The Baseball Hall of Fame bills itself as a shrine to the most notable players who have ever set foot on a diamond. Nestled in bucolic Cooperstown, New York, it's an airy room lined with bronze plaques of the game's most indelible names: Cobb, Mays, Ruth.
And yet, there is a conspicuous absence of some of baseball's most famous faces. The Hall does not include the player who collected more hits than anyone else. Nor does it include the player with the most home runs, nor the hurler with the most Cy Young Awards.
The unveiling today of the 2015 class of inductees — a slate that for a third straight year will be bereft of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens — further undercuts the Hall's credibility. So, too, do the omissions of other deserving players unjustly punished for the crime of having played baseball in the 1990s.
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It's widely understood that Hall voting is a complete farce. And as in years past, we've seen a slew of suggestions for "fixing" the process. Some are even pretty good! Yet despite their worthy intent, these proposals err in that they wrongly presume that the Hall can be saved — and that it's even worth saving.
Baseball, more than any other professional American sport, prides itself on historical pageantry. Put another way, it's a sport obsessed with a mythologized version of its past.
A little nostalgia for a game predating the Civil War is understandable. I'm as big a fan as the next guy of those sped-up videos of a grainy Babe Ruth scuttling like a bug around the bases. But when wielded by the game's appointed gatekeepers — both the voters and the Hall itself — that nostalgia becomes perverted into resolute, curmudgeonly stasis.
The voting body is a bloated mess of nearly 600 members, some of whom haven't covered baseball in years. (To wit, here's a golf website explaining the ballot of one of its three eligible voters last year.) Then there are the crackpots who think "gut feeling" trumps research, the usual suspects who phone the whole thing in, and, of course, the shrill nutjobs who treat the ballot as an excuse to troll basement-dwelling nerds.
The voting process cannot be fixed without gutting that body, and that's just not going to happen. Consider that one of the most popular proposals for reforming the vote is to simply increase the number of selections each candidate can make on his or her ballot. It's a good idea in theory, especially considering the backlog of sterling candidates newly eligible for induction with even more no-doubters on the horizon. Yet last year, with one of the most stacked ballots ever, only half of voters burned all their votes. Dropping ballot limits would buoy some candidates, but it's no panacea.
True, the Baseball Writers' Association of America in December approved a resolution recommending the ballot limit increase from 10 to 12. But that's nothing more than a Band-Aid — and a non-binding one at that — that won't fly with Hall of Fame officials who have no desire to act on anything that could erode the institution's exclusivity.
As for the Hall itself, it's a stodgy institution that considers change a fate worse than death. It's most notable change in recent years? Reducing the number of years candidates can remain on the ballot from 15 to 10 — a transparent shift aimed not at ensuring a fair evaluation of history, but rather at more swiftly eradicating a dark chapter from the official record.
I don't mean to impugn everything about the Hall and its gatekeepers. There are many, many thoughtful voters, and the Hall is a delightfully eerie memorial to poke around in for an afternoon.
But what's the point of a Hall of Fame that schemes against its own mission by trying to eradicate a decade of its past? And what's the point of a baseball institution that refuses to acknowledge arguably the greatest hitter and pitcher who ever played the game?
Some may object that the Hall contains too much history to be ignored. Conveniently though, there is already a more inclusive memorial in Cooperstown chronicling baseball's rich history: the Hall's adjoining museum.
Sure, the Hall has all the regal pomp, but the museum is loaded with relics far more interesting than all those bronze plaques. It fleshes out the exploits of the faces next door in between tidbits of trivia and memorabilia. And unlike the Hall, it deigns to mention the unmentionable players. Bonds' record home run ball is already there. The museum even features an early Nintendo game named after Clemens.
It would take a Ruthian effort to overhaul the Hall of Fame. So rather than gripe every year and pine for incremental, ineffectual progress, we'd be better off eschewing it as the game's definitive record of greatness in favor of the more comprehensive history on display next door.
