Tag Archives: National Baseball Hall of Fame

For the Mets, Hall of Fame day and play

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Jeff Kent, Andruw Jones, Carlos Beltrán

Former Mets Jeff Kent and Carlos Beltrán sandwich longtime Braves center field vacuum and bomber Andruw Jones at the Hall of Fame Sunday. Today’s Mets even made them proud back in New York. (National Baseball Hall of Fame photo.)

So little has gone right for the Not-So-Amazin’ Mess (er, Mets) this season that even the grumpiest cynic among Met fans must have entered Sunday praying for something, anything. On a day when two former Mets were inducted into the Hall of Fame, one of whom elected to be represented as a Met, the least the Mets could do was win a damn game.

Carlos Beltrán was one of baseball’s center field greats. Not open for debate or debunk. He was a demolition expert at both sides of the plate. He’s one of only five men to hit 400+ home runs and steal 300+ bases. And, as Jayson Stark (The Athletic) hoisted forth, there are only two men in all baseball history to play 40+ postseason games and a) bat .300+; b) reach base for a .400+ on-base percentage; and, slug .600+

Who’s the other guy? Some moon-faced mug named Ruth.

“[W]ith apologies to Reggie Jackson,” Mr. Stark croons, “Beltrán may have been the real Mr. October.” (Sit down and shut up about that 2006 National League Championship Series-ending called strikeout. His Babehood saw and raised, running unconscionably into a World Series-ending out trying like a fool to steal a base he couldn’t have stolen aboard a scooter by then.)

No apologies necessary. Nobody forgets Jackson’s three-bomb Series-winning party in Game Six of the 1977 Series, of course. But take a look at what counts in the long haul, Beltrán over 65 postseason games and Jackson over 77 (WPA: win probability added, not the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal):

Will the real Mr. October please stand up?
  BA OBP SLG OPS WPA
Carlos Beltrán .307 .412 .609 1.021 2.26
Reggie Jackson .278 .358 .527 .885 1.22

It’s almost to wonder how come Beltrán never earned a nickname comparable to Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson’s. Did you know Beltrán is the only player in major league history with 312 stolen bases and an 86.4 percent stolen base percentage? The Man of Steal has a mere 80.7 theft percentage.

Beltran was also as run preventive as the day was long with his glove. Maybe not quite as run preventive as fellow Sunday Hall inductee Andruw Jones—but nobody else was, either. Not even the immortal Willie Mays. Jones and Mays are numeros uno y dos, after whom come Paul Blair, Jim Piersall, Kenny Lofton, and Devon White. If only those four could have hit in the Beltrán-Jones league, never mind Mays.

“When people ask me why I choose this cap,” Beltrán said during his induction speech, referring to the Mets after saluting every team for whom he played, “I have to say this, guys. It’s simple. Every organization shapes your career. New York shaped my life.”

Jeff Kent wasn’t all that much as a very young Met, of course. He was prickly at his best at that time. Dealt from the Blue Jays (for pitching great David Cone), Kent answered a prank from his new teammates with fury. From there to the Indians in another trade and then to the Giants, he built a parallel rep as a solid player (especially at the plate) and a bit of a sour belly.

As a Giant, Kent yanked himself into the books. No, it didn’t hurt that he got to bat with Barry Bonds’s kind of protection, but that kind of protection matters nothing if you don’t or can’t take advantage. Kent took. And how. Six straight seasons of 20+ home runs and 100+ runs batted in; nine straight of 20+ bombs and 90+ steaks.

By his own eventual admission, Kent found it difficult to impossible to let himself be seen as human. Yet when the Contemporary Era Committee elected him last winter, Kent let himself show what he didn’t dare unless he was getting into a scrum with Bonds: real emotion.

He even thanked his Giants manager, Dusty Baker, profusely enough. “He was the right man at the right time for me, and I’m naturally a half-empty guy . . . Looking back, I think I complicated the game a lot more than it needed to be. And Dusty was the opposite. Dusty didn’t complicate the game. He respected it.”

If only the Jeff Kent at the Cooperstown podium could have been available to the Jeff Kent who snapped at pranking teammates, lied about popping wheelies on his motorcycle his final Giants spring training, and chewed out mercurial Dodger teammate Milton Bradley for non-hustle when Bradley was playing on a balky knee that exploded on him on a subsequent baserunning play. Among others.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Kent’s and Beltrán’s former Mets were going to be damned if they were going to let the Dodgers take a third straight from them on Hall of Fame day.

Freddy Peralta, whose shaky season seems to have ensured his Mets tenure will be short and somewhat less than sweet, pitched four decent innings of six-hit, three-run (two earned) ball. The Mets bullpen put the Dodgers on lockdown the rest of the way for the most part.

