HANDICAPPING THE HALL

               Few things are certain in life, but one of the best bets concerns the voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame’s class of 2020, the results of which will be announced next month.  Derek Jeter is on the ballot and he’ll be elected. You can bet your house on it, if you can get anyone to bite.

               The only suspense involves whether the verdict of the baseball writers will be unanimous. That never happened until last year, when shortstop Jeter’s New York Yankees’ teammate Mariano Rivera, the sterling relief pitcher, swept the table. Not even Babe Ruth had done that; the game’s best player ever was named on just 95.1% of the votes cast for the Hall’s first class, in 1936.  That figure, however, and others that year, should contain asterisks because it was a helluva ballot and limits on the number of names the scribes could list probable cost many worthies unanimous consent. For example, Cy Young polled just 49%.

               Jeter might not have matched Young’s never-to-be-topped pitching stats but his are well beyond those of the “normal” star, among them 3,465 regular-season hits, 14 All Star Game selections in a 20-year career and five World Series rings, although he had help getting those last things. Perhaps equally impressive, he survived his lengthy bachelorhood in the tabloid capital with his good name pretty much unscathed. They ought to etch that into his Cooperstown plaque.

               Jeter’s is one of 18 first-time names on the 2020 ballot and the only one likely to come close to the 75% approval rate of the 400-plus electors needed for election. Indeed, only four others—Paul Konerko, Cliff Lee, Bobby Abreu and Adam Dunn—likely to approach the 5% vote needed to survive until the 2021 voting. If I were still voting I’d include only Jeter and Konerko among my 10 choices, with Pauly getting a nod mostly on the sentimental ground of leading the Chicago White Sox to their long-sought 2005 World Series victory.

               Most of the interest in this year’s balloting will center on players who have been found wanting previously but whose vote totals suggest future hope. They are the pitchers Curt Schilling and Roger Clemens, shortstop Omar Visquel and the sluggers Barry Bonds and Larry Walker.  Clemens and Bonds should be lumped together because both were, without doubt, the best at what they did during their common era, but whose reps were damaged by their well-established use of performance-enhancing drugs while they played, in violation of  baseball’s rules.

               The two run as a sort of entry—1 and 1A—and their vote totals have risen in tandem, from about 37% in 2013, their first year on the writers’ ballot, to about 59% last year, their seventh. If they don’t make it this year they’ll get two more tries, after which their cases will be moved to one of the Hall’s veterans’ committees. 

               The votes for Bonds and Clemens serve as a referendum on what I call baseball’s HITS era—for Heads In The Sand—regarding steroids use, roughly 1990 to 2005. Negative feelings about that period were strong initially, as shown by Bonds’ and Clemens’ two-thirds 2013 rejection rate, but they’ve softened in more-recent years. I didn’t vote for either of them when I had a ballot, and never would. It’s wrong to think they’ve been exiled from the Hall because their records are celebrated there and their photos and videos are displayed; it’s just their plaques that are absent. My guess is they won’t make it this time but will eventually, alas.

               Schilling’s case is different. Everyone agrees he was an excellent pitcher day in and out and a great big-gamer, and apparently drug-free. His problem has been his mouth, which he can’t manage to keep shut. Among his many targets (women, Muslims, liberals) have been the news media, and it isn’t a good idea to piss off the writers when they’re the ones who vote for the Hall. I voted for him when I could because I thought his being a jerk shouldn’t be disqualifying. He got about 61% in 2018 and probably won’t get in this time, but just might before he’s off the ballot after 2022.

               Walker is in his last year on the writers’ ballot and hit a high of 54% last year. He was a very good hitter, with a .313 lifetime average over 17 seasons, but his other stats aren’t overwhelming. Also, his best years (1995-2004) were in the Colorado Rockies’ light-air Denver ballpark, which many believe makes hitters look better than they are.

 Visquel got 43% last year, and won’t make it this time either, but will eventually, I hope. Wizard fielders like him are underrepresented in Cooperstown.

There will be two more inductees at the Hall’s summer ceremony, Ted Simmons and the late Marvin Miller, both chosen by one of the Hall’s veterans committees. Their stories are quite different. Simmons was a durable (21-season) catcher whose hitting stats and other qualifications were always very good but never great. He had one shot at the writers’ ballot, in 1993, but didn’t reach the 5% survival floor. After he retired as a player in 1988, though, he stayed around the game as a coach, scout and executive and, apparently, made many friends. Hall election at every level is in part a popularity contest that doesn’t end when the spikes are hung up.

Miller, a former economist for the United Steel Workers union, which I once covered, became the head of the game’s players’ association in 1966 and led it for 16 years. In that span it went from a vest-pocket operation to one of the nation’s most visible and potent unions, one that won pay raises and work-rule agreements that opened the way for revolutionary changes to the economics of baseball and all other American sports. Along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson he was one the most-influential sports figures of the 20^th century.

