Roger Clemens

Breaking Down My 2015 Hall of Fame Ballot

/ Carter Gaddis
My 2015 Hall of Fame ballot. I voted for first-timers Ken Griffey Jr. and Trevor Hoffman, along with holdovers Jeff Bagwell, Edgard Martinez, Fred McGriff, Mike Piazza, and Lee Smith.

My 2015 Hall of Fame ballot. I voted for first-timers Ken Griffey Jr. and Trevor Hoffman, along with holdovers Jeff Bagwell, Edgar Martinez, Fred McGriff, Mike Piazza, and Lee Smith.

From the official Baseball Hall of Fame BBWAA Rules for Election – 5. Voting: Voting shall be based upon a player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

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I wish I had a cool Ken Griffey Jr. story to share. Naturally, I saw him play plenty of times, primarily against the (Devil) Rays. He actually was merely so-so in 42 games against Tampa Bay: batting average .231, on-based percentage .309, slugging percentage .444, and only nine of his 630 home runs.

Those mighty Rays, man. Giving Hall of Famers fits since 1998.

Putting the check next to Griffey’s name on the ballot was one of the easiest decisions I’ve made in my eight years as a voter. Simply, his career playing record and contributions to the Mariners and Reds warrant induction in the Hall of Fame. I don’t see much, if any, room for debate about Griffey, who was elected today along with Mike Piazza.

As always, I conducted my research. I’ll admit that was a much shorter process with Griffey.

I looked at his numbers on Baseball Reference, then checked his name on my ballot.

Similarly, I believe that Trevor Hoffman’s playing record and contributions to the Marlins, Padres, and Brewers made him a Hall of Famer. He became the all-time saves leader in 2006 and held that distinction until Mariano Rivera passed him in 2011. I checked Hoffman’s name not long after I checked Griffey’s.

Then I devoted a few minutes to each of the five holdovers from last year’s ballot, players I checked in December 2014 but who did not join John Smoltz, Pedro Martinez, Craig Biggio and Randy Johnson in the Hall. I found nothing to convince me I had been wrong about those five, so I checked them, too.

I was allowed to check as many as 10 players, but that’s where I stopped this year: seven.

Here are all seven players I checked this year (asterisk indicates holdover from 2014): Continue reading →

If Only Integrity, Sportsmanship and Character Did Not Count in Hall of Fame Voting

/ Carter Gaddis / 10 Comments
BBWAA

A BBWAA Lifetime Honorary membership card, along with the envelopes for the 2013 Hall of Fame ballot.

I care about the Baseball Writers Association of America. I care deeply about the Hall of Fame vote I earned as an active member of that organization from 1999-2009. When my active membership lapsed after I was laid off from the newspaper where I worked for 16 years, I cared enough to pay the fee that ensured I would remain a lifetime honorary member.

The gold card that comes with honorary membership does more than allow me entry into any Major League ballpark in the country. It is my final tangible link to a 24-year sportswriting career that ended in 2010. It wasn’t entirely my choice to end that sportswriting career, but it’s over and I’ve moved on.

Mostly.

Every December I anticipate the arrival of the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot in the mail. Not in my e-mail inbox; in the mailbox that sits under a tree in my front yard next to my driveway. It comes in a distinctive manila envelope, stuffed in there along with a stamped return envelope, biographical information on each of the candidates, a letter from National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum President Jeff Idelson, and the BBWAA Rules for Election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

I’ll vote for the sixth time this year. Every December, I fax off my ballot to the BBWAA because I want to keep the actual paper it’s on. I sort of envision my kids’ kids holding it one day and talking about how their grandfather contributed, if only in a small way, to baseball history.

So, it means something to me. I covered the game long enough to earn that vote, and I actually got into sportswriting hoping to one day become a Hall of Fame voter. I consider it an honor and an important responsibility.

