The retired baseball writer thought I was joking. Lee Smith and Harold Baines have been elected to the Hall of Fame, I told him last week.
It was too early – or too late, depending on your view of the calendar – for April Fool’s Day, so no, I wasn’t joking. The newest members of the Hall of Fame were Lee Smith and Harold Baines.
They were elected last Sunday by a 16-person committee appointed by the Hall’s board of directors, Jane Forbes Clark, chairman. It was one of four committees that vote once or twice every five years to stock the Hall with new players in case the writers, in their annual vote, decide no one is worthy of election.
For 15 years the writers decided Smith wasn’t worthy of election. They decided Baines wasn’t worthy of election for all five years he was on the ballot and in fact declared him so unworthy that in his fifth year they didn’t give him enough votes to keep him on the ballot for a sixth year.
Clark and other Hall officials are so eager to have live bodies on the stage at Cooperstown on induction day in July they will almost grab anyone off the street. They have never figured out that having players the caliber of Smith and Baines detracts from and dilutes the honor for the players who deserve it, i.e., the players voted in by the writers.
I don’t always agree with the writers’ election, but if 350 or 400 writers vote for a player, so be it. But for the Hall to give players a second chance makes no sense. There’s no crying in baseball? There should not be a second chance either. If a batter strikes out, he’s out. That goes for Jack Morris, too.
When Morris was on the writers’ ballot for 15 years, I was as aggressive an advocate for him as anyone. But he fell short of election and should not have been handed to the veterans committee, which elected him last year.
In Smith’s 15 years on the writers’ ballot, he was presented to 7,454 voters. He received 3,215 total votes, or 43.1 percent. Only once did he receive as much as 50 percent. In 2012 he got to 50.6 percent.
Baines received a grand total of 150 votes, 5.5 percent of the votes, in the five years he was on the ballot. In 2011, 28 writers voted for him. His 4.8 percent was below the 5 percent minimum needed to remain eligible.
Yet the Hall’s historical overview committee saw fit to put Baines on this year’s veterans committee ballot. I wish I could say that Jane Forbes Clark put Baines and Smith on the ballot, but she didn‘t, at least as far as I know. I am ashamed to say that the ballot was concocted by 10 baseball writers and baseball’s premier statistician, Steve Hirdt of Elias Sports Bureau. The 10 current and former writers:
Bob Elliott (Toronto), Jim Henneman (Baltimore), Rick Hummel (St. Louis), Bill Madden (New York), Jim Reeves (Fort Worth), Tracy Ringolsby (Denver), Dave van Dyck (Chicago), Glenn Schwarz (San Francisco), Mark Whicker (Los Angeles) and Jack O’Connell (BBWAA).
Then there was the 16-member panel that elected Baines and Smith:
Hall of Famers Roberto Alomar, Bert Blyleven, Pat Gillick, Tony La Russa, Greg Maddux, Joe Morgan, John Schuerholz, Ozzie Smith and Joe Torre; major league executives Al Avila, Paul Beeston, Andy MacPhail and Jerry Reinsdorf; and veteran media members/historians Hirdt, Tim Kurkjian and Claire Smith.
I would ask some of these people to explain their thinking in making up the ballot or voting, but I don’t want to get them in trouble with Clark and Jeff Idelson, the Hall president. Several years ago two committee members were thrown off the committee because they were accused of talking to me about internal deliberations, which are supposed to be hush-hush.
Hall officials had no evidence anyone had talked to me, and I certainly didn’t admit that anyone had talked to me. But people who are asked to serve on Hall committees are foolishly flattered by the status the Hall gives them, and I didn’t want to jeopardize their positions.
What I don’t understand is why writers are flattered, not just by their committee positions but also by being asked to vote. As a voter, I have never felt flattered and at times have questioned if I should even be voting.
When I worked for The New York Times, there came a time when we were not allowed to vote for the Hall of Fame or for any post-season awards. One colleague, Joe Durso, was offended by that restriction and continued to vote.
