As the old saying goes, sportswriters' opinions are like armpits, if armpits were published on the front page of every newspaper's sports section.* So lots of armpits were exposed today, explaining why their owners did or did not vote for various candidates to enter the baseball Hall of Fame. None of them seem to have noted my personal theory, that this year's ballot is essentially a modern day retelling of The Taming of the Shrew.
Just to establish the groundwork, here's what happened. No one was elected to the Hall of Fame this year. The full list of voting results is, as always, recorded in tabular form by Baseball Reference. The major candidates were Barry Bonds, Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza, Curt Schilling, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
Of those, McGwire has admitted using steroids. Clemens, Bonds and Sosa never failed a drug test, but anyone with eyes could see they were a bit, umm, unnatural. Bagwell was often suspected. Piazza hit a lot of homeruns and had bacne, so duh⸮**. Biggio was 5'11"/185 and was never suspected of anything other than sticking around a couple years too long.
The argument basically goes like this: People who clearly took steroids should not be elected to the Hall of Fame, because they're cheaters. I want to agree with that, but we've already elected cheaters to the Hall of Fame. There's a bunch of spitball pitchers and guys who took uppers. Babe Ruth, in fact, had incredibly elevated testosterone levels from his habit of eating a whole roasted pig before games.*** We can't keep everyone who had big muscles and hit a bunch of homeruns out of the Hall of Fame entirely****.
The key problem is that we use the Hall of Fame for two purposes. It is a museum of baseball history. But it's also a personal honor. The ceremony itself is almost like a canonization, not just inclusion in a museum.
I suspect the biggest reason the writers didn't vote anyone into the Hall of Fame is what I'm going to call "The Taming of the Shrew Theory". In the play, there's a man with two daughters, Ophelia and Desdemona. For whatever reason*****, he decides his youngest daughter can't get married until after his eldest daughter. Unfortunately Ophelia is a total harpy. Nobody's going to marry her, which is no good for Desdemona who wants to marry Mercutio, I think. So she has to get Nick Bottom to convince her older sister marry him, so she can get married to Mercutio on Midsummer's Night. Anyway, the exact details aren't important.
My point is, Barry Bonds is Ophelia. He's the "eldest daughter" on the Hall of Fame ballot. He's almost certainly one of the top 5 hitters of all time. He's 3rd in WAR, 1st in career home runs, 4th in career RBIs, 1st in walks, 1st in intentional walks and holds the single-season home run record.
But he's a shrew. Besides the PED suspicions, he was a grouch, a bad teammate, a rude interview, basically an unlikeable arrogant prick. Doesn't it just make you sick to think about him strutting up to the podium, with a grin on his face, clearly thinking what an honor it must be for players like Stan Musial and Hank Aaron to be in his company? That's the real holdup. It's obvious Bonds should be in the museum. It's also clear that no one wants to put on a ceremony in his honor.
It boils down to the fact that if Barry Bond's isn't a Hall of Famer, nobody is. So nobody is.
* My opinion is like yo mama, in that [Ed: not appropriate for posting in public.]
** Did you know there's a symbol to indicate sarcasm? Yeah, I bet you did⸮
*** [Ed: Citation needed, but why didn't Ryan Braun try that excuse? Does he eat kosher?]
**** Well, technically, yes we can and we're well on our way to doing it.
***** I seem to remember reading part of The Taming of the Shrew in high school. This blog being a Research Free Zone, I'm going off memory here.
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