Why the Hall of Fame just ain't all that...

Please don’t misinterpret the following post, baseball fans.

I like the Hall of Fame. I really do. I hope to go to Cooperstown sometime soon and see all of that awesomeness. There are some artifacts there that would just blow my mind to lay eyes on. Baseball ties us to the past, and clearly that’s one of the many reasons why we love it. Here’s where the HOF loses me. What exactly is it supposed to be? I think that it’s become the measuring stick for greatness, and that’s not good. I wish there was just a “baseball museum of history” rather than calling the greatest source of baseball history out there the HALL OF FAME.

So here’s my thesis, as it were: The Hall of Fame, while nice, is not now, never will be, and can never hope to be an accurate measure of greatness.

I’ll start with this evidence…

1. Numbers are great. Numbers are entertaining, and I think that numbers have gotten so advanced with the Baseball Prospectus guys doing what they do and advanced sabermetrics coming so far in the past couple of years, that numbers can really help you get the real “value” of a player. I love numbers, honestly. Eric obsesses over them, even. But numbers in baseball over great periods of time progressively mean less and less.

Part of what makes baseball great is the field on which it’s played. There are few things better looking/feeling that a baseball field. The dirt under your feet. The expanse that spreads out in front of a batter at home plate. Ah…it’s incredible. There is no regulation field! Imagine that in any other sport!!! Imagine being able to make a football field 110 yards to make it “defense friendly” or 90 yards to have higher scoring games. Imagine making basketball goals 9 ft. or 11 ft. It’s insane to even think about such things…unless you’re a baseball fan. So, for football and basketball, their bland and sometimes boring and uncreative nature, flawed as it is, makes their numbers comparable over long periods of time. In baseball, when you look at fields like Fenway, Camden Yards, and that God awful disgrace called Citizens Bank Park, you have to compare them to Turner Field, Petco Park, and wherever it is that the Giants play now that Candlestick has been torn down (I had to google it, it’s AT&T Park…which has a really nice ring to it).

How in this world do you measure greatness by comparing the numbers of people that play in those stadiums half the time???? You just can’t.

So Ryan Howard is the fastest player to ever get to 200 homeruns. Who cares? I’d hit 200 home runs too if I made a baseball field the size of my back yard. I really would. That just absolutely and completely DOES NOT MATTER. He’s a good player, but not because of that. We absolutely can’t let numbers be our guide in cases like these. Also, imagine what the next, prolific Yankees slugger will put up numbers-wise in that Cracker Jack joke of a ballpark that they just built. I guarantee you that, unless something changes, the next home run king will spend his entire career in Yankee Stadium or Citizens Bank Park (I would throw in Great American Ball Park, but the Reds will probably suck for too long to include them).

You see, part of what makes baseball great and creates a unique fan experience and makes it beautiful and different no matter where in this great country you’re seeing a game, and that creates a desire in grown men to go to every MLB stadium….is also the downfall of the HOF. When you don’t have a regulation-sized playing field, you can’t let numbers be the judge of greatness.

2. Another problem with the Hall of Fame is that the game has just changed so much. I know that level of competition is different, but everyone in every sport deals with that. Yeah, football players are bigger and stronger now than they used to be and basketball players are taller, but the fields are still 100yds and the balls are still the same and the goals are still 10 ft. high.

The equipment in baseball has changed, and so have the rules…drastically. Level of competition is fine until Bob Gibson comes around and so dominates his competitors that baseball shrinks the strike zone to make the game more hitter friendly. He single handedly made the game less marketable to the ignorant wretches out there who can’t appreciate dominant pitching. So, the commissioner and the owners dropped the ball (as they SO often do) and changed the rules to make the game more hitter friendly. So Gibson’s numbers got worse and his competitors got better, and that’s what we’re going to use as the standard for how great they were???? No…it just can’t happen.

The balls are wound tighter. The ballparks shrank just as the strike zone did, and nobody conquered that until Greg Maddux.

3. Clearly, steroids have jacked the whole thing up. The entire HOF is in disarray now because, hey, we let Ricky Henderson in and he was probably roiding right along with the Twin Towers the whole time. So who else can we keep out? Bonds? Clemens? Sosa? No, not really. I think at the end of the day you just have to put them in there. If Henderson came out and said, yeah, I did it…then do we take him out of the hall of fame??? Doubtful…We can’t do that anymore that we can strip the World Series rings off of the 04 Red Sox who we know were doing it too.

Look, I hate them all for cheating. It’s like a black eye on the hottest girl in the world (Senia, it’s you if you’re reading this…and I’m sure you are). I hate them for tainting what I love so much…but it’s tainted. It’s just officially tainted. So yeah, they cheated. But was it cheating for Tris Speaker to keep a file in his pocket? Maybe. That wasn’t illegal in 1900 and neither were a lot of the substances people were taking in 2003. So put these guys in a baseball museum…but let’s not measure their greatness by the inflated numbers that they put up.