Then the Mets took what they could get from Dodger starter Emmet Sheehan (a first-inning RBI single from Francisco Lindor) and his nasty little array of heaters and skidders, before he yielded after five innings. Then the Mets got to abuse the Dodger pen starting in the sixth. Jack Dryer walked a pair around one out, but Evan Phillips had the honour of Tyrone Taylor blasting his 1-1 service into the left field seats.

An inning later, a passed ball enabling A.J. Ewing to score led to a two-out walk to Jorge Polanco, which led to Marcus Semien—one of the gaggle of Mets brought aboard for this season only to find themselves playing out of position (and possibly out of their gourds) often enough—banging Will Klein’s 1-1 offering over the left field fence.

All the Mets had to do was keep the Dodgers pinned the final two frames. Luke Weaver squirmed unscathed out of a bases-loaded jam into which he’d squirmed a little too handily in the eighth—Freddie Freeman singling; Tommy Edman singling two outs later; Kyle Tucker hit by a pitch—before Teoscar Hernández bounced one to the third base side that Weaver himself grabbed and threw on from a fadeaway angle to just get the third out. Then Devin Williams found enough of his once formidable self in the ninth to shake off a leadoff single and strike the side out.

Met fans could be forgiven for asking why ex-Mets couldn’t be inducted into Cooperstown every day; or, at least, five out of seven days. Because on the sunny day when two received their plaques, the Mets had the great sense to play like the team they were supposed to have been cobbled, knobbled, and roped together to be this season.

Bill Mazeroski, RIP: Fair play

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Bill Mazeroski

Striking a pose in the Polo Grounds during his earliest Pirates seasons, Bill Mazeroski shows what really got him into the Hall of Fame at long enough last.

Let’s get it out of the way right away. “I was gonna hit one out,” said Dick Stuart, the on-deck batter. “Could I help if it Mazeroski decided to get cute?”

There. The best gag to follow after Bill Mazeroski hit the 1960 World Series-winning home run is resurrected just long enough and, now, cast aside. Because anyone who thinks the greatest defensive second baseman ever got into the Hall of Fame because of that home run alone should be dismissed unceremoniously.

Mazeroski died Friday at 89. The Game Seven-ending homer he hit to hand his Pirates a World Series win despite being outscored 55-27 will live in baseball lore as long as baseball itself lives, of course. Neither Dr. Strangeglove nor any other Pirate could help it if Maz decided to get cute.

It’s also one of the absolute classic instances of a player doing something so far above his own head the most powerful telescope available won’t locate it. If the only way you judge a ballplayer is at the plate, Mazeroski is too much of a piece with other mere mortals delivering transdimensionally immortal moments:

* Bumpus Jones pitched only one full major league season, 1892. His 10.19 ERA may explain a lot about why. The year before, he got to pitch one game . . . and became the first major league pitcher ever to pitch a no-hitter in his first-ever major league start. Go figure.

* Bobby Lowe is sixteen places outside the top one hundred second basemen of all time, but in 1894 he was the first major league player ever to hit four home runs in a single game.

* Howard Ehmke snuck one notch inside the top two hundred starting pitchers the game’s ever seen. With his career about to end, he was the surprise starter for Game One of the 1929 World Series. And he surprised everyone, perhaps even himself, by setting the single-game Series strikeout record (13) and doing it in large enough part at the expense of three Hall of Famers whom he struck out twice each. (Kiki Cuyler, Rogers Hornsby, and Hack Wilson.) His record was broken eventually by Carl Erskine, who was broken by Sandy Koufax, who was broken by Bob Gibson

* Don Larsen was the number 231 starting pitcher in the major league game’s history . . . but in 1956 he pitched the first and so far only perfect game in World Series history.

* Bill Mazeroski, a lifetime .260 hitter who hit slightly below average for second basemen, and had a lifetime .299 on-base percentage, hit the first and so far only World Series-winning Game Seven walkoff home run.

That quintet yielded forth one Hall of Famer. And he didn’t get there because he was the second coming of fellow Hall of Fame second baseman Rogers Hornsby, his diametric opposite in more ways than one. (Never mind the statue outside PNC Park’s right field gates, showing Mazeroski rounding second and waving his outstretched batting helmet after hitting that home run.)

Hornsby hit about ten tons in his prime and showed the pre-integration National League what it was like (and how bad it wasn’t) to have Babe Ruth or close enough to him in your league. But he was league-average at best at second base. And, he was described most politely as the cantankerous personality type.

Mazeroski could barely hit ten ounces. Some people might still be trying to figure out just how he averaged drawing eight intentional walks a season or hitting 13.8 home runs a season. (The National League’s pitchers weren’t that generous.) But slip a glove onto his left hand and he became second base’s answer to Brooks Robinson. (Or was Brooks Robinson third base’s answer to Bill Mazeroski?)

