Baseball’s Hall of Fame is functioning as designed and that’s why it sucks

It used to be an annual tradition of mine to post some sort of screed about the machinations of baseball’s Hall of Fame process. In recent years I’ve found it harder and harder to get amped up about who’s in, who’s out, and why. Mostly that’s because the problem really lies in whole concept, and in the institution itself.

So let’s talk about it!

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The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum has a very simple and noble mission statement. According to its own website, the Hall exists "to preserve the sport's history, honor excellence within the game and make a connection between the generations of people who enjoy baseball."

I must admit that I’ve never been to Cooperstown, but from what I understand, the museum portion the building’s “three entities under one roof” does all that quite well. Unfortunately, the portion that constitutes what most of us think of when we think of the Hall has a very particular and narrow way of looking at that mandate.

Preserve the sport’s history… unless it embarrasses us. Honor excellence within the game… for some but not others. Make a connection between the generations of people who enjoy baseball… but only if their generation didn’t like guys we thought were jerks.

Viewed through the prism of our updated mission statement, Tuesday was a banner day for the Hall — as well as for the the league officials, executives, and old guard media that hold the balance of power within it. Congrats, guys! The beloved David Ortiz is in! The hated Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are off the ballot! The odious Curt Schilling is gone too, but can at least be quietly honoured by the secret vote of some small committee down the line!

For those of us who over the years have come to view the Hall with more and more skepticism and less and less reverence, however, Tuesday didn’t feel like such a great day for the institution. And it was far from the first one in recent years.

Back in 2007, legendary union leader Marvin Miller was on course to be elected after receiving 63% of the vote from the Veterans Committee, which at the time was made up of all living Hall of Famers — primarily players, but also including builders and media members to have won the Ford C. Frick and J.G. Taylor Spink awards. However, before the next round of voting could take place, the rules were changed and suddenly non-players like Miller were to have their candidacies evaluated by a separate 12-member body of executives and media veterans appointed by the Hall. At the time, according to a piece from Chris Isidore of CNN, these included union un-friendly folks like Royals owner David Glass, a former CEO of Wal-Mart, and Orioles president Andy MacPhail, whose father had been on ownership's side during Miller's heyday.

Miller was posthumously enshrined in the class of 2020, but had been clear before his death in 2012 that he wanted no part in the process — something his family honoured when the league finally righted this wrong, declining to participate in the ceremony.

Miller made his feelings known in a letter to the Baseball Writers' Association of America following the 2008 debacle:

“Paradoxically, I’m writing to thank you and your associates for your part in nominating me for Hall of Fame consideration, and, at the same time, to ask that you not do this again. I find myself unwilling to contemplate one more rigged veterans committee whose members are handpicked to reach a particular outcome while offering the pretense of a democratic vote. It is an insult to baseball fans, historians, sports writers and especially to those baseball players who sacrificed and brought the game into the 21st century. At the age of 91, I can do without farce.”

Clandestine rule changes have also clearly affected the candidacies of Bonds and Clemens. In 2014 the amount of time players were eligible to stay on the ballot was reduced from 15 years to 10. Not only did this give Bonds and Clemens less time for their vote totals to grow, as had happened over time for eventual Hall of Famers like Tim Raines and Larry Walker, it cut off the next five years of new additions to the Hall's voting pool from getting a chance to vote for them.¹ Those additions will primarily be younger people — writers who grew up as fans in the "steroid era," or afterwards, giving them distance to process it differently than older grudge-holding voters who were themselves part of the widespread problem the game has long preferred to whitewash by making individuals like Clemens and Bonds scapegoats for the entire era’s unpopular systemic sins.

According to Jayson Stark of the Athletic, 86% of new Hall voters in the last five years voted for the pair this time around, suggesting that enshrinement would have been likely if they’d been given those extra five years that had previously been the standard.

Am I upset that guys like Bonds and Clemens won’t be getting a league-endorsed, legacy-repairing day in the sun anytime soon? Absolutely not. The steroid stuff I’m happy to overlook, because baseball made that bed itself, but Bonds has been accused in court of domestic violence by both a former wife and an ex-girlfriend, and Clemens was accused in 2008 of carrying on a decade-long “relationship” with Mindy McCready beginning when the future country star was just 15 and he was 28, which she confirmed at the time.² Those guys can both fuck off! But their exclusion, along with Miller’s case, illuminates a big part of what the Hall really is as an institution. Ortiz’s inclusion illuminates another side of that same reality.