Now, I am aware that the system as it exists is flawed. It never was perfect, but the Steroid Era threw everything into disarray. The inherent subjectivity of the process practically guaranteed chaos as the list grew to include Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Rafael Palmeiro, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and others whose candidacies have been tainted by suspicion (or hard evidence, in Palmeiro’s case).

I wrote pretty extensively about my feelings on the process last year. I ended up voting for seven players, none of whom were elected (we are allowed to vote for as many as 10). In fact, as you might recall, no one was elected by the writers.

Here are the players I voted for last year:

This year’s ballot includes Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas. I’m not saying that’s how I’ll vote, mind you. I’m simply pointing out that those three players are, frankly, Hall of Fame locks.

Where does that leave the likes of Bonds, Clemens, et al? Off my ballot, at least for now. As I’ve written before, it all comes down to Rule 5 of the BBWAA Rules for Election:

“Voting shall be based upon a player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.”

I boldface the salient words – integrity, sportsmanship, character – because voting for the Hall of Fame would be a much different proposition without them. Those words transform an already subjective process into a guessing game. A game that I and 600 or so of my fellow voters are compelled to play every December.

The game reached a new level of absurdity this year when Deadspin announced that it would “buy” a BBWAA voter’s ballot and allow its readers to make the selections. I don’t blame Deadspin, which is just doing what it does. I honestly don’t even blame the anonymous voter who allegedly has sold his or her ballot to Deadspin. Just because I take the honor and responsibility seriously, it doesn’t mean the other 600 or so voters are obligated to do so. That person has his or her reasons, and I hope he or she spends the money well. (Might I suggest a donation to one of baseball’s most famous charities, the Jimmy Fund? Or the Children’s Cancer Center? Or anywhere else but the sell-out voter’s bank account? Because hey … it’s Christmas.)

That voter – or soon-to-be former voter, once his or her name becomes public – is no more absurd than the voters who decided Joe DiMaggio – Joe DiMaggio! – was not a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Or that Gaylord Perry, an admitted spit-ball pitcher, was somehow more worthy of election than others despite his transgressions.

Or the voters – like me – who take it upon themselves to act as gatekeepers in the face of rampant steroid use in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

There is a simple solution, you know.

Change the rules for election. To be precise, eliminate three words.

Integrity.

Sportsmanship.

Character.

Eliminate those stipulations, and we’re back to the numbers.

Then it would be like the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which explicitly prohibits the much smaller pool of voters from considering the off-field actions of players.

I can acknowledge right now that my ballot would look a lot different if not for the current wording of Rule 5. Bonds, Clemens and Palmeiro absolutely would have earned my vote. McGwire and Sosa might have, as well.

Those three words are there, though. And that means another year of hand-wringing, wondering, speculating. It means watching one of my fellow voters help push the whole thing to a new level of absurdity by selling it to a satirical sports website whose editors are in the business of exposing absurdity in sports – something they do quite well.

As for me, I will continue to take it as seriously as I always have. It means something, this signature honor bestowed only upon long-time baseball writers. It means I’m still part of the game in a small but meaningful way.

And it means I still have a voice in a complicated conversation that I care about a great deal, a conversation that I’m pretty sure is just getting started.

This Game’s Fun, Okay? Baseball’s Hall of Fame Conundrum

/ Carter Gaddis / 22 Comments
BBWAA Hall of Fame Voting

The letter from the National Baseball Hall of Fame that comes with the ballot.

I was fortunate enough to see Barry Bonds play in person in a handful of games during my tenure as a baseball writer. The first was in October 2003, when his San Francisco Giants lost a National League division playoff series to the eventual World Series champion Marlins in Miami. Bonds was two years removed from hitting 73 home runs, and nearly three years short of catching Henry Aaron. He was also two months away from giving what would turn out to be deceptive grand jury testimony in the BALCO case.

That first night in Miami, I stopped typing during batting practice to watch Bonds take his swings. I was absolutely certain I was watching one of the greatest hitters of all time, clear and cream or no clear and cream. The BP home runs he hit into the empty right-field stands at Joe Robbie Stadium were big. Big and breath-taking, like the Grand Canyon. Big and loud, like the Pacific Ocean.

