Morality shouldn’t be a factor in HOF voting

If the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s empty 2021 class has proven anything, it’s that many BBWAA voters are judging players by the wrong thing.

Morality should not be part of consideration for a player’s place in baseball’s most hallowed halls. It’s clear the hotly debated “Rule 5”, which is known as the morality clause and calls for voters to consider “integrity, sportsmanship and character,” is being unfairly applied in the modern era after no players were elected for just the ninth time in 77 years of balloting.

For the voters who still believe morality should play a role in Cooperstown — denying alltime greats Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens their rightful election this year — they should also call for many of the Hall’s plaques to be removed. Let’s do a quick roll call of Hall members who did much more to tarnish the game’s reputation (and their own) than PED users.

Cap Anson was instrumental in erecting baseball’s color line, and Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis (who recently had his name removed from the BBWAA’s MVP award) upheld it. Tris Speaker was reportedly a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Add in admitted cheaters (Gaylord Perry), men of extreme violence (Ty Cobb), clear-cut enablers (Bud Selig) and a whole era of players who benefited from amphetamines, and the morality rule is a sham.

So why all of a sudden is it being “enforced” by voters now? Did they forget how Selig and the league itself allowed its PED problem to go unchecked throughout the 1990s, or that Bonds and Clemens were competing against rosters full of fellow users? It’s convenient and selective memory, especially in the case of arguably the greatest position player and starting pitcher ever. Excluding Bonds and Clemens because of their usage in an era defined by PEDs is ridiculous.

The honor to vote on who is

elected to Cooperstown — as earned by the electorate of 401 BBWAA members after 10 consecutive seasons of covering an MLB beat — is far too great for the process to be bogged down by voters being the morality police.

Instead of weighing one type of transgression against another, and past transgressions against ones committed in recent years, Major League Baseball should acknowledge that the Hall is not a place to honor character or make a judgment on lack thereof.

The Hall is a place to immortalize the greatest players in the history of the game, period. All other transgressions outside the lines — Bonds’ creams, Clemens’ needles, Schilling’s wayward tweets, Willie Stargell’s greenies — should be, and will be, judged by the populace on their own accord.

On the field, those players were Hall of Famers.

And, as history reminds us, the morality clause is rooted in graft. The clause was originally instituted by Landis as the moralist commissioner’s way to ensure the Hall election of Eddie Grant, a mediocre infielder and WWI casualty whose stats are nowhere near Cooperstown-caliber.

With the clause, Landis also simultaneously made sure the Hall would exclude Shoeless Joe Jackson, whom the commissioner banned following the 1919 Black Sox scandal.

Even if the morality clause is abolished, chances are the writers holding out on assumed PED users such as Bonds and Clemens (and coming next year, Alex

Rodriguez and David Ortiz) aren’t likely to change their minds so long as they have a ballot.

But with time, it stands to reason that as those voters (likely many of them older) phase out, and newer, more liberal-minded voters assume ballots, those players with PED baggage will stand a better chance at election.

In addition to the issue of morality, ballots are not made public, leading to a lack of trust in the validity of the process. When considering such a prestigious honor as the Hall, everyone has a right to know how voters voted and who didn’t vote (a record 14 negligent voters did this year). Currently, BBWAA voters are not required to make their ballot public, although many voters elect to do so.

The voting process for the Hall won’t ever be an exact science. But the abolition of the morality clause and transparency in the balloting process will go a long way to help the process.