On Deserving It

I was recruited to play sports in college and at the end of my freshman year I received a varsity letter. I didn’t particularly enjoy my experience as a Division I athlete and I probably would not have continued playing anyway, but I dislocated my (already-damaged) shoulder twice in the space of two months over the summer between terms so the choice to retire (such as it is) was pretty much made for me. There was a long period where I looked back at that time and could only focus on the negative: the experience itself was a sour one and the damage to my shoulder was such that, despite having a full reconstruction nearly a decade ago, I will suffer shoulder pain for the rest of my life. I didn’t have any particular pride in that letter and I couldn’t see the benefits of having achieved it, aside from the fact that it entitled me to a free letterman’s sweater which I own (on my father’s insistence) but have never worn.

I was made to think about this because of the reaction from almost the entire internet to the news that Harold Baines had been elected to the Hall of Fame. My dad was a Sox fan growing up in the western suburbs of Chicago and watched Minnie Miñoso and the early-’50s Sox teams, so the Pale Hose have always kind of been my American League team. Despite that, prior to yesterday I didn’t have any opinion whatsoever on Harold Baines. Even though I remember his career I never him saw play because he was an American League guy at a time when it was common for players to spend their entire careers in one league or the other and in an NL city like San Diego you really only saw the AL on television during the playoffs. As with lots of AL stars back before interleague and MLBAM - Edgar Martínez, Rafael Palmeiro, Paul Molitor, Juan González - I only saw the highlights on ESPN, so I didn’t have any sort of understanding of who Baines was as a player or what he had done. That probably explains why I still picture him as an Oriole (the team he spent most of the ‘90s with) rather than as a White Sox (the team he spent all of the ‘80s with and with which he is undoubtedly more associated).

But apparently lots of people, especially baseball writers, DO have opinions about Harold Baines. And those opinions are all variations on a theme: Harold Baines doesn’t deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. (And yes, those are two different articles on SI’s website trashing Baines’ selection.) The level of vitriol in some of these articles is astonishing - Jon Tayler writes “there’s nothing to Baines’ Hall of Fame case beyond his prodigious hit total, and he got there by piling up thousands of plate appearances as a plodding DH who could barely play the field”; Ben Lindbergh claims “Baines is probably the worst player to qualify for the hall in 42 years, and his election is shocking in an era of relatively enlightened evaluation”; Lindbergh’s Effectively Wild podcast co-host Jeff Sullivan, who has stated on several occasions that he DOES NOT CARE about the Hall of Fame, described Baines’ election to the Hall as “a bad thing” and then compared it to Donald Trump being elected president. (Seriously!)

What the fuck is going on?

How can this much anger be generated over something so monumentally harmless? By all accounts Baines seems like a a truly good person - go look at Ozzie Guillén’s twitter timeline for proof of that. If being a shit human being is enough to keep otherwise-surefire Hall of Famer Curt Schilling out, surely being a genuinely good person should count for something, especially in 2018 when the world seems consumed by a sort of unrelenting negativity. It is beyond my comprehension how anyone could be legitimately upset about the election of a good man, who was a great (if not spectacular) player, to an institution that is supposed to honour and (crucially) promote the history of baseball.

There are two major complaints from the writers about Baines’ election, and they centre on his worthiness and the committee system. The complaints concerning the committee system are about what you’d expect from a group that is frozen out of something they believe to be rightfully theirs: it’s too opaque and too prone to being manipulated by a few individuals with an agenda. This lack of accountability, they claim, led to the disastrous mistake that is “Harold Baines, Hall of Famer.” Yet the writers themselves make disastrous mistakes all the time. By way of an example, here’s a starting 10 (we’ll stick with the AL theme…) of players not elected by the writers: Satchel Paige, Thurman Munson, Dick Allen, Lou Whitaker, Ron Santo, Alan Trammell, Minnie Miñoso, Larry Doby, Tony Oliva, and Dave Parker. (Of course, some of those men are in the Hall, but only because of the same system all the writers are bitching about.) Until such time as the writers stop fucking up their votes consistently, calls to change the system are entirely without merit.

As for the worthiness part, does Harold Baines deserve to be in the Hall of Fame? I go back to my varsity letter. As I’ve aged, and gotten used to the shoulder stuff, and the distance between the present and the past has grown, my attitude towards my year as a D-I athlete has changed. I was a benchwarmer for the year I played and if the coaches had wanted to they would have probably been justified in denying me the letter. But I was at every practice, I sat in the van on road trips in the middle of a New England winter, and I warmed up in earnest for every game, each time convinced I was going to get a chance to play. More often than not, I didn’t. If there were a JAWS system for awarding varsity letters I probably wouldn’t have received it. Ultimately it was a judgment call by the coaches, and they decided I deserved it. While I’m never going to define myself based on my achievements as a collegiate athlete, I now derive a level of personal satisfaction in the knowledge that I deserved that letter, regardless of what people might think. The same goes for Harold Baines. Despite what JAWS would suggest, what makes a Hall of Famer is not an objective thing. People are kept out of the Hall of Fame for subjective reasons every year - each individual writer’s ballot is an entirely subjective document - so it makes sense that we would include them for subjective reasons, as well. That is almost certainly why Harold Baines is in and the aforementioned Curt Schilling is not. I didn’t care about Harold Baines at all until yesterday but, hearing the emotion that overwhelmed him when talking about being elected, I can’t help but feel happy that a group of people tasked with determining if he deserved to be in the Hall of Fame decided in the positive. The writers will say (or, more accurately, have said) that his election is a “bad thing” because he doesn’t deserve it. They’re full of shit.