywhere near 75% in the vote. He certainly would’ve lingered on the ballot for fifteen years, but I don’t think he’d have gotten in. He was a gambler, and everyone knew it. His personal life did not reflect a high moral standard, or a fear of risk: it wasn’t much of a leap to think that he was putting money on baseball games. It wasn’t a far leap to think that he was betting on his team.
It didn’t matter. The writers weren’t (and haven’t been) given the chance to pass judgement on Rose. In the most significant moral debate that most of the BBWAA members had ever encountered, they were forced to watch from the sidelines.
And, from those sidelines, they decided to prove their ethics. Confronted with a fifty-year history of performance-enhancing drugs being swallowed and snorted and syringed in the clubhouses, the writers decided to show just how good they could be at gatekeeping. And they chose, as their targets of condemnation, the lumbering sluggers of the 1990’s and 2000’s. In 1998, as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa made their assault on Roger Maris’ record, AP reporter Steve Wilstein noticed a bottle of androstenedione in McGwire’s locker. The stuff was sold over-the-counter to body builders, and though it had been outlawed by the Olympics and the NFL, it was a legal substance in baseball.
It didn’t matter. The fuse was lit. In a few months the whole thing exploded.
The ramifications of that explosion bring us to 2018, and a Hall-of-Fame ballot that is staggeringly over-crowded with qualified players. The best pitcher in baseball history has been made to wait. So had the best hitter. The impact of those waits is now trickling down to contemporary players: Roy Halladay, the best pitcher of his generation, collected 64.3 WAR over his career. That is enough to put him ahead of his peers, but he trails Clemens (139.6), Mussina (83.0), and Schilling (79.6). Who is a voter supposed to side with?
The BBWAA has lost a good portion of its legitimacy in the process. Once upon a time, the annual Hall-of-Fame ballot was a chance for writers to reflect upon and argue about who belonged in, and who didn’t make the cut. For the better part of the last twenty years, that conversation has been shunted to the side, in favor of a morality play.
To fix this, the BBWAA culled their ranks, striking off inactive writers, and allowing a new generation of writers, many indoctrinated in the language and codes of sabermetrics, to take over. But they’ve taken over a broken system: it is impossible to form a consensus of seventy-five percent when there are twenty-five possible candidates, and ten slots on the ballot.
* * *
You want to know what the solution is?
Of course you do. If you’ve made it this far, you want some kind of conclusion. How do we fix the Hall-of-Fame?
I think there are two steps. First, the BBWAA should lift the cap on votes. Let voters vote for as many players as they want. Or if that’s too dramatic, make everyone who has a vote list ten players: if you don’t pick ten, your ballot is ineligible.
The second thing that should happen is that Pete Rose’s name should be added on the ballot, so that the writers can decide his fate. Giamatti and the Hall-of-Fame made an error in judgement when they took that decision from the writers, and the way to fix that mistake is to give the decision back to the writers. Let them hash it out, and honor the decision they make.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.