Only your Hall-of-Fame ballot is perfect. Mine is not. At least not to you.
No matter who I vote for — or, just as important, don’t vote for — you will view it as imperfect if it does not match your thoughts. You will react with something between disappointment and rage.
It is because you care, and I am glad you care.
I suspect every other Hall of Fame combined — football, basketball, Rock and Roll, American TV Game Show, etc. — does not stir the passion about who is enshrined like who gets a plaque in Cooperstown.
It means getting a ballot is an honor and a responsibility, and I try to honor that by making my information consumption a 12-month endeavor, whether it is the terrific statistical/biographical work done by the analytic Jay Jaffe or via conversations with those who were contemporaries of players currently on the ballot.
I wish this were a more civil undertaking, but the Internet offers spontaneity and anonymity that stokes vulgarity that should be reserved for genocide, not who does or does not get into a sports Hall of Fame. It is the downside to that passion. But this is the world we live in. This column is not going to usher in an age of civility. It is merely an attempt to say, no matter which way you go, there is no way to make all who care happy.
Because only your Hall-of-Fame ballot is perfect. Mine is not. At least not to you.
And you know what, not to me either. There are no perfect answers in what makes a Hall of Famer. What is the fine line between the 1 percent who ever have played the game well enough to be enshrined and the next percent or 2 who miss out? That is what we used to do as voters — decide if Mike Mussina or Curt Schilling had done enough to inch from the 2 percent to the 1 percent.
You are asking 75 percent of a voting body to agree on that fine line, and it is hard to get 75 percent of people to agree on the day of the week. Remember that seven players got more than 50 percent of the vote last year, but just three were inducted.
The steroid issue only has made a difficult endeavor — to get that 75 percent — more so. There are voters who refuse to consider anyone with ties to illegal performance enhancers. I respect that position. But if I were to follow it, I would not vote for Barry Bonds, which means I would not vote for the greatest player I ever saw play. And I don’t mean the monster who broke the single-season homer record.
I do believe the Greek tragedy that befell Bonds. That he was a clean player through 1998, saw the money and love lavished on the freak show that was Mark McGwire vs. Sammy Sosa, and gave in to greed and ego and got on the juiced gravy train.
But through 1998, Bonds had a .966 OPS, 411 homers, 445 steals, three MVPs, eight Gold Gloves. If he stops playing at that moment, he is getting my vote on the first ballot, and I think the ballots of enough others to get elected, too.
If you think my logic is crazy about Bonds, I understand. Only your Hall-of-Fame ballot is perfect. Mine is not. At least not to you.
There are those who say you just have to judge people in their time. What did it mean to play in the Dead Ball Era? Or before integration? This would mean anyone who performed like a Hall of Famer during the Steroid Age, just put them in. Because you can’t know everyone who did it or what the exact impact was. For most of this time there were not even rules in the game banning the stuff or testing in any serious way.
Again, I respect that argument. But Ben Johnson was busted in 1988. So, it widely was understood no later than that point that using steroids was cheating. Using it also was against the law in this country, which supersedes if it is written in any specific major league rule. This notion that it does not improve performance — you still have to be able to hit the ball or throw the ball — is silly. The drugs were not used at a mass level — health was not being risked — without getting results. As reliever Matt Herges, who was outed in the Mitchell Report, told USA Today in 2010: “It made me feel superhuman.”
This is what I think about every time I am just about to put a check mark next to players — who unlike Bonds, in my mind — would not have been Hall of Famers without juicing. McGwire, for example, had nearly the same amount of plate appearances before 1995 as after. He was a borderline Hall-of-Famer with a 147 OPS-plus (OPS-plus factors in ballparks and league — 100 is average, so 147 is 47 percent above average) before 1995.
But he was then entering his age-31 season. Decline should have worsened his Hall case. Instead, he had a 183 OPS-plus the rest of his career. The only players who ever posted better for a career were arguably the best two hitters ever — Babe Ruth and Ted Williams.
Even if McGwire had never admitted usage, I never would have believed those results.
And this is where we enter murkier areas. With players whose results I don’t believe in, but for whom there are no ties to the Mitchell Report or a failed test or association with a Balco or Biogenesis.
I have seen charges of not voting for these players called McCarthyism. To which I can only say, go reread some history of McCarthyism. No one is having his life ruined here. This is about making the Hall of Fame or not making the Hall of Fame.
This is not a court of law. I do not have to prove anything beyond a shadow of a doubt. I just have to prove to myself that a player’s career got moved beyond that Hall borderline by artificial means by using whatever information I have gathered over time to prove it.
I always have felt this way, but do so in a stronger way after seeing a documentary a few weeks ago called “Lance Armstrong: Stop at Nothing.” I cannot recommend it enough to just see how much one human will deny, deny, deny and aggressively try to disprove the truth. But what stood out to me was the case made about collective and individual accomplishment that just made no sense.
The average speed of the Tour de France jumped so radically from what it had been that collective cheating was the only plausible explanation, even without failed tests as corroboration. And the circumstantial case against Armstrong rising to the top of that speed was such that his cheating felt indisputable.
There are some on this year’s ballot who fall into this category with me. If you think this unfair or inconsistent, I respect that opinion. All I can say is this is my personal vote. I am not trying to influence any of the other 500-plus voters.
I used to believe in complete transparency on this. That every ballot should be made public. But I, a) do not want to publicly damn anyone with a non-vote, and b) quite frankly, do not want to subject myself to even more venom than is now standard by just being a voter and writing a column such as this.
I continue to mull if my process is right or wrong, continue to listen to input, continue to try to do the right thing. But I understand no matter what I do, only your Hall-of-Fame ballot is perfect. Mine is not. At least not to you.