Via The Platoon Advantage, we come across three more Hall of Fame voters, all from Chicago, who have determined based on either (a) nothing; or (b) rumor or information that they posses but don’t feel is up to the standards of being published in a piece of ethical journalism,* that Jeff Bagwell did steroids and thus isn’t worthy of the Hall of Fame. They are Philip Hersh and Paul Sullivan of the Chicago Tribune and Scot Gregor of the Daily Herald.
Hersh says “I’m still too suspicious about Jeff Bagwell to include him.” Sullivan lumps Bagwell in with the “unindicted but suspected contributors to the PED mess.” Gregor says “[s]uspicions of using “performance enhancing drugs” weigh heavily on my decision to leave off productive players such as Bagwell, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and Juan Gonzalez.”
Hey, their ballots. They can use ’em how they want to. I just hope for their sake no one judges their careers’ worth in such a fashion, because it’s totally harsh and unfair and I’d hate for them to have to go through that.
Anyway, if that makes you feel all icky, go read Posnanski’s take on such Hall of Fame votes in historical context. I think he hits it on the head when he talks about how these guys see themselves as something more than mere assessors of baseball performance and something more like gatekeepers with an inflated sense of their place in the process.
But hey, at least they’re keeping us and history all safe from, well, something.
*Hopefully this point is not considered controversial. Because it’s nothing more than simple logic. By definition, people either have actual information establishing that Bagwell did steroids or they do not. If they do have it, they have not published it. And given how newsworthy such information would be, the only plausible reason they haven’t published it is because their newspapers would not allow them to do it because the information is thin and/or uncorroborated. So: such a stance as the one shown by these gentleman is necessarily either one taken with no information or with information that falls short of the standards to which they usually adhere in their daily work.
