2012 Baseball Hall of Fame Vote Analysis
Let’s try to sift through the wreckage of the 2012 BBWAA Hall of Fame vote, and
1) Reds shortstop Barry Larkin received 86.4% of the vote, easily exceeding the 75% he needed for induction into the Hall of Fame. One of the top ten shortstops of all time, he is a worthy addition to the Hall of Fame.
2) Jack Morris received 66.7% of the vote. He has a couple of years left on the ballot, and stands a good shot at getting elected before his time is up. His career WAR was 39.3, the second lowest among the 14 players on the ballot who survived the cut. Morris received 382 votes. Brad Radke, career WAR 40.9, received just two votes and fell off the ballot. Morris had a mustache. Radke didn’t. BBWAA voters like men with mustaches. They think it makes them look tough, you know, like a Hall of Famer should.
3) Forty-four percent of the American public believes that the world is less than 10,000 years old. This is the same percentage as BBWAA voters who left Jeff Bagwell’s name off of their HOF ballots. One has to wonder if they are, in fact, the same people.
4) Lee Smith, a relief pitcher who specialized in taking naps before his 9th inning cameos, received 50.6% of the vote. Apparently, this means that about half of the voters believe the save is a crap statistic, and they are correct.
5) Tim Raines got 48.7% of the vote. What’s interesting here is that no one mentions anymore that Raines was part of a cocaine scandal that rocked baseball back in the 1980′s. It was a very big deal at the time. Yet Raines now has a real chance of someday getting into the HOF. What are we to make, then, of all the hullabaloo surrounding the PED scandal of recent times? My guess is that it’ll ultimately go the way of all American scandals, including Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, etc. The public doesn’t so much forgive. It simply forgets.
6) Alan Trammell: Sometimes I think HOF voters are just kind of lazy. Why bother taking a look at a guy like Trammell’s numbers year after year? He just didn’t, you know, feel like a Hall of Famer when he was playing. Yet his career WAR (66.9) is better than Ozzie Smith, PeeWee Reese, Luis Aparicio, and Ernie Banks, not to mention Phil Rizzuto and Rabbit Maranville. In fact, Trammell’s career WAR is only slightly below Barry Larkin’s 68.9. I’m not saying that Trammell was as good as Larkin, but he is clearly legit Hall material. So why did he receive just 36.8% of the vote? Ask the voters.
7) The Designated Hitter rule came into being in the American League in 1973, the same year that Tony Orlando and Dawn dominated the singles charts with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree.” While Tony Orlando and Dawn are long since gone, the D.H. remains, a relic of the age of Nixon. The bastard child of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and A.L. President Joe Cronin, it remains with us today, an oddity largely rejected by the BBWAA, who gave Edgar Martinez, the greatest D.H. ever, just 36.5% of the vote.
8) Fred “Crime Dog” McGriff received just 23.9% of the vote. If he’d hit just seven more career home runs, he would probably have doubled that vote total. Writers look at their hands a lot, and the BBWAA writers noticed that they have ten fingers, so they can only think in terms of numbers divisible by ten. 493 (home runs) is not divisible by ten. 500 home runs would be. Thus the low vote totals for Crime Dog.
9) Larry Walker (22.9%) played during an era where we were all buried in an avalanche of three-run home runs and 14-10 ball games. For a while, he called Coors Field home. Coors Field was to the baseball fan what the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas would be to a group of college under-grads, the ultimate venue to enjoy a bacchanal of pure lust and carnal pleasure. Larry Walker is being penalized for having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and nothing’s going to change that.
10) Mark McGwire (19.5%) – The ultimate example of how our culture is like a pair of tectonic plates crashing into each other, causing massive earthquakes and unending destruction. We wanted massive biceps, towering home runs, Ruthian records, immortal legends. We got all of that. We also wanted Scouts Honor, drug-tested teachers, lock ‘em up law and order, and family values. We got some of that, too. But the natural tension between the two caused a fissure to develop into which McGwire’s reputation dropped, wordlessly and without a murmur from a society that demanded his creation, and his demise.
Four other players, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Rafael Palmiero, and Bernie Williams all received enough votes to remain on the ballot to fight another day. Thirteen other players dropped off the ballot. One of those players, Bill Mueller, actually received four votes for the Hall of Fame. Every society has a subculture, and every subculture has a lunatic fringe. Baseball is our little subculture, and, apparently, Bill Mueller voters are our lunatic fringe.
That’s as far as I care to go with this. Let me know your thoughts about today’s voting results.
Best Regards, Bill Miller
Image via Wikipedia
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Selig’s Monument
When Sir Christopher Wren (architect, astronomer, mathematician) died in 1723, his epitaph read as follows: “If you seek his monument, look around you.”
Wren had designed St. Paul’s Cathedral, as well as over fifty other churches and public buildings in and around London.
His legacy was his work; therefore, a statue honoring him would have been redundant.
