Turns in BBWAA card in protest over 'roid cheats

Lugz--Very very few people ever have the privilege and honor of deciding who will become a Hall of Famer.  We can all talk about it, argue, reason, rant and rail, but only a select few get to choose.

If you truly love baseball, as he surely seems to, you use the power of your vote.  

Would you frown on an American who refused to vote in a presidential election on the grounds that the whole country was so messed up there was no point in picking anyone? I think you'd say, hey, votes matter, use yours to do some good...no one hears silence.  

 

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I understand what you're saying, but it doesn't really fit. The issue isn't character as much as it's how using substances makes your performance better.

Being a racist doesn't help you hit 70 home runs. Steroids might.

 

Wanna know why? Because it toughened up our feet. We couldn't afford shoes. So we stapled cardboard to the bottoms of our feet.

 

I think voting in an election-- particularly a local election-- is much more important than voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Blasphemy around here, perhaps.  (You know what would be funny -- to do a story on writers who spend months hemming and hawing over their HOF votes, but don't bother to vote in elections.)  But the point is, it's hard for me to equate the two.

Correct me if I'm wrong... But I seem to remember reading that the BBWAA was having trouble holding on to HOF voters.  Bigtime papers... The NYT, maybe??  The WP??  The Houston Chron??  Don't know, can't remember exactly, somebody help me out... but some pretty bigtime papers were telling its writers to give up their votes.  And I thought, "If all these bigtime writers from bigtime papers can't vote anymore, isn't the whole HOF thing sort of.... LESS of a big deal??"

So I guess that's why I see one guy making a personal decision not to vote on the HOF anymore... as not such an earth-shaking event.

 

Actually, it does fit. Newhouse cites the '94 strike and steroids as reasons why the game has lost its purity. My point is that the game never had purity no matter what your recollections from age 7.

 

You had cardboard? We were lucky to have staples!

 

But the institutions of racism helped a great deal.
Does Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games if he has to face Satchel Paige three times during that stretch?

 

Yes, but it wasn't Joe DiMaggio's choice to ban black players.

Would he have hit in 56 straight games if there had been specialized relief pitchers, video tapes to study, cross-country travel to confront, fielders with huge gloves?

He played under the rules/policies that were in effect. He didn't set them.

 

I'm speaking to the issue of people with dubious character being in the Hall of Fame. Being a wife beater didn't affect the essence of the competition on the baseball field the way steroids and greenies did.

 

No, but most of the people who set the rules/policies are in the Hall of Fame.
And whether or not you set the rules/policies hardly has anything to do with whether or not you benefitted from them when you piled up your records. Nothing McGwire did, as far as we know, was against the rules when he did it.

 

I understand that, Smasher, but if you go back to Newhouse's twisted reasoning for turning in his card, he specifically cites the '94 strike and steroids, which in his view were the final straws in the game losing its purity and, in turn, his losing his enthusiasm for being part of the voting process. He doesn't frame it as simply a moral dilemma about voting for possible cheaters, although if he'd have gone with that it would have been a tad more plausible.

 

I'm not talking about Newhouse, I'm talking about your post bringing up wife beaters and racists.

I see no logic at all in Newhouse resigning from the BBWAA.