Sports on Earth: Hall Pass

Joe Posnanski speculates:

Nobody is getting into the Hall of Fame through the Baseball Writers door this year. I mean, yes, it’s possible—POSSIBLE—that Craig Biggio will slip into the Hall by a few votes. But I don’t think so. Not this year. Not on this crazy ballot…

I don’t know if this year’s ballot blackout will cause… administrative changes—looking ahead, I sort of doubt it. As weird as this year is, it’s really something of a one-year aberration… I think if any rule will be tinkered with, it will be the player-vote limit… I wouldn’t be surprised if it went up to 15 for next year’s ballot.

As for the rest … I don’t think there will be Hall of Fame voting changes. I think, instead, players who are better than at least half of the players in the Hall of Fame will keep getting overlooked and underappreciated and measured against an impossible and imaginary standard.

Then the Crickets, Blowfish, or whoever they are vote a bit.

Leigh Montville

I don’t have a ballot and am glad that I don’t. This whole thing is a mess. The idea that Craig Biggio or Curt Schilling might go into the Hall of Fame but Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens won’t is ridiculous. If results on the field don’t matter, then this becomes a beauty contest, backroom politics, a vote for prom king and queen supervised by the faculty to make sure that the right candidates succeed.

Today is only the beginning. The process is going to become harder and harder as science moves stem cells around and creates synthesized genetic athletes in the future. (OK, what do we do about this Jason Bourne?) What should be legal? What shouldn’t? If I have laser surgery, say, to give me the same eyesight as Ted Williams, am I cheating? The BBWAA and the Hall have to look for a way to accommodate its history and this future and dole out asterisks or italicized comments where necessary. Something has to change.

If I had a vote, I think I would cast my ballot in protest for Pete Rose—and only Pete Rose—every year until that change was made in the criteria for selection.

BALLOT: Pete Rose.

Mike Tanier

Football writer here!...

I suppose if you want to write off an entire period of your sport’s history as The Steroid Era, cast a pall of suspicion and disgust over a decade’s worth of sports memories, and basically say that everything exciting and delightful that happened in baseball from about 1988 to 2002 was squirted from a syringe into the bloodstream of some villainous cad, you can keep a generation’s worth of all-time greats out of the Hall of Fame for being maybe-slightly guiltier than everyone else of a crime no one bothered to accurately define or enforce.

What’s that? You say that’s what many voters are perfectly willing to do? O-kay. Well, let me just concentrate on the Pro Football Hall of Fame and cast all my votes for Cris Carter.

BALLOT: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa.

Edit: Link fixed. Jim