The baseball Hall of Fame is a conundrum in a way that no other sport’s hall of fame has ever been. The reason is because Hall voters are forced to play not just gate keepers to the Hall, but morality police as well. The culprit is both the character clause and the specific way the Baseball Writer’s Association of America asks its members to vote. What it comes down to is a player can gain entrance to the Hall only by both being judged to be an all time great at the sport and a good person, one who has avoided bad sportsmanship, cheating in its different forms, and personal indiscretions, including domestic violence.
There are tons of writers better equipped than I to explain to you why Bobby Abreu’s career is or is not worthy of the Hall of Fame, or why Billy Wagner should or should not be in despite (or because!) he was a relief pitcher. And the truth of it is there is so much data available now that figuring out who was great and how great they were is a relatively simple exercise. This is how it is in just about every other sport.
Where things get complicated is when you start to set moral standards, behavioral judgements of someone’s off-the-field personal life as a requirement for admittance. To be clear, I’m not arguing against this. Simply I’m saying it makes things extremely difficult because it requires voters to make two judgements, is a player’s career Hall worthy, and does that player meet the vague moral standards of the moment. The baseball part is comparatively easy.
Things get even more complex when you consider the players already in the Hall of Fame. Kirby Puckett was a domestic abuser. Many if not most of the players from the first 50 years of Hall elections were racists, sometimes not very quiet about it, either. Is it fair to hold out Manny Ramirez, who meets the baseball standards of the Hall pretty easily, because he supposedly cheated by using performance enhancing drugs when the club he’s attempting to gain entrance to is populated by dozens of players who used greenies in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as well as spitballers, scuffballers, and the like? Maybe! Maybe not! But Manny Ramirez can’t gain entrance to the Hall without voters first answering that question.
How do you solve this problem? The Hall isn’t going to go back and remove players for past indiscretions and the block of writers tasked with making these decisions isn’t in agreement on how to apply new standards. The result is judgements are being made unevenly, both across history and across this year’s ballot.
Solving this is an impossibility. Writers must either ignore character entirely and vote for the best players regardless of which laws they’ve broken, moral, criminal, or baseball, or the Baseball Hall of Fame becomes the Baseball Hall of Fame and Morality. Which, again, is fine! If that’s what people want, or that’s what the Hall wants, fine. But that will be the result.
I think you may have gleaned my position on this, but in case not, here it is. I’d put all of them in. Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer argued, or at least presented his position, that this incongruity was too much of a burden to place on the voters. The only reasonable solution he could come up with was to not vote at all, despite his qualification as a BBWAA member of 10 years making him eligible. Ben is a smart person and a great writer and it’s entirely possible if I were in his position I’d either make the same choice, or a lesser one. To me though, the problem with that position comes if everyone agrees with it. Then you have no Hall voting. That’s not to say it’s not the best of a bunch of bad answers, because it might yet be, but I don’t think it solves the problem of any more than one writer.
The question I always hear is that the story of baseball can’t be written without Player X being in the Hall of Fame. I take issue with that. The story of baseball can be written without just about any player short of Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. If Mike Trout ceased to exist or just wasn’t put into the Baseball Hall of Fame for some reason, baseball would still go on and the history of baseball would still be rich, fulfilling, and eminently worthwhile. And, let’s be honest, how much can you say about most of the members of the Baseball Hall? Likely not a whole lot. That’s not a crime (of the baseball variety), it’s probably just puts you solidly in the majority. The point is the Hall isn’t the arbiter of what is and what isn’t worth remembering when it comes to baseball, whether it wants to be or not.
So where does all that leave us? Still between a rock and a hard place. So I say again, the only solution I can come up with is to put all worthy players in and publish their mistakes, misdeeds, indiscretions and criminalities in plain sight. Alex Rodriguez had lousy sportsmanship, was caught using steroids multiple times, and is undoubtedly one of the best hitting shortstops of all time. Why can’t we put that (or a slightly better worded version of that) right on the plaque? My grandmother was a wonderful loving mother and also quite a difficult person to deal with. That topic was brought up in depth at her funeral. We remembered her, with love, with all of her warts, because we loved her and because she was a human. There was no sugarcoating. There was no lying or avoiding because she had just passed. We discussed the whole of the woman. Why can’t we do that for Hall of Famers too?
The Hall is, after all, a museum, and museums are supposed to tell the whole story. The best museums leave us not just with increased reverence for the past, but with a deeper and richer understanding of the figures that populated it, and that can not be achieved without an honest accounting of the people in the Hall and the actions those people chose to take during their lives in baseball and out of it.
Orioles Analyst
Matthew Kory is a Orioles / MLB Analyst for BSL. He has covered baseball professionally for The Athletic, Vice Sports, Sports On Earth, FanGraphs, and Baseball Prospectus. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two boys, and his cats, Mini Squeaks and The President. Co-Host of The Warehouse.