Tuesday’s Baseball Hall of Fame induction announcement should have been a day for the purest celebration of the sport.
Even amid an ongoing labor dispute, coming together to celebrate the greats of the game’s past should have provided an opportunity to be optimistic about its future, especially given the perpetually gregarious legend now preparing for a summer trip to Cooperstown.
Instead, David Ortiz’s day was overshadowed, and the Hall of Fame once again found itself mired in discussions about process rather than outcome. Whatever your feelings on players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, each of whom are inextricably linked to baseball’s so-called steroid era, it’s impossible to disentangle them from the history of the game.
That measuring stick — can the story of baseball be told without this player? — is one that weighs heavily on my mind when I consider the role of the Hall of Fame. I do not hold a ballot, and will not be eligible to vote until after the 2028 season at the earliest, so I haven’t poured in the necessary commitment to sharpening my own tools and firming up a stable belief system. Nor should I, by my estimation; that cart doesn’t need to be in front of that particular horse.
Still, the role of the Hall of Fame itself is more at issue now than perhaps it’s ever been, and it’s that complication that makes the framing of player candidacies more interesting. If enshrinement in the Hall confers immortality, should it be given to those who are strongly suspected — or proven, in the case of Manny Ramírez and Alex Rodríguez — to have cheated the game? If there’s no bigger honor in the sport, shouldn’t there be discernment in the way it’s earned?
Ultimately, it seems the Hall of Fame itself is not the ultimate measuring stick of how the game is remembered. It may be the most obvious manifestation of baseball’s love of its own history, and it is of course the game’s most important living museum. What it does not do, though, is tell the game’s story, because that’s a story that’s written instead by the memories that come from caring about the only sport that could be so bold as to call itself the nation’s pastime and be correct.
No one, after all, is suggesting Glenn Brummer or Tom Lawless be inducted into the Hall of Fame, and yet Cardinals fans of a certain age will never be able to forget the highlights that each of them imprinted on the game forever. It’s bizarre to think the lightest of light hitting infielders would be a villain in one of the country’s biggest baseball markets, but ask a diehard Nationals fan what they remember about Pete Kozma some time.
Summer of 1998, more on Bonds
For that matter, even before his induction, you could’ve gotten some pretty colorful responses if you had asked people in St. Louis about Ortiz.
If 1998 was the summer that saved baseball, then there’s no way to tell the story of the game without Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, neither of whom ever came close to being elected by the baseball writers. Sosa, like Bonds and Clemens, fell off the ballot this year in his 10th attempt, cresting at 18.5% of the vote. In his 10 years, McGwire never reached higher than 23.7%.
Ask baseball fans in St. Louis and Chicago about McGwire and Sosa and you’re likely to hear about that magical summer and the regrets that followed in equal measure. So it follows with Bonds. Those who grew up in Pittsburgh and the Bay Area and tracked him as he climbed through baseball history will never be able to forget what he gave them as he dominated the game like arguably no hitter ever has before; nor will they likely be able to pass off the pain of the judgments that undercut those achievements even as they came.
Baseball’s Hall of Fame not ultimate arbiter
The throughline in each of those stories is fandom, not the Hall of Fame. What a plaque might mean to each individual player is something to consider, and for a fan of Bonds, it’s easy to absorb his pain and disappointment as your own. Still, induction or no, his records aren’t erased any more than your memory of watching them be set. Bonds might not be immortal in bronze, but he is in brain and heart.
Baseball’s Hall of Fame is not the ultimate arbiter of the history of the game, despite its unique place in recording that history. Enshrinement there is an honor, but not to the exclusion of all other honors. If you believe Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire and even Tom Lawless deserve a place among the greats of the game, the good news is that they have it, even without a vote.
No vote of baseball writers can purge what fans know and feel, and that is where the history of the game truly lives.