When President Obama took the field last week to throw out the first pitch of the major league all-star game in Saint Louis, he was handed the ball by Stan Musial, heaved it to Albert Pujols, and then shook hands with Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and other Cardinals greats lined up behind home plate. The host team was honoring its living legends. All but one.
Now the man who rescued baseball gets a little over 20 percent of the vote each year for the Hall of Fame, nowhere near the 70 percent he needs to be inducted. And on slow news days, the baseball writers whose votes keep him out write stories explaining why McGwire—and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Sosa and others—are unworthy. McGwire might have been a nonentity at last week’s game, but he was grist for last week’s copy mill.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
High and mighty? That sounded like a shot at somebody—and it was. Davidoff was sniping at Telander, who’d been presumptuous enough to make a proposal Davidoff didn’t think much of. At a meeting of the baseball writers covering the all-star game, Telander had called on the Baseball Writers Association of America to form a committee that would try to think through the perplexing subject of PEDs and the Hall of Fame.
Davidoff complained that Telander’s committee “would have prioritized the ‘integrity, sportsmanship, character’ tenets of the Hall’s current rules over all others. It would have treated this debate more seriously than that of a pitcher’s won-loss record.”
“I’ll just have to voice my opinions in a column. But I can’t come up with answers on my own. I was looking for help. I was looking for buddies in this quest.”
“There’s nobody better suited than us,” says Telander. “We know more about baseball than anybody.” But that could be both true and beside the point. “Basically,” says Sullivan, “it’s something we’ve done since the 1930s and it’s something we don’t want to give up. It’s a tradition, and basically it’s the last thing we have left. It’s our last clout. Baseball writers are dwindling. Press boxes are a lot emptier than they used to be—the Dodgers are letting in bloggers.”
Wilstein told Araton, “I’m not one of the finalists yet, and I don’t want to sound as if I’m campaigning. But I’d like to think the decision will be more of a referendum about writers covering the issues than it will be about me.”