Another colleague, Dave Anderson, arranged a meeting with the executive editor, Max Frankel, who had instituted the no-vote rule, and asked me to join him. However, by the time the meeting took place, I had decided Frankel was right. We shouldn’t be voting for people we covered. That status put us in the position of creating news instead of covering it.
The Hall asks the writers to vote because its officials know there is no better group, no more credible group, to decide who should be in the Hall of Fame. However, as long as the officials feel that way, why don’t they accept the writers’ verdict as final and not interfere by having a veterans committee give undeserving players a second or 11th chance (maximum time on the writers’ ballot is now 10 years)?
In 2013, when the writers elected no one, Joe Morgan, the Hall of Fame second baseman and the Hall’s vice chairman, conceded, “Maybe the writers got it right.”
One problem with someone like Baines being in the Hall is he will be used in future elections by voters who will say “if Baines is in the Hall of Fame then so-and-so and so-and-so should be in.”
That has happened with, among others, Bill Mazeroski, the former Pittsburgh second baseman who was a great defensive player but not a Hall of Famer. The veterans committee elected him in 2001 because Joe Brown, the Pirates’ general manager during Mazeroski’s career, was that year’s chairman of the veterans committee.
In those days, if the chairman had a player he wanted in the Hall, the other committee members went along with it.
The process has changed, but Hall officials stack the committees to achieve their goals. The most glaring example of that scheme is the failure of Marvin Miller to be elected in the 36 years since he retired as executive director of the Players Association.
When Miller was still alive – he died in 2012 at the age of 95 – he asked that he no longer be put on the ballot and his son Peter has consistently repeated that request. But the Hall has ignored Miller’s wishes, and he will be on the veterans committee ballot for an eighth time next December.
And once more Clark will put enough management voters on the 16-person committee to make sure there will be at least five voters who will say no to Miller. Election requires 12 votes. Sixteen minus five equals 11.
If you looked up Miller in Wikipedia, you would find this quote from Red Barber, a famed baseball broadcaster: “Marvin Miller, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, is one of the two or three most important men in baseball history.” Ruth and Robinson are in the Hall of Fame. Miller isn’t.
When confronted in the past about Miller’s absence, Idelson, the HOF president, has verbally thrown up his hands and said, “What do you wants us to do? We put him on the ballot.”
At the same time, though, Idelson and Clark have stacked the committee against Miller. They continue putting owners and other management types on the committee but have never asked Richard Moss, Don Fehr or Gene Orza to serve. Nor have they asked writers who they know would vote for Miller.
Meanwhile, they give a second chance to players whom the writers have long rejected. The election of Smith and Baines is the equivalent of Bowie Kuhn’s election by a similar committee in 2008. In his 15-year tenure as commissioner, Kuhn did nothing to warrant his election to the Hall of Fame. In fact, much of what he did or said was negative, including his dire warning in 1975 that free agency would be the death of baseball. Free agency and baseball are still around, but Kuhn isn’t.
The election of Smith and Baines cheapens the Hall of Fame and dilutes the honor for those who were legitimately elected. This second-chance system is wrong. There are no do-overs in baseball, and there shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame.
If the writers had any sense, they would be insulted by the Clark-Idelson system. Tell them, if you want us to continue voting, give up the second-chance system. If you don’t want to, find other voters to keep you in business.
THANKS BUT NO THANKS
Randy Levine, the New York Yankees president, had a sudden but brief spurt of notoriety last Monday, and the Yankees weren’t even playing. A television news network, MSNBC, included him in a group of six men it said were candidates to succeed John Kelly as President Trump’s chief of staff. Levine quickly denied the story and his interest in becoming part of the story.
“I’m happy being president of the Yankees,” he told me upon returning my call.
How did Levine get involved in the political speculation? When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City, Levine was one of his deputy mayors and has remained close to Giuliani, who is a Trump lawyer. Either Giuliani suggested Levine to the president, or someone remembered the connection and threw Levine’s name out there.
When George Steinbrenner was alive, Trump was an occasional visitor to Yankee Stadium. In fact, that’s where I first met him.
“I’ve been reading you since I was in college,” Trump said.