The Pecan Park Eagle

Baseball Needs to Balance the Scales.

It was a Macy’s-like parade, all right, complete with hot air balloon excuses for the process of righteously turning away, one more time, but in larger and newer numbers, some of the greatest players in the history of baseball from the residence they each deserve on the basis of their field performances in the so-called Baseball Hall of Fame.

The day of January 9, 2013 unfolded as a prescription for home-made/ho-made (take your pick) hypocrisy among most of the same writers who could not praise Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa enough back in 1998 for saving baseball from the stink of 1994 with their magical, somewhat mystical displays of record-breaking power. Time Magazine featured a glowing cover of Big Mac and Sammy. Sports Illustrated went so far as to dress out the same two players in Roman togas and laurel wreath head-dresses before spilling out their broadly smiling images on their cover as the saviors of the game.

It didn’t matter to the writers and the owners in 1998 that many of the “big boys” were getting there through the open use of steroids. I don’t recall anyone in 1998 writing about steroids as “performance enhancing drugs.” In fact, I don’t recall anyone writing or expressing their concerns about steroids in 1998. The performances of Big Mac and Sammy that year were rattling the soul and brain of baseball on a recording-breaking pace. Like real life action heroes, those two men almost single-handedly together, were spinning the big league park turnstiles far into the black and driving away the bad memories of that horribly lost season of 1994.

Memories are short.

Once Barry Bonds took things to a wholly higher level of achievement, breaking the HR record of the revered Hank Aaron, and once a proven liar accused Roger Clemens of PED use and the latter “mis-remembered” his actual experience into a case for branding him a liar to Congress on the Rafael Palmeiro-level, requiring a trial for Clemens to find legal exoneration, the witch hunt was on. Now players like Jeff Bagwell were falling under the shadow of suspicion for having developed “Popeye” biceps during the same era.

Now all you had to do was pander to the suspicions of the suddenly self-righteous members of BBWAA to lose any later support for the HOF. – And this has been how it’s been for the past 7-10 years.

So what actually happens when the big 2013 class of major suspects comes up for HOF consideration? The writer boys arrogantly turn their backs on all, explaining that it’s all part of the process of sorting out what needs to be done over time.

Oh really? Does that same “process” include not voting for the squeaky clean and sure-fire Hall of Famer Craig Biggio – just because it’s his first time on the ballot?

What arrogance!

I could not agree more with writer Jerome Solomon than I do this morning. In his Houston Chronicle criticism of the BBWAA today, he touches all the bases on why this vote, this year, stunk to high heavens. If you are a voting writer, and you think a man is good enough to go in “sometime,” he’s good enough to go in “now.” Any further delay for the sake of pro forma compliance with the historic rules of the good old boys’ and girls’ club is unacceptable.

Those players whose numbers speak for themselves should be inducted into the Hall of Fame, regardless of how much anyone thinks these players alone should be punished for the steroids era by banishment. We have to be vigilant here. There is no clear class of convicts in this matter. Some people used and some people lied in an attempt to cover up. Others just stood there like deer in the headlights and got smeared with the mud that got slung their way. The result is that we have allowed social network television to hawk the witch hunt and to smear guilt-by-suspicion to all who could not defend themselves from character assassination.

Meanwhile, the Commissioner, the owners, many of the writers and fans, and all of the sports print and broadcasting publishers sit back in the glow of bystander sanctimony and go about the business of making the players alone pay for the game of baseball’s embrace of steroids at our most recent turn of the century.

Yesterday’s HOF vote by the BBWAA was nothing more than a ritual exercise of the baseball culture’s hypocrisy. It’s time we all took responsibility for the fact it happened and move on with clear and severe consequences embraced and set forth about what shall happen to future abusers.

Then let’s get those field-deserving nominee people into the HOF from the era that were punished for being members of the fall guy group in this whole past, but still ongoing sad affair and make things right. Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and Mike Piazza, among others, all belong in the Hall of Fame. So do Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell, by the way.

It’s time to make it right by the next vote.

The fall guy group has taken the whole rap and suffered long enough for a sin that belongs to the whole baseball world. If our baseball world cannot see that much, then we all deserve whatever happens next.

The witch hunts of Salem never stopped the advent of new evil in Massachusetts.