Cancel the sportswriters?

In one of those irresistible coincidences that a columnist cannot bear to pass up, I happened to read Jimmy Breslin’s short 2011 biography of Branch rickey over the weekend. I think it was Breslin’s very last book (he died in 2017). It was part of the Penguin Lives Series of biographies and memoirs written by legendary scholars and journalists.

In the prologue, Breslin explains that he was asked to consider writing a biography of a great American. he suggested rickey, the executive whose breach of Major League Baseball’s racial barrier “helped clear the sidewalks for Barack Obama to come into the White house.” The suggestion was half-serious, but when Breslin ran into editors who had never heard rickey’s name, indignation, the great motivator, took hold.

The book didn’t take me long to polish off, and on Tuesday one of the great dates in the baseball calendar arrived: the results of Baseball hall of Fame balloting were announced. Anomalously, no candidate was selected by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA), as none of the names on the ballot gained the necessary 75 per cent of the votes.

This is something that has happened from time to time in the past, sometimes for a few years in a row. But the 2021 ballot contains the greatest hitter ever, Barry Bonds, and bears the name of roger Clemens, who has a case to be considered the greatest pitcher ever. Both are under a cloud because of suspected steroid use.

Both are on the ballot for the ninth time, and players only get 10 appearances before their hall of Fame case is handed over to one of the hall’s more scholarly veterans committees. Pitcher Curt Schilling, whose yokel opinions and business failures have made him a subject of liberal opprobrium, also appeared on the BBWAA ballot for the ninth year.

Schilling, who has a hall of Fame resume and was a central figure in the game during his career, is perched at an awkward 71.1 per cent. Bonds and Clemens are barely above 60 per cent and seem destined to be shown the side entrance.

The hall of Fame gets nervous when the BBWAA falls into a snit and stops choosing new hall of Famers. Even one failure of the conclave is a major blow to the economy of Cooperstown, N.y. Many hall of Fame ballots are now shared publicly by BBWAA members, since it has dawned on the sportswriters that it was untenable for them to exercise such a privilege in secret.

Fans and players now know that the hall of Fame pipeline is obstructed by cranky lifers and prigs who get worn out checking a lot of boxes, and who can bring themselves to vote only for one or two super-worthies, or for none.

The old veterans committee was broken into multiple committees in 2010 and given a little of the power that had once resided with the ancient sportswriters’ club. This time, the other committees couldn’t meet because of COVID. That is bound to put a little more pressure on the BBWAA, many of whose own members (correctly) think it’s inappropriate that they control the main entrance to the hall of Fame.

hall voters are instructed to consider the candidates’ character, but when you give such an instruction to performative opinion-mongers, it becomes a contest of wine-snob status-seeking awfully fast. The moral panic over steroid “rules” that were scarcely enforced within baseball spreads like an oil slick, and suddenly Curt Schilling is excluded for being an obnoxious loudmouth without having the social excuse of a newspaper column. (The BBWAA, incidentally, never fails to find a candidate for the Taylor Spink Award, which is given to baseball writers as a sort of adjunct to the hall of Fame.)

Will the hall of Fame, or the apparatus of organized baseball with which it enjoys close symbiosis, ever just take the nuclear football away from the BBWAA? This would take an unusual quantity of courage and would require the creation of a responsible alternative plan.

But there’s a possible shortcut: cancel culture! Which brings us back to Breslin’s book. Breslin, as a New yorker, had a front-row seat for baseball’s integration struggle, and was intimate with the media of the era. So when he veers from his narrative to observe that the BBWAA was a major force upholding baseball’s colour line, it gets one’s attention.

The association, Breslin wrote not very long ago, “was a fake and a fraud, a shill as white as the Klan.” Ball clubs gave beat writers meal money and paid travel, and in return scribes were expected to make proper use of their cartel-like control of press box seats. “Only reporters working for daily newspapers, and thus only whites, were permitted to enter,” Breslin testifies. “Association rules kept out reporters from the weekly papers, almost all of whom were Black.”

“The … rules were so sinful and scandalous that even a faint voice in protest could have shattered the arrangement,” he adds. But as any baseball historian could tell you, only an honourable handful of white columnists raised hell about racial segregation in baseball before rickey took on the job of annihilating it. All the while the Black press was being confined to the fringe of the game by the BBWAA.

Some would say that the association must disband in the name of retrospective justice. I do not go so far; I merely release the idea into the ether for the consideration of others.

THE HALL OF FAME PIPELINE IS OBSTRUCTED BY CRANKY LIFERS AND PRIGS.