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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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AT THE HALL OF FAME
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Some This-a and That-a
About the Hall of Fame
of TheColumnists.com
I am a voter.
I vote on inductees to the baseball Hall of Fame.
I vote on candidates for the broadcasters’ wing of the Hall.
I long ago passed the requirement of writing about baseball for at least 10 years in order to vote players into the Hall of Fame. Also, I was one of the first to write a sports television column, so I am on the 20-person board that selects candidates for the Ford C. Frick award honoring baseball broadcasters.
Many people do not know about the basics of the voting.
In order to be eligible a player must have played 10 seasons in the major leagues and been retired at least five years. He must win the approval of at least 75 per cent of the baseball writers to earn acceptance.
He has a place on the ballot for 15 years. If he doesn’t’ gain entry in that time, he is dropped. Also, if he doesn’t get one percent of the writers’ vote at any time, he is dropped from consideration.
A candidate has one more chance: He can win the favor of the veterans committee, made up of former players. The committee is controversial because it is questionable whether players should get a second chance once they have been passed over by the writers. The veterans committee originally was formed for the sake of oldtime players modern writers may never have seen. That no longer is the case, because the veterans committee is now passing on players modern writers have seen and have rejected.
For a time the veterans committee became a place to reward old friends. Phil Rizzuto never made it with the writers nor with the veterans committee until some friends of his--Bill White and Yogi Berra--joined the veterans committee.
I long voted for Rizzuto and Richie Ashburn in the writers’ vote. Along with Pee Wee Reese, they made the Hall only through the courtesy of the veterans committee. For 15 years I voted without success for Roger (61 homers) Maris and the solid hitting, wizard-of-a-fielder, Keith Hernandez.
I haven’t voted for Mark McGwire because he is a druggie. Innocent until proven guilty applies to staying out of jail. It doesn’t hold in my book for a place in Cooperstown. For the same reason I most likely will not vote for druggies Roger Clemens, Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa or Barry Bonds, among others, when they become eligible.
I haven’t voted for Jim Rice (he made it this year) nor Richie Allen (he has not) because they were problem-child players, not team guys. Their wayward ways too often got in the way of winning games.
I would not have voted for Pete Rose at first. I would vote for him now.
I think he was stupid to deny his gambling on baseball. He has alienated many players by showing up at Cooperstown Hall of Fame weekends, upstaging many of the new and old inductees.
But Rose has been punished enough, and there is no questioning his baseball talents. He comes across now as no worse a miscreant than the druggies as far as the image of baseball is concerned. If the Hall can stand the presence of Walter O’Malley, who sold out Brooklyn, it shouldn’t continue to punish Rose. He deserves the empathy President Ronald Reagan showed blowhard Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, pardoning him for the felony of corrupting the electoral process.
When and if Rose is pardoned by baseball commissioner Bud Selig, he should go into the proper pool--not the veterans committee, but the writers’ vote. Writers were never given a chance to vote on Rose, so it is unfair to pass over this more legitimate voting body for the committee that shouldn’t even be in existence any more. Justice for Pete Rose, indeed.
I am fighting a
losing cause in the vote for broadcasters. I vote for Graham
McNamee every year, but he never makes it.
McNameee was the dominant radio broadcaster of the 1920s. He worked seven World Series. He worked most of the big sports of the day as well as important political and entertainment events. He made the cover of Time Magazine in 1927.
McNamee has been lost in the shadows by the 20-man group that votes on this award, probably because he didn’t have the baseball smarts and smoothness of today’s announcers. Since I have been voting, Bob Uecker (Milwaukee) Lon Simmons (San Francisco) Jerry Coleman (San Diego) Gene Elston (Houston) Denny Matthews (Kansas City ) Dave Niehaus (Seattle) and Tony Kubek (Toronto and national) have been named.
They are all good men, I suppose, but none had the impact that McNamee had in the beginning. I think McNamee makes the ballot every year because I always put him at the top of the required Top Ten list. The broadcasters’ wing at the Hall is sadly lacking without McNamee.
One last thrust.
Congress recently acted in a way that could have relevance for
Cooperstown. Congress has a Statuary Hall where each state has
statues of two of its honored citizens. Recently, in order to
place a bronze figure of Ronald Reagan in Statuary Hall, the
California State Legislature removed the Rev. Thomas Starr King,
a Unitarian Universalist minister who helped persuade California
to stay in the Union during the Civil War.
(Not everyone was pleased with the switch. Rev. Lindi Ramsden
of the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry in California
said, “To disregard Starr King so cavalierly…was
a big mistake. Reagan already has a lot of things named after
him. How do you decide to name so many places after one person?")
In any case, with that as precedent, the baseball Hall of Fame might consider replacing some of the less-than-worthy bozos to make room for new worthies. I would start by booting Rabbitt Maranville. He had a career batting average of .258 in the 1920s and 1930s, a time when most stars hit in the .300s. He made the Hall only because he directed the Hearst papers’ baseball youth program, and monopolist publisher William Randolph Heart ordered all his baseball-writer voters to vote for Maranville.
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The John Knowles Hare drawing of Graham McNamee is courtesy of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. This column first posted Aug. 10, 2009.
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