Posted by Bill Baer on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 10:25 pm

I am about to commit baseball blasphemy with what I am about to say, but stay with me here, folks: I don’t care about baseball’s Hall of Fame. I don’t care about any Hall of Fame for that matter, be it baseball, rock and roll, or scuba diving. Maybe I’m just growing tired of the debates, or maybe I have disillusioned myself from enjoying anything that could be fun.

When I read the outrage over Jay Mariotti’s blank column, or Bill Conlin’s fallacious logic, or Howard Bryant claiming much ado about nothing, I don’t feel anything. I don’t want to debate them and show them why they’re wrong; and I don’t want to agree with them and show everyone else why they’re right. I’m simply indifferent to all the arguing.

Now, I realize I’m setting a record for the most frequent usage of the pronoun I, so instead of telling you what I feel, I’ll tell you why I feel it.

Disengagement

Being that I’m merely a fan who likes to write about the sport and its participants as a hobby, my attachment to the players barely goes futher than where the grass meets the top of the dugout steps. I don’t know the players personally, so it is difficult for me to invest myself emotionally in their fortunes beyond what they do in uniform. Maybe I’m just dystopic.

I have had the pleasure of meeting many professional baseball players in my lifetime but since they were just cursory encounters (i.e. meeting Chipper Jones and Rafael Furcal in an airport) I still have no motivation to pull for them personally, be it praying for their golf scores or hoping they get inducted into the Hall of Fame.

What’s Done is Done

A player’s induction into the Hall of Fame is validation of a great career to many, including to the players themselves. However, even if Bert Blyleven never makes it in (and he probably will), I will always associate greatness with his name.

I can’t imagine why a Hall of Fame induction would change anybody’s opinion about anything. Was Van Halen any less of an incredibly awesome rock band before their 2007 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Did you look at their discography and think to yourself, “They were good… but not ZZ Top good”?

Likewise, even if Jack Morris gets inducted and Blyleven does not, I’ll always think of Morris as merely good and Blyleven as great. Their respective Hall of Fame statuses will have no effect on my opinion because I know what each pitcher did in his time on the baseball diamond.

The Writers

George Orwell once said, “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy”. I don’t know the personalities of non-baseball writers nearly enough to say how accurate his statement is, but I think it definitely holds true with regard to baseball writers.

Is Jay Mariotti’s intentionally blank Hall of Fame ballot a display of anything other than his vanity?

Does Bill Conlin’s groupthink balloting display anything other than laziness?

That’s not to disparage all baseball writers, but just to point out that the Baseball Writers Association of America is comprised of human beings who, by nature, tend to be vain, selfish, and lazy. Leaving the Hall of Fame in the hands of the writers, whose opinions are based on a lot of subjectivity, is guaranteed to result in inconsistent logic and the overall devaluing of the institution.

On Thursday’s edition of Outside the Lines on ESPN, Buster Olney pointed out that there’s a conflict of interest in allowing the writers to cast votes for Hall of Famers. The writers are in the business of selling newspapers, magazines, and online subscriptions and otherwise drawing eyeballs to websites. Writers that don’t successfully accomplish those tasks will eventually lose their jobs, so it makes complete sense for them to take the controversial stance and cause a debate*.

*By the way, you can’t fault Mariotti for casting a blank ballot. It’s not his fault; it’s the system’s. The institution gave him the power.

Inconsistency

In an column posted earlier today for ESPN, Howard Bryant wrote, “Milestones that never before provided a free pass [...] now are viewed as cause for automatic election.”

That is important to acknowledge if we are to take the Hall of Fame as seriously as we seem to ought to. As time goes on, and baseball and its players and its fans change, the standards will change as well. That refers not only to statistical measures of success, but ideological ones as well. The writers may keep Barry Bonds out of the Hall of Fame because it is believed that he is guilty of some very serious offenses. However, in 40 years, we will likely view his offenses as insignificant.

Preaching

Imagine you open up a history textbook to the chapter on George W. Bush’s War in Iraq. The opener reads:

Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake — the biggest blunder in the history of the United States resulting in billions of dollars being wasted, the rights of Americans being taken away, and having a strong hand in the economic depression that occurred several years later.

I’m a liberal and a Bush-despiser, but even that would anger me. History is not the place to make opinions. Just the facts, ma’am.

The writers have their soapboxes in newspapers, magazines, books, and on radio, television, and the Internet. If they want their feelings to be heard or read, they have their venues. The Hall of Fame, a museum that recollects baseball’s long and storied history, is not the place for writers to have their opinions heard. My stroll through the Hall of Fame should result in me seeing “Barry Bonds: 762 career HR” and not “Barry Bonds: 762 career HR*” with a disclaimer underneath that reads, “*Suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs during the latter part of his playing career.”

Futility

That’s why I don’t care about the Hall of Fame. It doesn’t change the way I look back on baseball history, and it won’t ever unless some big changes are made. Bert Blyleven has been campaigning for his induction for many, many years. It’s sad because his campaigning has actually adversely affected him. Sports by Brooks Tweeted recently, “Guy in BBWAA told me today that if Bert hadn’t campaigned so hard, he’d have gotten in LAST year.”

That’s all I needed to hear to justify my inability to care about the Hall of Fame.