Tiger Geist

You’ll read a lot on this soon, for two reasons:  1) Roberto Alomar didn’t get voted into the hall of fame, and 2) no Tigers were voted in, and it seems increasingly less likely that Alan Trammell will get in.  (FYI:  Excellent articles by Jim Caple and Rob Neyer, which I may or may not agree on)

But why do I hate this?  Because based on the way the voter’s vote, the whole point of the hall of fame is becoming lost on me.

I understand the ’shoe-ins’ for the hall.  Greg Maddux will walk into the hall.  So will Ivan Rodriguez… etc etc.  Trust me, I understand that Alan Trammell is not Cal Ripken.  But I also understand that Jim Rice and Andre Dawson are not Willie Mays or Hank Aaron.  So this process is lost on me.

I’m also not a fan of the selection committee and voters waiting a few years and then stating “you know, even though I voted such and such an MVP, in contrast that wasn’t really that good of a year”.  That makes sense in terms of getting things right.  But in baseball, hall of fame voting is really the only time that they allow people to sit back and say “hey, did we get that call right?”  Balls vs strikes, safe vs out — will there ever be instant replay for this?  The game can be entirely decided by an umpire who has a split second to make the correct call, but the hall of fame voters get 15 years to decide on the players who lived on those split second decisions.

In the end, it is about making it right.  But here we go — before the world of instant feedback known as ‘the internet’, fans got most of their news from baseball writers.  The writers wrote about players and generated interest, and you learned about which players were good and which ones were great.  As a fan, you would go purchase a ticket.  You saw an MVP type season from the player on your team, or you went to the stadium to see another player from another team, just to say you saw that player play.  Fifteen years later, the same writers who said player X was great now says “comparitively, he was good, not great”.  The Writer gets the chance to change his mind.  The fan, however, doesn’t get a refund on their ticket.

So the fan has memories of great players, and now they’re told that they aren’t really that great by the same people who stirred up the interest in the first place.  So the writer gets it right.  In service organizations, “the customer is always right”.  Except in baseball.  The writers are always right, and they are allowed to change their mind.  You as a fan can keep the memories.

Who is right?  Whomever you think is right.  Its the Oscars vs the Golden Globes; i’m not claiming the voting is wrong.  For me, the voting process is killing my interest in the hall.  Maybe Alan Trammell or Jack Morris don’t deserve to be in the hall.  But they are the ones I have memories of.  Kirk Gibson will never sniff the hall without purchasing his own ticket, but I can’t think of a better baseball moment then his home run in the 1988 world series (of course with the Dodgers…).  Nothing Andre Dawson has done excites me, yet I still get chills and can spout off trivia while watching the Gibson vs Eckersley at-bat.  Maybe the Hall of Fame is perfectly fine; maybe it just isn’t for me.