Big like the stain left on baseball by performance-enhancing drugs.

I saw Roger Clemens pitch in person dozens of times. I saw him in a Blue Jays uniform, a New York Yankees uniform, an Astros uniform, a Tampa Yankees uniform (at a May 2007 rehab outing at Legends Field, live-blogged by yours truly) and a New York Yankees uniform again. He was no longer the Rocket by the time I picked up his career. Not really. But he was still Roger, and he was still a winner on the field, and I was absolutely certain I was watching one of the top five right-handed pitchers of all time whenever I saw him pitch.

Their respective perjury trials have begun to recede from memory (or, anyway, I had to look up the details). Bonds was convicted of obstruction of justice – but not perjury, and served no jail time. Clemens, who was mentioned in the Mitchell Report, was charged with six felony counts of lying to Congress. After an initial mistrial, he was found not guilty on all six counts this past June.

So. Here we are, December 2012, the time of Hall of Fame reckoning for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

I am about to vote for the fifth time. On previous ballots, I already have left off the names of Rafael Palmeiro and Mark McGwire because they used performance-enhancing drugs. They posted Hall of Fame numbers (particularly Palmeiro), but it’s not only about the numbers when it comes to voting for baseball’s Hall of Fame.

The reason I didn’t vote for them – the reason I am inclined, at the moment, not to vote for Bonds, Clemens or fellow first-year candidate Sammy Sosa – is the existence of rule No. 5 in the BBWAA Rules for Election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I’ve cited it before, and here it is again, in its entirety:

  • Voting – Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

If those three words – “integrity, sportsmanship, character” – were not there, Hall of Fame voting would be a much simpler matter of selecting my subjective criteria (and remember, it is a highly subjective process) and voting for the players who matched or exceeded those criteria.

No matter if I or the other 500-plus voters from the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) like it, the way a player conducted himself off the field matters. So does the way he treated the game when he played. There are those who would argue that even if the character issues are taken into account, the weight of on-the-field accomplishments might still warrant induction. I’m not sure that argument holds water, any more than the argument that it’s OK to base your selection only on the numbers and behavior before the perceived PED abuse took place. Look, how do we know when (or even if) these guys began to shoot up? When is the cutoff for Bonds? Before San Francisco? For Clemens? Before Toronto? That’s a slippery slope and it is a poor way to choose a Hall of Famer.

On what, then, are we to base our decisions?

Several players, including recent Hall inductees Andre Dawson and Barry Larkin, have come right out and said neither Bonds nor Clemens deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. They consider Bonds and Clemens (and, by extension, anyone who used PED) unworthy because they betrayed the game. It is particularly heinous because it was Bonds and Clemens, two of the game’s most gifted players, who succumbed to temptation for the sake of … what? A few more playing years (and many more millions of dollars)? A chance to break hallowed all-time records? An opportunity to burnish numbers that already might have warranted induction into the Hall of Fame?

But wait. Clemens has denied he ever used steroids or human growth hormone. Bonds has denied that he knowingly used BALCO’s infamous steroid compounds, the clear and the cream. Sammy Sosa has also denied using.* The question is, how do we, as voters, as journalists, know beyond a shadow of a doubt that these players are not telling the truth? Without evidence to the contrary (or a McGwire-like admission or test-related suspension), is it fair for us to indict these players by withholding a Hall of Fame vote that their raw numbers certainly deserve?

*Although, the fact that Sosa used a corked bat – against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, of all teams – and that corked bat shattered all over the Wrigley Field infield in 2003, and Devil Rays catcher Toby Hall pointed out the cork in the broken bat’s shards to the home plate umpire … to have witnessed that circus-like spectacle of cheating might make me think twice about voting for Sosa, anyway.

