Being There, but not any more
BEING THERE
In this Being There we have to amend the verb. I am there and I was there — for a long time — but soon I won’t be there. I will surrender my right to vote for the National Baseball Hall of Fame after this month’s election. Confirmation came via email from New York last week that, indeed, I have been granted a ballot to vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame class of 2018. That’s not unusual because I’ve cast my votes for 22 consecutive years. In that time, 37 men have been elected via traditional ballot, and I think I voted for every one of them most of the years they were eligible. Some I had to be convinced of by other players, but they did get my eventual vote. Until a couple of years ago, it used to be an automatic thing: if you had been a member of the Baseball Writers of Association of America (BBWAA) for 10 consecutive years, you got a lifetime vote for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I’ve been a member for 32 years, the first 10 of those as a Toronto Blue Jays beat writer who covered an average of about 125 regularseason games a year. Now, a committee reviews your participation qualifications, and I agree wholeheartedly with that concept. In earlier days, the BBWAA had a very stringent policy about membership, and I was in charge of enforcing it for the Toronto chapter. You had to see a ton of games, home and away, to be a member, partly because of the Hall of Fame vote, and a couple of times we interrupted a writer’s string at seven or eight years for not being there enough. The people who set the original voting standards felt writers were the only media capable of casting votes for something as permanent as the Hall of Fame. They saw the games, knew what a Hall of Famer looked like by comparison, talked to players every day about the men they were playing against, and had access to their in-game tendencies that radio and TV people, most of whom worked for the team in some form, didn’t. With the explosion of “journalists” from All-Sports stations, websites and blogs, with tweeters who position themselves as reporters, and with public access to detailed metrics, things have changed. It’s not necessarily a bad change, but it alters the way we view the games and therefore the way we view the people playing it. It’s a numbers game now, sprinkled by ultimately useless “hot takes.” And since the detailed ballots of every voter are now going to be available to the public, it’s likely many will take the safe route, based solely on the same numbers everyone else is using. We don’t need people for that … a well-built logarithm could do it. But that’s not the reason I’ll be hanging up my voting cleats. It’s because I don’t get to enough games to fulfil what I consider the mandate: be familiar enough with the players and their tendencies to compare them, with my eyes, to not only their contemporaries, but their forebears. For three or four years now, Spectator writers have worked only the local scene, not the national and international ones that I had covered for nearly 30 years. So with the five-year lag between a player’s retirement and his eligibility for the Hall, I am now coming to the end of the last group I saw play enough to decide confidently on their Hall of Fame status. By my own principles, enforced in the BBWAA decades ago, I am about to become underqualified. I also suspect that we’re about to see a liberation of the steroid gang, and I don’t want to be part of that. My line in the sand has always been this: if you were caught red-handed, were testified against under oath or were fingered by the Mitchell Report, you don’t get my vote. Rumours of drug use weren’t enough so I had to vote for Mike Piazza, but I would never vote for Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, A-Rod and the like. Here’s my rationale. Steroids don’t just help give you power, they can help you recover from what used to be career-ending injuries. A number of great players of earlier eras aren’t in the Hall because their careers were truncated that way. On the other side of the coin, it gave me great pleasure to vote for Roberto Alomar, Paul Molitor, Dave Winfield, Phil Niekro and Rickey Henderson, all of whom played for the Jays when I was there. And can you imagine being able to scribble an X beside Robin Yount, George Brett and Nolan Ryan all on the same ballot? The next time there’s a motherlode like that, someone else will Be There. I won’t.