Very happy news for me yesterday: Detroit Tiger Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez was voted into the Hall of Fame. (What? He played for some other teams as well? I don't care.) Magglio Ordonez deserved better than his one-year-and-out fate. Carlos Guillen deserved better than zero votes. You may disagree, and you might even care about players who never played for the Tigers, although I can't imagine why.
But that's one of the things the Hall of Fame elections are for - debate among fans.
And that leads us to the question of Curt Schilling, who dropped this year from 52 percent of the vote the previous year to only 45 percent. Christine Brennan of USA Today is admirably honest in her assessment of why that's happening. It's not that Schilling wasn't good enough to get in. He was. But sportswriters make the call here, and while they don't like Schilling's comments about them, what they really don't like is Schilling's politics:
No, Schilling dropped not because of anything he did on or around the field of play, but because of what he, now 50, has recently said about baseball writers, many of whom happen to be Hall of Fame voters.
He called them “scumbags” and “some of the worst people I’ve ever known.” He also tweeted a photo of a T-shirt that suggested journalists should be lynched. He later said he was joking.
“If I had said, ‘Lynch Trump,’ I’d be getting in with about 90% of the vote this year,” Schilling recently told TMZ.
He might be right. Nonetheless, it’s not every day that an athlete decides to run around alienating the very people whose votes he needs for the Hall of Fame.
Where does all of this leave us? I find myself in the rather odd position of saying that Schilling should have more of a shot of getting into the Hall of Fame than Bonds or Clemens — and I can’t stand some of the things Schilling has said.
On Twitter, he has equated Muslims with Nazi Germany. He said Hillary Clinton should be “buried under a jail somewhere.” And he went on a Facebook tirade against access to public facilities for transgender people.
I wouldn’t want a person like that in any Hall of Fame I was forming, and I sure wouldn’t be happy if he moved in next door. But the Baseball Hall of Fame, for which I do not vote, is known for its rogue’s gallery of undesirables and unquotables, people like Ty Cobb, Eddie Murray and Steve Carlton. Misbehavior off the field could fill a wing of the Hall, starting with the great Mickey Mantle. Seems like Schilling, one of the finest postseason pitchers ever, would fit right in.
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You can clearly see Brennan's own political biases coming out here. She's a liberal and because of that she regards Schilling as a horrible human being. It says a lot about the left that they wouldn't want a person living next to them just because they disagree with their politics.
But at least Brennan is willing to expose the petulance of her colleagues, who are willing to overlook Schilling's accomplishments on the field because they don't like his public comments. Since when is it a Hall of Fame disqualifier than you don't support transgender bathrooms, or that you point out the corruption of a politician? It's not, except to the extent that the people who vote on these things disagree with those opinions and want to punish those who hold them.
By the way, Schilling is certainly not the first athlete to speak in harsh terms about sportswriters, nor is he inaccurate. Many of them are completely horrible people. Many of them are extremely irresponsible in what they say about athletes and teams, and deserve the ire that athletes like Schilling and others aim at them. Some of them, like Brennan's USA Today colleague Bob Nightengale, are cockroaches who try to destroy other people just to show how powerful they are. Such people are beneath contempt. If Schilling has to keep quiet about that to get into the Hall of Fame, then it's probably not worth it.
But here's what I find interesting about Brennan's argument and the actual behavior of Hall of Fame voters. Many of them will argue that Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds deserve to be in the Hall of Fame based on their numbers, even though we know they cheated and compromised the integrity of the game. Some make the same argument on behalf of Pete Rose, although he is not on the ballot so they can't vote for him.
No one argues that Curt Schilling did anything of the sort, but Brennan acknowledges that some don't vote for him because they don't like the things that come out of his mouth - even though they have nothing to do with what he did on the field. That shows you where the priorities of baseball writers lie, and it's one of the reasons you can believe what Schilling says about them.