Always, I go back to the fifth rule for voting. Integrity. Sportsmanship. Character. I’m not trying to sound all sanctimonious here. I know that these are nebulous qualities. We all define them in our own way, and they mean more to some than to others when it comes to voting. I’ve thought a lot about these concepts since I became a voter five years ago. And how have they guided me in my selections? Here are my four previous ballots:

  • 2008: Bert Blyleven, Rickey Henderson, Tommy John, Dale Murphy, Jim Rice, Lee Smith.
  • 2009: Roberto Alomar, Bert Blyleven, Dale Murphy, Fred McGriff, Lee Smith.
  • 2010: Roberto Alomar, Jeff Bagwell, Bert Blyleven, Fred McGriff, Dale Murphy, Lee Smith.
  • 2011: Jeff Bagwell, Fred McGriff, Dale Murphy, Lee Smith.

We are allowed to vote for as many as 10 nominees. As you might have noticed, I did not vote for two players who made it in: Andre Dawson and Barry Larkin. I’ve written before, I loved both players when they were active, and admired them for their career excellence and off-the-field activities. I just did not feel like they quite crossed that threshold from superb to Hall of Fame. Yet, I don’t deny that they are Hall of Fame worthy now. Nor am I naïve enough to think that all of the players I vote for will get in. Murphy won’t, and this is his last year of eligibility. I think if Dawson and Jim Rice are Hall of Famers, Murphy certainly should be, too. And I’ll probably vote for him one last time. But I don’t expect him to make it.

As you can probably tell, the subjectivity of this process is a deep, winding rabbit hole. Why Fred McGriff, but not Larry Walker? Why Jeff Bagwell, but not Edgar Martinez? I could explain those decisions now, but I’ll save that for when I actually decide on my ballot for this year.

Because I have decided that in my fifth year as a voter, the advent of Bonds and Clemens on the ballot means it’s time for me to re-evaluate how I make my selections.

Did they cheat? I don’t know. Probably. But I don’t know.

Here’s a question I need to consider, and I hope all voters do, too: If Clemens, Bonds, McGwire and even Palmeiro were not Hall of Fame worthy in the eyes of Major League Baseball or the National Baseball Hall of Fame, why are they allowed to appear on the writers’ ballot? Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, two obvious Hall of Famers based on numbers alone, are banned for gambling ties. Yet, Bonds is officially the all-time home run king. Not Henry Aaron. And Roger Maris is consigned to long-ago history by all those apparently drug-aided 60- and 70-home run seasons by Bonds, McGwire and Sosa.

The question now is, if these players are still eligible, what right do I have* to keep them out of the Hall of Fame? I have to balance that with an equally important question: If we, the voting writers, don’t deny perceived cheaters the ultimate honor in baseball, who will?

I’ll be wrestling with that for the next couple of weeks. The deadline to file my ballot with the BBWAA is New Year’s Eve. Until then, I welcome any and all advice/comments. Just … please relax. Have a ball out here. This game’s fun, okay? Fun, God damn it.

Here are this year’s candidates: Sandy Alomar Jr., Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Barry Bonds, Jeff Cirillo, Royce Clayton, Roger Clemens, Jeff Conine, Steve Finley, Julio Franco, Shawn Green, Roberto Hernandez, Ryan Klesko, Kenny Lofton, Edgar Martinez, Don Mattingly, Fred McGriff, Mark McGwire, Jose Mesa, Jack Morris, Dale Murphy, Rafael Palmeiro, Mike Piazza, Tim Raines, Reggie Sanders, Curt Schilling, Aaron Sele, Lee Smith, Sammy Sosa, Mike Stanton, Alan Trammell, Larry Walker, Todd Walker, David Wells, Rondell White, Bernie Williams, Woody Williams.

*BBWAA members become voters after 10 consecutive years of membership. That’s like, 347 years in SEO Writer age. I was an active member as a sportswriter for the Tampa Tribune and as a freelance journalist from 1999-2009, and became an honorary member for life in 2010. Voting for the Hall of Fame is the last meaningful vestige of my career as a baseball writer, and I take the honor seriously. But it’s definitely fun, too.