This comes up since a host of guys who admittedly used steroids (or are widely believed to have used steroids) are coming up for Baseball Hall of Fame consideration.
In THIS thread, at least, I’m not interested in debating whether steroid users should or shouldn’t be elected. As it is, voters and fans alike are split in several directions. Some think steroid users are contemptible cheaters and should be kept out of the Hall forever. Some think steroids were just a fact of life in Eighties/Nineties baseball, and that everyone with the right stats should be elected no matter what they injected. Others fall at various points in between. For the sake of THIS argument, that’s all irrelevant.
What I’m reflecting on is the common practice of voters leaving guys off the ballot for a year or two, with the intention of voting for them later.
A lot of voters who are furious at Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds will undoubtedly shun them in their first year(s) of eligibility, but (if they don’t get in on the first ballot anyway) will vote for them later.
I’m asking, does this make ANY sense at all?
Remember this old joke? “Q: What do they call the guy who finishes last in his class at medical school? A: DOCTOR!”
Joe Dimaggio and Harmon Killebrew, among others, needed a few years to get into the Hall of Fame. Hardly anybody remembers that now- all that anyone remembers now is… they’re Hall of Famers.
What kind of “lesson” does anyone think Barry Bonds is going to learn if he has to wait two or three years to get into the Hall of Fame?
It seems like a pointless, stupid gesture to me. I can respect either the “Keep the cheaters out permanently approach” OR the “elect the deserving guys and let history judge” approach.
But if you’re going to vote the cheaters in eventually anyway, why wait? What do you imagine you’re proving?
They’re not trying to teach them a lesson. They consider being elected on the first ballot an additional distinction, and some people do see it that way even I don’t think the broader public pays that much attention to it. So it’s not much of a punishment, but it’s what they have available. I’m less bothered by the “punishment” of guys who cheated than I am by the whole logic of refusing to elect some players on the first ballot because some better player weren’t elected on the first ballot 30 years ago and on and on.
Kirby Puckett was elected to the HoF in his first year, which tells you all you need to know about how the HoF voters view their sacred duty. He had below average credentials as far as HoFs go, but got the nod in his first year because of what a great character guy he was. (Of course, a few years later it came out that he may have sexually assaulted a woman in a bathroom stall, and had cheated on his wife numerous times.)
Puckett’s candidacy was substantially assisted by the fact that his career was ended early, at age 35, by vurtue of his losing his eyesight because he was hit in the head by a pitch. At the time he was still as good as player as he had ever been, so the voters felt he’d been shortchanged a bit.
I think it’s stupid to wait a year to vote for someone as some sort of statement on their place in the Hall - First Balloter, vs. guy who only mostly belonged. I think it’s much worse, however, to intentionally not vote for someone who you know perfectly well is going to be elected this year whether you vote for them or not. The 2007 class is a perfect example - only two players got in, but those two players were Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr. No one who has a vote (and therefore, presumably, knows at least something about the game of baseball) could possibly have honestly thought that either of those two guys didn’t deserve to be inducted on the first ballot. And yet, Gwynn only got 97.61% of the vote, and Ripken only reached 98.53%.
So either 1 1/2 - 2 percent of Hall voters are complete idiots or had personal grudges or simply forgot to mail in their ballots, or they intentionally chose not to vote for people they knew perfectly well deserved it. The rationale I’ve always heard is that some voters don’t think anyone should get 100% cause none of the first five inductees did. When I’m President of Baseball, all those guys will lose their vote.