4. Another inherent flaw with the HOF as a measure of greatness is the voting procedure. Sportswriters get to decide who’s great and who’s not? Are you kidding me? Their personal bias, the town-to-town bias, and the big market players vs. the small market players further prove my point. It’s a flawed system for measure greatness. Their system of bias and trying to get people in on the first ballot/second ballot/eight ballot garbage is just so stupid. If someone is worthy on their 7th try, their numbers haven’t changed. They’re the same player they were on the first ballot, so just put ‘em in. The sportswriters are the reason that Jim Rice (Boston) gets in but not Dale Murphy. That’s an absolute joke. Explain to me how Dale Murphy hits 398 HRs, has a career BA of .265, and OPS of .815, wins 2 MVPs and makes 7 All-Star games doesn’t get in but Jim Rice hits 382HRs, .298 BA, OPS = .854, wins 1 MVP, and makes 8 All-star games and gets in. Even if you purely base greatness off of numbers, this just doesn’t make sense. Could it be that Rice played in Boston???? Perhaps…but something’s fishy here. When you’re the best player in the league for 2 YEARS STRAIGHT, you have to either put this guy in the HOF or throw out those years of baseball. It’s too political. Braves fans my age and a little older are gonna tell their kids about watching Murphy and how he just controlled the game and they’ll talk about his magnetism and they way he played. Then those kids will probably say, “Oh, okay cool…so he’s in the Hall Of Fame then, right?” And the dad’s will have to say, “Well…no….but that doesn’t matter.” And the kid’ll say, “Yeah it does, the best players go to the Hall.” And dad’ll say, “No…it’s complicated….entry to the Hall is all about numbers and big market cities and stuff.” And the kid’ll say okay, but he won’t remember Dale Murphy like he should. He won’t care. And you won’t really ever be able to explain it to him.

5. Pete Rose.

6. Ted Williams goes into the HOF no matter what. He’s probably the greatest hitter that ever lived. But he lost a lot of his prime years to the wars. There were probably tons of guys who would’ve barely squeaked in if they wouldn’t have lost those years…but those that were on the borderline are just forgotten now…as players and as soldiers.

7. The rules of the different leagues further jack everything up. American League baseball and National League baseball are just too different. How do you measure pitcher’s stats in the AL vs. the NL. The ignorant fools who vote for the HOF probably don’t, so they see somebody with an ERA of 3.5 in the NL as better than someone with a 3.6 in the AL, but that’s probably not true. How much credit do you give a DH? The DH is an abomination to the game, first of all. How do we really put people in the HOF who were not complete players. They only had to play half the game. So many other guys won’t make it because they tore up their knees in the field and couldn’t hit as well or they just tired themselves out trying to be a complete player rather than some baphoon that just swings a bat hard. But DH’s will go in…and you know why? Because number are neat-o. And that’s a shame.

8. Also, no intangibles what so ever are taken into account. How were these guys in the club house? Did they make their team mates better? Did they piss people off and fight with their manager over whether or not they could wear gold ear rings? When you look at Chipper Jones direct traffic and move 7 other fielders around based on his knowledge of the game and the knowledge of the hitter, you have to know that baseball is so huge on intangibles…things that you can’t measure. You can’t possibly hope to quantify qualities like that. And Chipper will make the HOF for sure, but not because of that…it’ll be because he put up some cool numbers.

IN CONCLUSION..

The Hall of Fame, and the sportswriters, and many of the fans seek greatness in the numbers that players put up. But numbers, which are only good for the now, can’t measure the scope of a player’s greatness historically.

So look, have the Hall of Fame…and let the people in based purely on numbers for all I care…but those of us who love baseball shouldn’t judge greatness based on whether they made it to the Hall. I guess it’s a valid recognition of cool stats and numbers, and of memories…but it’s not an accurate measure of one’s greatness.

Unfortunately, it will always be viewed as the measuring stick for true greatness. I may tell my kids one day about how good Dale Murphy was and that little freak will say, “Oh yeah, well he’s probably in the HOF then, right?” And I’ll have to say, “No…not quite….it’s complicated with Atlanta not being a huge market and him being on a bad team…you see….sometimes the sportswriters…nevermind, son.” And he’ll forget about Dale Murphy, as I’m sure people from today have forgotten about some of the greats from the 70s that never made it in the sportswriters little club. That conversation should never, ever happen.

The bottom line = The Hall of Fame, while a cool museum, is an inaccurate measure of the greatness of ball players.

Case closed.