Carlos Beltran Creates A New Ethical Debate for Hall of Fame


Could have been the best game Jim Palmer ever played: 11 goalless kicks One summer afternoon in Baltimore in 1977, there were nine strikes and no marches. Still, Palmer didn’t win because the Orioles never scored. The Texas Rangers’ slippery ace, Gaylord Perry, was dominant.

“I go out to get the ball and there are two big fingerprints on the slippery point of the ball, that way you throw a spit,” Palmer said. “So I go to the referee and say, ‘I guess we don’t need to reserve him, his fingerprints are already on the ball.’ He just laughs and they’ve laughed all these years.”

“But Gaylord took all those shots, he was tough, he was great. Are we going to keep him out of the Hall of Fame when he wins 300 games?”

Perry did this on his third try in 1991. with 77.2 percent of the vote Member of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Perry was a notorious con man—he even wrote a book called “Me and the Spitter”—but he passed the “honesty, sportsmanship, and character” test that Hall asked voters to consider.

These guidelines do not change and will continue to complicate the voting process for years, even after Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling and Sammy Sosa are dropped from the ballot. voting on tuesdayThey are going to the ballot box for the 10th time without exceeding the 75 percent threshold. Only David Ortiz (77.9 percent) made it this time.

Bonds, Clemens, and Sosa were strongly committed to performance-enhancing drugs. Ortiz had his own connection (a positive test in 2003 Poll before he reached stardom), but enough writers looked back to select him by 11 votes. Alex Rodriguez, who had a better career than Ortiz but was banned for doping for a year in 2014, missed the election by 161 votes.

Still, Rodriguez had ample support, with 34.3 percent of the vote, to remain a viable candidate for the next ballot, which would include newcomer Carlos Beltrán with a different baggage. Beltrán had an exemplary career up until the last moment when he joined the Houston Astros. signal playing order The players were given immunity for cooperating with Commissioner Rob Manfred’s investigation, but Beltrán had retired by then and Manfred cited him by name.

Now voters must decide whether nine-time All-Star forward Beltrán meets the standards of character substance for a plaque in Cooperstown, NY. fast-firing Beltrán In January 2020, just 11 weeks after hiring him.

“I lost to Carlos Beltrán for this job and I’ve had no issues with that,” said Eduardo Pérez, analyst at ESPN and SiriusXM. “That’s the greatest respect I have for that man. From my point of view, like it or not, he’s a Hall of Famer on the first ballot, and don’t tell me everyone in the Hall of Fame are great individuals. They’re far from perfect.”

Pérez, whose father was inducted into the Tony Hall of Fame in 2000, said today’s nominees face a different environment than previous generations. Few Hall of Fame members have committed more troubling ethical sins than spitballs—domestic violence, enforcing the color barrier, collusion, alleged game-fixing, illegal recreational drug use—but now, it seems, a candidate’s violations, defamation or seems more likely to be deleted. legacies.

“In today’s world, due to social media and people’s access to information, you are more vulnerable than in those days,” Pérez said. “The character is seen differently and more easily revealed.”

Despite their focus on Bonds and Clemens, their vote totals actually rose from last year. The other two actors had major drops, and in both cases the writers clearly used character material.

Omar Vizquel fell from 49.1 percent to 23.9 percent after his ex-wife accused him of domestic violence last December and a former bat boy filed a sexual harassment suit last August. According to research by Jayson Stark of The Athletic, the 25.2 percent drop is the biggest single-season drop since the annual Hall of Fame voting began in 1966.

It fell 12.5 percent from 71.1 to 58.6 after Schilling asked the Hall of Fame to remove his name from the ballot box because it didn’t respect writers. He also bolstered his social media rhetoric and essentially took back the goodwill he had earned as a player when he won the Roberto Clemente Award, baseball’s highest honor in service to society.

Beltrán also won this award, and voters should remember that when considering his candidacy. But the Hall of Fame won’t tell voters what to do about Beltrán’s sign theft with the Astros, just as they’ve given no instructions on how to explain his steroid use.

“Once you start guiding the character, you probably need to start giving in any situation,” Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch said in an interview Wednesday. “Whether it’s the BBWAA or term committees, we think it’s much more important to leave that up to the voters because it means something different to each person.”

A 16-member committee will meet in December to evaluate the past 30 years, and Bonds, Clemens, Schilling and Sosa may reconsider. But their presence in that ballot box is not guaranteed; A panel of BBWAA members designs the ballot to be voted on by a committee approved by the Hall of Fame board of directors.

“We’re working hard to have a group of people, part historians, part living Hall of Fame members, and part executives, all of whom will look at the candidates in the room in an impartial manner,” Rawitch said. Said. “We’re looking for balance in terms of gaming careers, where they grew up, race, gender – we’re trying to find a group of people who represent the community. There may be someone with a strong opinion and that’s okay and they will try to persuade others to vote their way. But ultimately we’re trying to find a group of people who won’t come knowing who they’re planning to vote for.”

Palmer, who has served on a committee in the past, said the composition of this group will be important in determining which candidates will appear. As always, character will be up for debate – but maybe that shouldn’t matter that much.

“Even if I’m not in the Hall of Fame, the most memorable thing about that weekend is always the fans’ love affair with baseball, its records, and its history,” Palmer said. “And what does character have to do with it? Is it that important, is it sacred, does it override everything else?”

This question is up to every voter and will not go anywhere.

“We believe character is important not only in the process of voting for Hall of Fame, but also in life,” Rawitch said. “Some industries are probably held to higher standards, baseball is one of them and has always been one of them. We actually think that’s a good thing.”



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *