Writers or moral authorities? The 2013 Hall of Fame vote

We all expected this to happen; it was a foregone conclusion.

So why are many of us so upset?

With Wednesday's Hall of Fame vote, both baseball fans and players alike have been done a great disservice and have had our opinions insulted-- cast aside like the rights of criminals.

As a society, more and more it seems as though the will of the people is discounted and disregarded. You see it in our Federal and State governments. You see it through lockouts in our major sports leagues. It makes you wonder exactly who these people are that are making decisions for us.

Who exactly has been put in charge of deciding what constitutes a hall of fame baseball player, and why do they have so much power?

The Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) chooses Cy Youngs, MVPs, ROYs, Managers of the Year, and elects players into the Hall of Fame. Although its constitution is long and written in semi-legalese, it basically says that any legitimate publication that covers 75% of a team's games (or nationally) can have a whole bunch of guys eligible to vote. For instance:

"(A) paper shall be entitled to membership in the Association for one sports editor, all full-time general sports columnists who regularly cover baseball, and as many reporters as are primarily assigned to cover baseball."

In addition, statisticians who supply newspapers with baseball stats and foreign language reporters (like Japanese journalists) are eligible for membership. Furthermore, "honorary members" are eligible to vote if they've put in 10 years of membership, even if they're retired or cover tiddlywinks tournaments in the Anchorage Unified School District for a living these days.

There are all walks of life included in this voting process-- from Peter Gammons to Yasushi Kikuchi of the Kyodo News (who voted for Bernie Williams), to some guy named Ken Lechtanski from the Brockton Enterprise

That's right. THE KYODO NEWS AND BROCKTON ENTERPRISE.

The long and short of it is that there are far too many individuals voting on these prestigious awards, and the system is deeply flawed.

I am not an advocate of letting every decent baseball player into the Hall-- be certain of that. However, I am a proponent of reflecting the overall impact and completeness of a player's career in the HOF vote.

There is too much subjectivity involved in this vote for it to be considered legitimate.

Legitimacy is a Pandora's Box-like concept, especially when considering this year's crop of former stars is tainted-- either rightly or wrongly.

The biggest problem I have with this current system, is that too many of these writers have decided to play baseball god. People like Jon Heyman, who I greatly respect as a writer and newsbreaker, have decided to braise in their own self-righteousness and self-appointed moral authority.

If Jon Heyman and Ken Rosenthal choose not to vote for two media abusers like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, I would like to know the reason. Surely it couldn't have been the 7 MVPs and 7 Cy Youngs.

To me, assumed steroid use that was never proven in a court of law, or by the Commissioner of Baseball is not good enough a reason. It's just not.

Bonds and Clemens aside, how do you not vote for Craig Biggio? Mike Piazza?

As a Giants fan, you know I hated the Pizza Man. He's a dirty Dodger and a gross Met and will always be that to me. But as a baseball fan? He and Biggio are two first ballot HOF'ers.

Were they as good as Babe Ruth or Willie Mays? No. Few were.

Riddle me this. Is a guy that primarily played the game's most difficult position and smacked 427 homers along with a career .308 average not valid enough to be considered one of the greatest players ever? If Piazza's numbers and lack of ties to steroid controversy preclude him from being voted for on a ballot full of surly polarizers, then it's time to eliminate some of the subjectivity from this voting process.

The same argument can be made for guys like Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, and Curt Schilling.

It's simply ludicrous to me that the best players of the '90s and 2000s are being railroaded by a bunch of grandstanding writers, whose admission into the BBWAA may or may not be deserved. To this lover of baseball, it is simply appalling.

The most upsetting part about this farcical voting process, is that the aforementioned group of god-playing scribes has basically told you, and has told me, that our opinions don't matter.

It doesn't matter that Astros fans would love to see their two beloved Killer B's in Cooperstown. It doesn't matter how much joy Bonds brought to the fans of San Francisco or how much he dominated the sport. It doesn't matter that suffering Red Sox fans got to enjoy the taste of victory in the form of Curt Schilling's bloody sock.

