The Chris Moeller Archives

"Preserving History, Honoring Excellence, Connecting Generations"

The National Baseball Hall of Fame is a bizarre institution, its relationship to Major League Baseball more peculiar still. The Hall is a privately-run museum. Never forget this. Its president in 2003, Dale Petroskey, a former assistant press secretary in the Reagan White House, disinvited stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon from a planned 25 year anniversary celebration of the classic film "Bull Durham" because of the couple's public position at the time opposing the war on Iraq. Despite claims at the time that they were disassociating themselves from politics, the museum hosts a statewide meeting each year for the New York Republican Party.

It's located in Cooperstown, New York, because of the erroneous claim that Cooperstown native Abner Doubleday, a Union general during the Civil War, invented the game. In 2008, Petroskey was forced to resign for "failing to exercise proper fiduciary responsibility" over the museum, and even last year, despite the support of almost-endless public promotion and general goodwill, the museum operated at a financial loss of $2 million. Baseball players and teams (and even sometimes, fans) are encouraged to provide personal and historic memorabilia to the "national" museum for the purposes of public display, but the Hall has frequently been victimized by scandals involving artifacts, by large-scale heists and other perpetrated frauds.

Major League Baseball has two methods for inducting baseball figures into the enshrinement wing of the museum-- an annual vote of the 10+-year members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, and a semi-annual vote by a committee of league veteran or retired players, executives, and media officials. Though the museum purports to host a "National Baseball" Hall of Fame and not a "Major League Baseball" Hall of Fame, the museum, in concert with the Hall, passed a rule in the early '90s that forbid the induction by either group of electors of any person whose name appears on MLB's permanent ineligibility list. This action was taken specifically to keep Pete Rose, banned from MLB for life for gambling, from being inducted.

Rumored and/or admitted users of "performance enhancing drugs" (meaning: steroids, HGH, Creatine, but not amphetamines or monkey urine) have not been deemed ineligible for election, and as a result, some of their names appear on the ballots, but a majority of the writers who vote in the Hall's primary election campaign have taken it upon themselves to declare (or at least privately determine) that they will not vote for an MLB player they suspect of having used PEDs in the performance of his on-the-field duties. Suspicion has been categorized by these voters as anything from a player's full public admission, to court testimony delivered by convicted drug dealers, to unexplained statistical spikes in measured diamond performance, to back acne.

They choose to do so, by admission in most cases, because the Hall of Fame boasts an election eligibility rule that states that candidates should be considered "based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played." Thanks to an extraordinarily-unique reading of this personality clause-- and a very hypocritical one-- as I will now commence testifying, the following individuals have been made eligible for enshrinement one or more times but subsequently voted down...

"SHOELESS" JOE JACKSON, owner of the third-highest career batting average in MLB history
PETE ROSE, MLB's all-time leader in hits
BARRY BONDS, MLB's all-time leader in home runs
ROGER CLEMENS, winner of 7 annual Cy Young Awards as the best pitcher in his league
MARK McGWIRE, 583 career home runs (10th all-time), demolisher of Roger Maris' 37-year record for home runs in a season
SAMMY SOSA, 609 career home runs (8th), only player to hit 60 home runs in a season three times (also, three consecutive seasons)
RAFAEL PALMEIRO, 569 home runs (12th), 3,020 hits (25th)
MIKE PIAZZA, all-time home run leader among catchers (427)
CRAIGH BIGGIO, 3,060 hits (21st)
JEFF BAGWELL, 36th all-time in WAR (Wins Above Replacement) among position players
MARVIN MILLER, founding director of the baseball players' union, responsible for revolutionary improvements to the game-- financially for all involved and to the business' public promotion


Now, consider that the following figures, each brimming with integrity, sportsmanship, and character are enshrined...

