The 2013 Baseball HOF ballot featured two hitters with 3,000+ hits, four hitters with 500+ home runs, five hitters with 1,500+ RBIs, three with 500+ stolen bases, two pitchers with 3,000+ strikeouts, and eleven players total with 60+ career wins above replacement. But as you’ve undoubtedly heard, none were selected for induction, for a wide variety of reasons.
The most significant reaction has been to congratulate the baseball writers for collectively taking a stand against the steroid era, the stand no one made in the 90s. However, this stand is curiously inconsistent with the current makeup of the Hall, already featuring known cheaters, drug users, and others who violate the standards of character, integrity, and sportsmanship. On the other hand, better late than never, right?
In the abstract, there is nothing wrong with attempting to improve your institutions. Unfortunately, I fear this will serve to do nothing but degrade the Hall, to begin a slow march towards irrelevance. Without intervention from the Hall’s administrators, or from the Commissioner himself, the muddled moral stand will do far more harm than good.
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Moral relativism (more specifically, meta-ethical moral relativism) is the idea that there are no objectively right or wrong positions in a given debate or choice of action. This isn’t an idea that the average person really employs in everyday life; even someone who doesn’t take their moral compass from The Bible will accept a criminal code as a basic standard of right and wrong. However, it’s ever present when a large group of people are asked to take collective action on something. When no one can use a normative point of reference, there’s no way to get collective movement in the proper direction, if any direction at all. Your group becomes a poor sap lost in a dark forest without a compass.
We see this on a grand scale in politics. The fundamental disagreement on whether large or small government is preferable leads to the kick-the-can fiscal cliff and debt ceiling deals everyone hates. The gun control conversation is hopelessly aimless because Americans as a whole are having trouble deciding whether they value freedom to carry guns or safety from them. Thanks to steroids, we’re reaching the point where the BBWAA votes on the HOF with the effectiveness of Congress. Yikes.
The main problem with their moral stand against steroids is that no one is really sure what kind of stand it is. Even among the writers that do agree that steroid users should be punished, you have: those who exclude the entire 1990s, those excluding only those who admitted or were caught by positive tests, those painting their suspicions with a broader brush, and finally the blank ballot crew. When one person’s election requires 75% of the vote, the most restrictive standard becomes the operative standard.
For the last few years, this wasn’t a major problem; truly great players like Rickey Henderson could still command all the support they needed. But now that so many players are on the ballot, it’s going to be virtually impossible for a player to clear all of the steroid hurdles, gain the respect of the blank ballot crew, all while reaching the limited ballot space from voters who aren’t keeping steroid users out. Greg Maddux is surely making the cut, but there’s a chance Tom Glavine gets delayed from the ballot crunch (for instance, a lot of the more inclusive voters have omitted the top candidates in order to keep fringe candidates on the ballot).
It’s going to be tough for the Hall to maintain historical relevance when the only person from the 90s/00s that can get inducted from now on is Greg Maddux. Thus, the most obvious reform would be to go to a 20-spot or unlimited ballot, which would ease the gridlock a little bit. But, there’s an even bigger problem that threatens the Hall’s relevance: debate fatigue.
No matter your opinion of the various steroid users, I think ultimately everyone would love to move on from the Steroid Era. Every conversation about who took steroids from 1995-2004 detracts from the current game and anyone playing in it. But we’re never going to stop having those conversations while we’re debating Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, every year, for the next 20 years. After only one election cycle, I’ve heard plenty of very committed baseball fans admit that they simply don’t care about Cooperstown anymore. When we rehash this next January, who else is going to lose interest? Think about how aggravating the 2012 AL MVP debate was. I don’t know a single person who wasn’t completely sick of the whole thing by the time it ended, myself included. And the MVP is easy: we have a direction in mind, and we’re limited to only that season. Does anyone still want to debate the merits of 2012 Mike Trout and 2012 Miguel Cabrera? I didn’t think so.
This is where the Hall’s moral relativist problem is most concerning. There is literally no hope of these differences being resolved. The various factions are so directionless that no one is going to move towards each other, and there’s no incentive for the BBWAA to change that. The lack of direction is even more stark when you realize that, not only are the voters too relativistic on baseball maters, but they’re even subverting concepts which are universally accepted in the rest of the country. For instance, the idea of forcing an accused man to prove his innocence was established as a violation of due process in ancient English common law. Yet numerous writers have posed that exact requirement on guys like Piazza and Bagwell (how on Earth someone is supposed to prove that they never took a drug over a 20 year period is beyond me, but that’s a different story).
An increasing number of baseball fans are simply going to lose interest in a Hall of Fame where no one gets in, where we have to keep rehashing one of baseball’s serious black eyes, and where we have to watch the historical gatekeeping function administered by a collection of petty and self-aggrandizing writers, using standards fit for a country with far less liberty than ours. But, there is a solution available.
To go back to the Congressional comparison, Bud Selig has shown quite the preference for the kick-the-can method of solving problems. His response to the Steroid Era history has been famously timid, preferring to let the BBWAA sort out the mess somehow. This is in stark contrast to the swift action by MLB after the Black Sox scandal, as well as its reaction to Pete Rose. As draconian as a lifetime ban can feel, it spares baseball of the yearly re-opening of old wounds and allows progress.
Baseball needs a strong sense of direction from the top in order to solve its Cooperstown crisis. It doesn’t have to be lifetime bans and total ineligibility for every proven user (although that would be a vast improvement). It could be as simple as Allan announcing his support for Steroid Era players as integral part of the game’s history and deserving enshrinement. I’ve generally favored full inclusion, but I’m at the point where I would welcome a collection of bannings. Anything has to be an improvement on the bloated mass of players floating along in the limbo of receiving 10-40% of the vote each year. After all, Congress has an approval rating about 12%. A comparison to that group can’t be good for baseball, or for anybody.
Pictured: Old Hoss Nietzsche
Ducks on the Pod 