The Hall Of Self-Promotion
In a perfect world, the voting for the Baseball Hall Of Fame would be about… um… baseball. But now, in a way that only sports yakkers can seem to manage, the Baseball Hall Of Fame is about sports yakkers. Sure, there are still players. But what really matters is that as many sports yakkers as possible yak as loudly as they can about those players. After all, there have to be caveats in place to ensure that the enshrining of a great player doesn’t overshadow how important it is to be a sports yakker.
I’ll be brief about McGwire: 583 home runs. Never tested positive for steroids. Played his entire career before steroids were against the rules. One of two players who brought baseball back from the brink of irrelevancy in 1998. Even if he was steroid-enhanced, he was the most feared hitter in a league where most guys may have been steroid-enhanced. But that’s a baseball-based argument, and what sports yakker cares about that?
Leave aside for a moment how ill-conceived and poorly reasoned the anti-steroids argument is. Steroids in general–and McGwire specifically–is a convenient leverage point for sports yakkers who are more concerned with getting their faces on television and with working book deals than with actually honoring great baseball players.
Think I’m joking about the Hall being a sports yakker self-promotion tool? Meet Paul Ladewski. Ever heard of him? No, of course you haven’t before today.
“Paul Ladewski of the Daily Southtown in suburban Chicago wrote in a column Monday that he submitted a blank ballot because of doubts he had over performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.”
Gee, what a brave stance to take. Because nobody else is concerned about steroids in baseball, obviously. On top of that, he has his fellow yakkers in a lather because now Ripken won’t get a unanimous vote. (I suppose I don’t need to point out that Ripken, at zero, failed exactly as many drug tests as McGwire.) The fact that the heretofore unknown Paul Ladewski is now making national news is a huge burden for him to bear, I’m sure. But I imagine he’ll be able to grit his teeth and ride out the storm of publicity and notoriety.
At what point did the Baseball Hall Of Fame stop being about baseball? Maybe it was always about self-promoting opinionmongers. Maybe it was just never laid quite as blatantly bare as it has been this year.
January 9th, 2007 - Posted in baseball | |