We were told today by the vast majority of baseball writers that our beloved sport's superstars of yesteryear were of too ill repute to be enshrined alongside spitballers like Gaylord Perry, spikes-up racists like Ty Cobb, and all the guys who dropped a few amphetamine pills into their clubhouse coffee pot between games of an August doubleheader.

We were told that guys like Bonds created an uneven playing field by allegedly using PEDs-- something that wasn't even illegal in MLB until 3 years ago. What about when Bonds faced Kevin Brown or Jason Grimsley? Was that uneven?

What has happened to baseball in this respect is sad. Bud Selig failed to do his job by wearing blinders and pleaded ignorance when it all came to a head. He is the one who presided over this "tainted" era, from 1992 until now, and his failures have led us to this upsetting moment in 2013.

At some point, this vote needs to be returned to some semblance of objectivity, and a new voting system must be implemented-- something similar to MVP or Cy Young voting.

The rank-choice system of voting that chooses annual award winners, should be used for HOF votes, and whomever is on the ballot should receive a point-valued ranking that will be tallied at the end.

I also believe that BBWAA voters should be instructed to vote solely on career statistics and general impact on the game. Personal vendettas and biases need to be checked at the door. It was a fair playing field because too many in the game were all doing the same thing in an attempt to gain an edge.


I believe that as fans, we feel cast aside by this vote, and that some of the best players in the history of the game have been railroaded. Many of these players didn't help their cases by making poor choices and defiantly denying them publicly. It is time to just accept what happened in the "Steroid Era" and chalk it up to a learning experience.

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

To see the ballots of those BBWAA members that made their votes public, click here


If you're wondering how Bay Area writers treated Bonds in this election (not all writers disclosed)...

FOR BONDS.

Ray Ratto, CSN Bay Area, KNBR
Andy Baggarly, CSN Bay Area
Hank Schulman, San Francisco Chronicle
Carl Steward, San Jose Mercury News
Marcos Breton, Sacramento Bee
Mike Lefkow, Contra Costa Times
Tim Kawakami, San Jose Mercury News

AGAINST BONDS:

Ann Killion, San Francisco Chronicle
Susan Slusser, San Francisco Chronicle
Chris Haft, MLB.com (Giants)
Paul Gutierrez, Honorary (CSN Bay Area)
Mark Purdy, San Jose Mercury News

The system is definitely effed up

For those of us out there confused about how, exactly baseball's revenue sharing/lack of salary cap system works, you are not alone. Until this article came out about 10 days ago from ESPN's Jayson Stark, it's really never been totally spread out in front of you.

As you know, (for better or worse), MLB has no salary cap. Teams like the Yankees can spend whatever they can, and that's just fine with Bud Selig. We all complain about it-- those of us that are fans of teams not located in the Eastern time zone or Orange County, CA-- but as Stark and Scott Boras point out, we need to look at these losers with the tiny payrolls.

Yes, Florida and Pittsburgh, we're looking right at you.

These teams make excuses to their fans about small markets, weak economies, small populations, etc.

The real truth of the matter is that the system is set up in a way that truly would benefit these teams if they wanted to succeed. They choose not to. These teams collect a fat check from the rich teams, lay around in a puddle of their own Triple A filth of a roster, and cry poor.

I encourage you to read this whole article on ESPN, but I'm gonna just have to copy and paste some of it here:

"Your team (Pirates/Marlins) collected more money this season -- before it ever sold one ticket -- than it spent on its entire major league payroll. In fact, it collected more than it spent on its major league payroll and its player-development system combined."

Stark goes onto explain:

• "Central fund (includes national TV, radio, Internet, licensing, merchandising, marketing, MLB International money): Each team, from the Marlins to the Yankees, gets the same central-fund payout. And that check comes to slightly over $30 million per team if you deduct the $10 million in pension and operations fees, or just over $40 million if you don't.