A man’s life is revealed primarily in his work. It is what we do, and how well we do it, that defines who we are, and how we are remembered.
In addition to their work, some are also honored and immortalized in great works of literature, song, poem, or sculpture. A blind poet, Homer, has kept Odysseus’s memory alive long after his body has perished, in The Odyssey. The faces of four American presidents: Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt may survive the next Ice Age gazing at the horizon from atop Mt. Rushmore.
Even here in Greenville, South Carolina, a bronze statue of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson serves as a cautionary tale of Man’s weakness in the face of temptation. Jackson’s legacy was his life’s work, overshadowed by scandal.
This August, Bud Selig, Commissioner of Baseball for the past 17 years, will be honored outside of Miller Stadium in Milwaukee, with a seven foot statue of his own. At such a moment, it is useful and proper to examine a man’s legacy.
Generally, statues and monuments are erected posthumously, allowing a person’s legacy to be weighed and measured over time. In some cases, heroes of one era fade quickly and become irrelevant to the next. In other cases, one’s reputation grows into something far more substantial than anyone who was a contemporary of that individual ever could have foreseen.
Therefore, it is sensible, in most cases, to wait several years, or even decades, after a person passes away before something as permanent as a statue should be unveiled.
Not all statues remain permanent, however, even while the subject of the monument is still alive. The people of Iraq, for example, toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein, denying him immortality even as he was about to be deposed and eventually executed.
Happily, most monuments and statues do not follow behind such a malignant legacy, like a shadow behind a crypt. Instead, they tend to be of the innocuous variety, a bland businessman with no apparent overriding moral compass.
They tend to be more like a statue to Bud Selig.
Selig’s work, then, is his legacy, even as his statue awaits its grand exhibition to an upper mid-western public.
And what, exactly is Selig’s life’s work? There is the bureaucrat, and there is the leader. One has to assume that whoever decided to commission this statue views Selig as an important leader, at least to the local Milwaukee community. After all, bureaucrats are seldom immortalized.
Nevertheless, Selig has been overwhelmingly a bureaucrat. Now, we need bureaucrats to get things done, and Selig has done that.
Financially speaking, baseball has consistently prospered under his reign, even if some teams claim to be losing money. Selig’s introduction of the Wild Card system has significantly changed the playoff dynamic, ensuring greater competition and, therefore, more fan interest during the month of September than ever before.
Even interleague play, as difficult as it may be to justify in a serious, competitive sense, has, measured by attendance figures, brought more fans into the parks. And the players, of course, are richer than ever.
If baseball was in dire economic straights, it would not be populated by hundreds of millionaire athletes anxious to shoot drugs into their systems to ensure future access to ever larger sums of money.
And this is precisely where the other half of Selig’s legacy, that of the amoral enabler, comes in.
Now, one might argue that it is not the job of a businessman, even a CEO, to act as mother-superior to the broader community. What matters is the bottom-line; morality is irrelevant here.
And yet recent history, including this morning’s headlines regarding Toyota, remind us of the true cost levied on an organization that believes business and morality make strange, uncomfortable bedfellows.
Toyota is currently enveloped in a scandal not all that unlike baseball’s own steroid scandal of the past decade or so. Corners are cut; Secrets are kept; Denials are made; Eventually, a semblance of truth and contrition are offered. The pattern has become all to familiar in recent years, affecting Presidents, athletes, and businessmen.
Therefore, Selig’s monument is, inadvertently, an appropriate national symbol reflecting the excesses and selfishness of our contemporary society.
But is his statue an appropriate symbol in the classical sense of honoring a hero?
Commissioner Selig is plainly guilty of allowing, even encouraging, a performance-enhancing drug scandal to develop and virtually overtake our National Pastime on his watch.
His refusal to even acknowledge that a serious problem existed until Congress became involved reveals a depth of denial regarding not only the problem itself, but also his own responsibility in the matter, that can only be judged as gross negligence.
Obviously, Selig the Businessman was quite satisfied with the state of the game throughout the ’90′s and on up to the early years of this century. Therefore, what need was there for a Moral Leader to get involved who might only muck things up?
In my very first blog post, I stated that there are two essential questions important to both American history and to baseball history:
1. Who deserves to be remembered?
2. How do they deserve to be remembered?
The answers to these questions, I stated further, comprise the collective historical mythology that we pass down through the generations, from father to son. Because baseball is, after all, a shared experience that evolves away from the realm of history to that of mythology as the decades turn to dust.
Question #1 has apparently already been answered: A fellow bureaucrat in Milwaukee has a decided that Commissioner Selig deserves to be honored and remembered.
Question #2, therefore, becomes more specifically: How does Bug Selig deserve to be remembered?
Images of used needles, Congressional Committees, contrite apologies by players, and home run records rendered meaningless dot the landscape of Selig’s Realm.
Clearly, then, if you seek Selig’s monument, look around you.