Preserving history. Honoring excellence. Connecting generations. That’s what the Baseball Hall of Fame voting is supposed to be all about. It says so, in those very words, at the top of the cover letter accompanying the official ballot.
They might as well have put “playing moralist” up there, too.
That’s what you end up doing. You judge some of the candidates not by what they did on the field but what they did off it. Which brings us to Mark McGwire. If he has officially disowned his past, as he did in front of Congress that day, why should the Hall of Fame voters reward him for it?
That’s the part I can’t get past. I didn’t vote for McGwire and never have. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. Truth is, I wish it hadn’t come to this. I wish there were guidelines, in black and white, for how voters should treat players who are believed to have disgraced the game by using performance-enhancing drugs.
Instead of black and white, there’s only gray. Instead of proof, there are only allegations. Instead of reality, there’s only the perception McGwire himself fueled with his infamous “I’m not here to talk about the past” speech in Washington.
McGwire is a surefire Hall of Famer based on his numbers. He was the Harmon Killebrew of his generation, with strikingly similar numbers — .263-583-1,414 to Killebrew’s .256-573-1,584 — to prove it. But numbers won’t define McGwire’s career.
So he’s off my ballot, as is Tim Raines, another certain Hall of Famer if not for his admitted use of cocaine before, after and, yes, during games. He thus becomes the first player ever left off my ballot for using performance-inhibiting drugs.
I only mention him because, for much of the 1980s, Raines was every bit the player Rickey Henderson was. They were prototypical leadoff hitters, table setters who could hit for average, draw walks and run at will, disrupting the rhythm of every pitcher they encountered along the way.
But today, only Henderson gets my vote. He’ll no doubt go in on the first ballot, and the hope here is that Jim Rice, in his 15th and final year on the ballot, will join him, better later than never.
Rice also got my vote, as did Jack Morris, the best big-game pitcher of his generation, and Alan Trammell, a shortstop who drove in 1,000-plus runs and hit .300 seven times.