KENESAW MOUNTAIN LANDIS, baseball's first commissioner who almost single-handedly worked to keep the sport segregated from his first day on the job in 1920 until his death in 1944; suspended the eight "Black Sox" players for life from the league a day after the men were acquitted in court
TOM YAWKEY, 44-season owner of the Boston Red Sox, whose team never won a championship during his tenure ('33-'76), and was the second-to-last among the then-16 franchise owners to field an African-American player, in 1959, 12 full years after Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodgers debut
EDDIE COLLINS and JOE CRONIN, both enforced Yawkey's segregation policy as Red Sox general managers
CAP ANSON, who refused to take the field in exhibition games against black players in the 1800s, and is generally credited with establishing and holding the color line in MLB in the pre-Landis era
GAYLORD PERRY, who had admitted before his Hall enshrinement in 1991 that he threw an outlawed spitball throughout his career, from 1964 to 1983, and even titled his 1974 autobiography "Me and the Spitter"
WHITEY FORD, who once said of his habit of doctoring baseballs, "I didn't begin cheating until late in my career, when I needed something to help me survive. I didn't cheat when I won the 25 games in 1961. I don't want anybody to get any ideas and take my Cy Young away. And I didn't cheat in 1963 when I won 24 games. Well, maybe a little."
DON SUTTON, ejected and suspended 10 days for scuffing a baseball in 1978, and certainly didn't stop there
BOWIE KUHN, former commissioner who served as Marvin Miller's punching bag in labor negotiations throughout the 1970s and early '80s, and who worked so diligently on behalf of the clubs to keep salaries down, even if it meant they were refusing to improve their roster through player free agency
TY COBB, once went into the grandstand during a game (in 1912) and pummeled a handicapped man; was coerced into retirement in 1926 (along with another Hall member TRIS SPEAKER) over allegations of game-fixing; a widely-recognized racist once charged with attempted murder against a black man, on record as having assaulted a black elevator operator, a black construction worker, a black groundskeeper, and the black groundskeeper's wife
SMOKEY JOE WOOD, like Cobb and Speaker, accused of game-fixing by former pitcher Dutch Leonard (evidently Leonard was the Kirk Radomski or Brian McNamee of his day)
CHARLES COMISKEY, "outed" a black player, Charlie Grant, who was posing as a Cherokee during an exhibition game; widely regarded as the true villain of the Black Sox scandal, his penny-pinching included having held Eddie Cicotte out of the final nine games of that 1919 season for the purpose of denying the pitcher a performance bonus
ED BURROWS, COMISKEY, BARNEY DREYFUSS, CLARK GRIFFITH, BAN JOHNSON, LANDIS, LARRY MACPHAIL, AL SPALDING, GEORGE WEISS, AND OTHERS (?), club owners and league executives that operated a segregated business
ENOS SLAUGHTER, reported to have been the ringleader in a campaign to organize a players' strike against Jackie Robinson's debut with the Dodgers
WILLIE MAYS, named by outfielder John Milner during the 1980's Pittsburgh drug trials as the player that provided the "red juice," or liquid amphetamines, in the New York Mets' locker room during the early '70s
WILLIE STARGELL, named by outfielder John Milner during the 1980's Pittsburgh drug trials as the player that provided the amphetamines in the Pittsburgh Pirates' locker room during the late '70s and early '80s
HANK AARON, admitted amphetamine user in his autobiography "I Had a Hammer"
REGGIE JACKSON, has tried unsuccessfully to walk back his long-ago admission that he used amphetamines, even while he continues to publicly chastise the later generation of PED users
FRANK ROBINSON, GOOSE GOSSAGE, 'fess up you hypocritical assholes, you know you did the "greenies" that were laid out on every clubhouse table for 20 years
MICKEY MANTLE, who, according to Zev Chafits' book "Cooperstown Confidential," received a steroid and amphetamine injection in 1961 when he and teammate Roger Maris were both chasing Babe Ruth's single-season home run record and simultaneously chasing a pennant for the Yankees, was benched at least one game that September with an abcess caused by the quack doctor that administered the shot with an infected needle
ROBERTO ALOMAR, sued by two different women for supposedly, knowingly infecting them with the HIV virus, cases settled out of court
ORLANDO CEPEDA, served 10 months of a five-year conviction for attempting to smuggle marijuana into Puerto Rico
KIRBY PUCKETT, charged with false imprisonment, fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, fifth-degree criminal assault after being accused of groping a woman in 2002 (acquitted)
SANDY KOUFAX, admitted to pitching "high" on painkillers for much of his injury-plagued career, and admitted being on a multitude of PEDs during the 1966 World Series
BABE RUTH, PAUL WANER, GROVER CLEVELAND ALEXANDER, AND HACK WILSON, prodigious drunks, even among their very competitive company; frequent violators of the 1919 Volstead Act (additionally, none of these men ever played against black players. Comedian Chris Rock once accurately described Ruth as the owner of "714 affirmative-action home runs")
PUD GALVIN, admitted to enhancing his performance with the use of monkey urine in 1889
PAUL MOLITOR, cocaine addict until the age of 25
FERGUSON JENKINS, arrested for cocaine possession in 1980
DUKE SNIDER, pleaded guilty to federal tax fraud in 1995
WILLIE McCOVEY, convicted on charges of inadequate reporting of income between the years 1988 and 1990
STEVE CARLTON, told Philadelphia Magazine in 1994, "Twelve Jewish bankers in Switzerland rule the world."
WADE BOGGS, admitted extramarital affair on national television and settled out of court with a woman, not his wife, who sued him for $12 million for emotional distress and breach of oral contract for promising to support her financially.
LEO DUROCHER, suspended for the entire 1947 season for "association with known gamblers" in violation of league rules
DENNIS ECKERSLEY, alcoholic, checked himself into rehab after a dismal 1986 season
CARLTON FISK, pleaded guilty to a charge of driving under the influence only two weeks ago
TOMMY LASORDA, asshole

Who am I forgetting?

posted by CM @ 7:07 PM