• Revenue sharing: Only income-challenged teams get a revenue-sharing check. But you should never forget that those checks are a lot larger than your average rebate check from Target. This sport shared $400 million in revenue this year -- more than the gross national product of Western Samoa. Now every club's payout is different. But the five neediest teams -- which we believe to be the Marlins, Pirates, Rays, Blue Jays and Royals -- averaged somewhere in the vicinity of $35 million in revenue-sharing handouts per team. And that still left over $200 million -- more than $20 million a club -- for the rest of the "payees" to divvy up.

• Local TV/radio/cable: Good luck getting these exact figures. But we know that 29 of the 30 teams make at least $15 million a year in local broadcast money, and no team rakes in under $12 million. Obviously, some clubs collect much, much more than that.

Add $30 million, plus $35 million, plus $15 million, and what do you get? That would be $80 million. At least. Before these teams spin their turnstiles once."

And as we know, there are about 12 teams last year that spent right at, or less than $80MM: Kansas City, Oakland, San Diego, Tampa Bay, Pittsburgh, Washington, Minnesota, Cincinnati, Arizona, Cleveland, and Baltimore. For those of you keeping track at home, that's 40% of the teams in baseball that are collecting checks for intentionally being non-competitive.

Each of those teams has its issues. With the A's, it's attendance and a horrific stadium. For the Rangers, it's their owner running out of money. For the Padres, it's an impending sale after an ugly divorce. The point of this whole thing is that there are huge checks being thrown these teams' way in order to make them competitive with the New Yorks and Bostons of the the world, and rather than seize that opportunity to bring a little joy into their fans' lives, they choose to cry poor and collect checks.

I was going to make an Obama socialist joke, but I decided against it. In fact, this socialist system in MLB under Selig is such a welfare state that it makes even the Scandinavians jealous.

As for the Giants, they officially had a payroll of about $94MM last year, good for 14th highest in the league-- ostensibly "middle of the road".

As the fans'/local media personalities' drumbeat to spend more money gets louder and louder, we must ask ourselves exactly why ownership cannot or will not spend more on free agents.

An "educated rumor" that I've heard (ie. second hand information from an unnamed someone by way of another unnamed someone in the organization) is that the Gyros lost close to $30MM this season. Now, to be fair, I didn't hear it directly from anyone in the organization, and I don't know if that number was before or after different revenue streams or lack thereof were factored in.

So regardless if that large number is real or not, I believe it.

The Giants get a significant amount of money from local TV and Radio deals. They have decent attendance and solid revenue streams from stadium concessions, etc.

The only possible way I see that they could've lost that kind of sum is from the following:

-- An annual mortgage payment on AT&T Park of $20MM+
-- Little or no revenue sharing check (not including money from the "Central Fund" that Stark described above

It's kind of like the Giants are too well off for a cut of Selig's welfare check, but not well off enough to be able to afford a $110MM payroll. Kind of like that family out there trying to get Financial Aid because they actually need it, but is told they make too much money, even though they have three college aged kids and live in Marin County.

At the same time, because the Giants have a legitimate revenue stream of our own (Stadium, tickets, concessions, TV/Radio), we're somehow at a disadvantage when compared to teams that don't.

Take the Reds as an example. They spent $72MM on their payroll in 2009. What do you want to believe that they were a prime candidate for a big revenue sharing check? Here's how they work out:

-- Central Fund: $30MM (40 minus 10 for pension, etc.)
-- Revenue Sharing: $25MM (Estimate)
-- TV/Radio deals: $15MM (Est.)

That equals $70MM. What was their payroll again? Oh yeah, $72MM.

So then, you factor in Cincy's 5 year old beauty of a ballpark with its 22,000 per game attendance, $8 Miller Lites, $20 parking, $35 Bronson Arroyo T-Shirt jerseys, subtract operating cost and minor league development, and I bet they doing no worse than breaking even.

With the Giants, they're stuck. We live in a big market. We don't get that extra $25MM from sharing like 'Natti gets. That $25MM right there is a mortgage payment, and nearly the exact amount of money they'd need to spend to land a precious bat like Holliday or Bay's and have enough left over to re-sign Juan Uribe.

I'll take a line from the movie Red Dragon:

"Now do you see?"

If I sound like a raving lunatic, please let me know, because I'm not sure anymore....