The
Baseball Hall of Fame shapes the narrative of baseball history.
Crucially,
while the Hall shapes baseball’s history, its decisions of induction and
rejection do not create it. A significant portion of the reaction from the
sabermetric and thoughtful corners of the baseball world against the lack of
admissions in the Hall’s most recent vote seems to be concerned that the Baseball
Writers Association of America is denying the existence of 20 years of baseball
history.
Many of the writers who cast blank
ballots, left off unindicted but muscle-bound stars, and allowed subjective
moral codes to rule their vote are undoubtedly trying to erase the so-called
“Steroid Era” from the game’s history. But what they have failed to realize is
that by intentionally failing to admit these accomplished men they are not
erasing them from history, they are merely making their own poorly reasoned
arguments the next chapter in each player’s narrative.
The Hall of Fame vote does not merely
serve as a stamp of approval on a player’s career, mainly because the Hall,
like all mediums of sorting and recording history, is part of the history that
it attempts to document. How historical events are discussed in museum
exhibits, scholarly papers, and university courses reflects not just the
importance of the events or people at issue, but also the biases and concerns
of the society discussing them.
Discussions of slavery in textbooks
written in the early 20th century by southern authors tell modern
historians a great deal not only about how certain people at that time felt
about a polarizing issue, but also offer insight into the society that
produced those thought processes. I believe that the argument over Performance
Enhancing Drug (PED) use by the baseball intelligentsia falls within the same
framework. (Yes I just compared slavery to steroids). As much as votes against
Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Jeff Bagwell, and Mike
Piazza attempt to minimize their statistical accomplishments and gloss over
their historical impact on the game, they simultaneously provide a great deal
of insight into the moral structure of the majority of baseball writers, and by
extension, baseball itself.
The travesty of a vote this
afternoon has not erased the history of the steroid era, it has added to it:
the moralizing, apologizing, and finger-pointing of our present generation will
become part of the narrative of baseball. If Bonds and Clemens are denied entry
to the Hall after fifteen years on the ballot, as McGwire and Sosa almost
certainly will, their accomplishments will no more be lost to history as those
of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Pete Rose, Dick Allen, Lou Whitacker, Keith Hernandez
and the countless other players who for one reason or another failed the Hall’s
standards.
The Hall’s decision on each player
adds to his history and shapes the narrative of each man’s career. Even the (arguably)
worst of these decisions- Jackson’s ban, has only made the story of the Black
Sox of 1919 all the more memorable.
The anti-PED votes cast today will
not erase the last two decades of history, but they will add to it, and I
sincerely believe that forty years from now the votes of the Baseball Writers
Association of America today will seem precisely as inexplicable as the
decision of dozens of voters forty years ago to leave Jackie Robinson off their
ballots.