  Miller made few friends among the game’s leaders; in fact, he told his members that if the execs liked him he wasn’t doing his job. Animosity towards him blocked his Hall membership for years. He took that as a badge of honor and promised not to attend an induction ceremony if he were elected and swore his children to keep that pledge. That’s okay, though. His Hall plaque will be a necessary reminder of the change his efforts wrought.

                

              

              

              

DRAWING THE LINE

               In sports, what happens on the field stays on the field. Usually.

               A couple of times when it didn’t have punctuated the news of late. One involved Myles Garrett, a Cleveland Browns defensive end who, in a tussle at the end of a game with the Pittsburgh Steelers, yanked off the helmet of Steelers’ quarterback Mason Rudolph and whacked Ruddolph over the head with it.  The other involved allegations that the Houston Astros, baseball’s 2017 world champs and 2019 runnersup, engaged in a three-season campaign of electronic sign stealing.

               Garrett’s misdeed, a crime of the flesh, occurred in full view of the 67,000 or so spectators at the football game in Cleveland plus the millions of folks at home watching on TV, for whom it was replayed many times. There was no doubt what happened, so the National Football League quickly stepped in and whacked the player with an “indefinite” suspension that will include the Browns’ six remaining  regularly scheduled games this season plus whatever playoffs they might quality for, and, maybe, some games next season as well.

 The Astros’ business is more complicated and no doubt will require prolonged investigation by Major League Baseball. That’s the way it can be with white-collar (white jersey?) crimes, where lawyers often succeed in painting offenses in shades of gray that defy easy adjudication. They earn big money for doing that.

 But back up a second and take another look at the supposedly open-and-shut Garrett matter. If the young man had been caught doing what he did on the street he’d now be in jail or out on bond, faced with a criminal assault charge. We’ve become so accustomed to our sports organizations being laws unto themselves that we take for granted their power to make rules that, in their own spheres, replace the force of law. That power is grounded in the fact that sports participation is consensual and people choose to compete with the knowledge that they take out-of-the-ordinary risks. In practice that covers just about everything that happens on a football field.

 That line, however, blurs when the mayhem goes beyond what is usually defined as egregious; in those cases the criminal authorities can intervene. That’s what has happened at least three times in the National Hockey League, all involving incidents that took place in Canada.  In 1988, Dino Ciccarelli of the Minnesota North Stars was fined $1,000 and spent a day in jail after being convicted of assault for a slashing attack on Luke Richardson of the Toronto Maple Leafs.  In 2000 Marty McSorley of the Boston Bruins got 18 months’ probation for similarly bashing Donald Brashear of the Vancouver Canucks and in 2004 Steve Moore of the Colorado Avalanche got a year’s probation and 80 hours of community service for a from-behind attack on the Canucks’ Todd Bertuzzi that left Bertuzzi with three broken vertebrae and ended his career.  That last attack also resulted in a sizable civil judgement in Bertuzzi’s favor.

If he were so inclined the Steeler’s Rudolph might have marched over the nearest police station and accused Garrett of assault. He didn’t, and it probably never occurred to him to so. He didn’t appear to be hurt too badly and, no doubt, subscribes to the boys-will-be-boys ethos that pervades the game. It is on such a permissive basis that our sports proceed at all levels, for better or worse.

The business about baseball sign stealing is interesting because the act involved is as much a part of the game as pine tar. Stealing signs go back as far as, well, signs, and everyone does it. The rub is supposed to come when a team employs mechanical or electronic devices in its pursuit, but even then the offense usually isn’t reported publicly. In a recent piece on the subject Paul Sullivan, the estimable baseball writer for the Chicago Tribune, called it a “club-on-club” crime that, when suspicions arise, is dealt with through informal channels,  in a sort of “hey, we’re on  to you, so quit it” mode. That’s because no team’s hands are clean.

Sign stealing’s part in baseball is best exemplified by the roll it played in one of the game’s biggest moments, Bobby Thomson’s 1951 “shot heard round the world” home run that decided the National League pennant playoff between his New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. According to accounts pieced together some 60 years later by my old newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, Giants coach Herman Franks picked off the Dodgers’ sign with a telescope in center field and relayed it to the Giants’ dugout through a buzzer system, and from thence it went to Thomson.  Thomson went to his grave insisting he wasn’t clued in, but some teammates’ later accounts contradicted that.

Sneaky as it was, though, that sort of thing wasn’t against baseball’s rules until 1961, and then only when technology is involved. This being the 21^st century the Astros case probably involves some of that but, amusingly, some old-fashioned means also might have been employed. One story had it that after picking off a catcher’s signals with a video camera and flashing it to the dugout, the team passed it along to its hitters by banging on a trash can.

If found guilty by the commissioner’s office the Astros probably will suffer the usual sports penalties— fines, loss of draft choices and the like. It’s none of the courts’ business, and rightly so. In a society that values property, though, the world of fun and games ends and the real world begins when actual stuff is involved. In 2016 Christopher Correa, the St. Louis Cardinals’ scouting director, was found to have looted the Astros’ computer system for such things as the team’s draft evaluations. Instead of a wrist slap and whispered “attaboy” he was sentenced to spend 46 months in a Federal prison.