When he wasn’t crushing the Blue Jays’ hopes, which was often, I must admit I got a hell of a lot of enjoyment out of watching David Ortiz play baseball. One of the game’s biggest, most vibrant personalities, with a knack for late-game heroics, he was a larger than life figure in the sport for more than a decade. In my mind he’s a deserving Hall of Famer, whatever that’s supposed to mean anymore. However, by the Hall’s own increasingly incoherent standards, he doesn’t exactly have the best statistical case for enshrinement. His career fWAR, for example, is about six wins short of both Fred McGriff and John Olerud. But Ortiz benefits from having played so many playoff games and so often in the highest profile rivalry in the sport.

Ortiz certainly has PED questions hanging over his candidacy, too. Commissioner Rob Manfred said in 2016 that he’d like that to be ignored³, and while the supposed evidence against Ortiz isn’t as compelling or well documented as the allegations about Bonds that were made in Game of Shadows, or about Clemens from José Canseco to Jason Grimsley to the Mitchell Report to Brian McNamee, it’s still hard not to feel like a player with a less ebullient, media-friendly personality may not have been given the same benefit of the doubt.

Ortiz, it must be noted, also had a restraining order filed against him in 2020 by the mother of his first child, who alleged that she had been “intimidated and threatened” by him.

I’m certainly not about to rank anybody’s domestic misdeeds by order of magnitude here, but I think what’s clear from these cases is that to walk among the greats of the game you don’t necessarily have to have generational statistical output. Despite the years of grandstanding on the topic, apparently you don’t need to be totally free of PED suspicions either. And you don’t need to have lived an unblemished life off the field. You just have to cut a large enough figure and be liked enough by the powers that be.

No one’s inclusion proves that last bit more than the enshrinement of former commissioner Bud Selig. A collusion era owner and the man who presided over the strike, the cancellation of the World Series, and the massive unchecked proliferation of performance enhancing drugs in the game, Bud Selig deserves a spot in the Hall of Fame about as much as I do. But he made the owners a lot of money. He deflected the worst damage of the steroid era onto players like Clemens and Bonds. He was good for the brand. And so — wouldn’t you know! — there he is. Whisked into the hall by the Veterans Committee in the class of 2017.

Now, obviously the Hall doesn’t speak with just one voice. There are the inscrutable committees, yes, but there is also the BBWAA ballot, which comes with a multitude of different opinions from all corners. There are levers behind the scenes that guys like White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf can pull to get their way — *COUGH* Harold “Hall of Famer” Baines *COUGH* — and the Hall can eschew accountability for their selections (as they did in 2017 by rejecting the BBWAA’s request to make all ballots public), but there’s not anything that can be done to stop 75% writers from electing whoever they as a group see fit. The rule-makers can only shift the goalposts for so long. Progress can be made eventually.

But progress toward what, exactly? A different version of someone else’s grudge machine?

The thing is, it is antithetical to the project of preserving history to elevate people in the way that the Hall tries to. Baseball is a complex game played and loved and run by complex people. Its history isn’t just the positive stuff. Its history isn’t represented in a wing of a museum dedicated to the powerful telling only the story that they want to be told.

Did the Hall once feel like it was something different than that? Probably. And I’m sure it even seemed fun for a while. But is this fun? When was the last time any of this was fun?

So why do we need it?

The truth is, we don’t. The truth is, Hall of Fame discourse is cynical busywork to keep the sport in the news cycle during the offseason’s slow periods⁴. The truth is, we wouldn’t talk about it nearly as much if it were “just a museum,” but it would be every bit as powerful, awe inspiring, worth visiting, and a hell of a lot more valuable historically to boot.

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1. To earn a Hall vote, members of the BBWAA must be on a beat for 10 consecutive years. It’s probably worth pointing out here that despite covering the game and the Blue Jays for a living since 2008, I have never asked, been asked, or wanted to be a member of the BBWAA.

2. McCready would later tell Inside Edition that she was actually 16 when the “relationship” began, and that it didn’t become sexual until “several years later.” Sheryl Ring of Beyond the Box Score filled in many more of the tragic details of McCready’s story in a 2019 piece. McCready died of suicide in 2013.

3. In 2003, the New York Times reported that Ortiz was one of over 100 players to turn up a positive result in tests conducted to determine the extent of PED use before the league's new testing regime was implemented in 2004. The league has since thrown the validity of those positives into doubt, with commissioner Manfred in 2016 calling it "unfair" for Hall of Fame voters to assess players based on "leaks, rumors, innuendo, not confirmed positive test results."

4. Guilty as charged!!