Maz’s 148 total defensive zone runs above his league average remain the best among second basemen in major league history. (His nearest trailer: Frank White, the longtime Royals second baseman, with 126.) When he retired after the 1972 season (and a second World Series ring, with the 1971 Pirates), he was believed to own the best defensive statistics of any player at any position, ever, pending the final outcome of Robinson’s career. (Total Baseball, the pre-Retrosheet baseball co-Bible, ranked the eight-time Gold Glove-winning Mazeroski the best fielder at any position, ever.)

The Hall of Fame voters weren’t in a big hurry to elect him.

“What he has to sell,” wrote Bill James in The Politics of Glory, “is lots and lots of defense, and the Hall of Fame isn’t buying. Trying to sell defense to the Hall of Fame is like trying to sell diplomacy to a terrorist. They may listen politely, but what they’re really looking for is big guns.” (Which reminds me: Hands up to everyone who barely remembers Mazeroski also hit a two-run homer in Game One of that 1960 Series to put that game out of Yankee reach, too.)

Come 2001, in The New Historical Baseball Abstract, James wrote that his own Win Shares system credited Mazeroski—whose other nickname was No-Touch, in honour of the speed at which he released a ball to start turning a double play (it was the speed of light, we think we remember)—with 113 such shares for his second base defense, “the highest total of all time.”

Some way, somehow, one of the last of the pre-Era Committee-partioned Veterans Committee finally caught on to the idea that run prevention was just as important to winning ball games as run production. Maybe slightly superior. “[T]he Cubs have had two problems,” wrote George F. Will during the peak (?) of their 108-year rebuild between 1908 and 2016. “They put too few runs on the scoreboard and the other guys put too many.” Good pitching isn’t the only thing that beats good hitting.

James once related that Dave Cash, who succeeded Mazeroski at second base, had no problem at all waiting around for Mazeroski’s age to overthrow him at long enough last. “Actually,” he quoted Cash as saying, “I learned a lot from Mazeroski.”

He’s a real man, and one of the things he taught me was to keep things in perspective. Maz didn’t make many errors, and he hardly ever made any bad plays, but when he did, he didn’t let it bother him. He was always the same, whether things were going good, bad, or indifferently.

A man that sanguine, whether playing second base or teaching it (as he did for numerous years to follow as a Pirates spring training instructor) is going to make short and sweet work of his Hall of Fame induction speech. That’s exactly what Mazeroski did when his (long overdue) time came, shamelessly letting emotion come forth before he finished:

I think defense belongs in the Hall of Fame. Defense deserves as much credit as pitching and I’m proud to be going in as a defensive player. I want to thank the Veterans Committee for getting me here. I thought when the Pirates retired my number [9] that would be the greatest thing ever to happen to me. I don’t think I’m gonna make it, I want to thank everyone who made the trip up here to listen to all this crap …Thank you to everybody.

As had been so while turning 1,706 double plays (it’s still a major league record), Mazeroski’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Just a year after he pronounced defense as Hall of Fame important in its own right, the platinum standard for shortstop defense, Ozzie Smith, was inducted.

We can allow thoughts of Maz and The Wiz in the same middle infield in our imaginations alone. But boy, what those imaginations would show us, to the chagrin of a few too many hitters learning the hard way how easy it isn’t to sneak something past them.

Worry not that Mazeroski reunited with his beloved wife in the Elysian Fields will drive her mad all over again. Milene Nicholson met him when she worked in the Pirates front office and married him in 1958. They were a couple until she preceded him to the Fields two years ago. Rest assured she’s kept the gloves ready for him near second base.

The BBWAA Hall ballot: The newcomers

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Ryan Braun

If you’ll pardon the expression, Braun cheated himself out of a Hall of Fame case.

A few weeks ago, I had a look at the holdovers on the current Baseball Writers Association of America Hall of Fame ballot. Included in my analysis of their cases was a promise, which some might deem a threat, to look at the newcomers in short order.

Well, the order was short enough. In the interim, the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee elected Jeff Kent to the Hall. So It’s time. But I’m going to tell you going in that I have a sneaking suspicion that Kent may stand alone among players at the Cooperstown podium next summer.

Which would probably drive to the nearest drink well those writers still standing who saw Kent in his prime. The ones who remember his feuding with a certain Giants teammate. The ones who knew concurrently that, without that teammate in the lineup ahead of him, Kent’s only passage to the Hall of Fame might be as a paying customer.

I’m not going to say, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” But, and we’ll take these ballot rookies alphabetically . . .

Ryan Braun—Like Álex Rodríguez, Braun got himself caught as a customer of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances from Biogenesis. Unlike A-Rod, that didn’t provoke Braun to litigiousness. His litigiousness happened earlier, when he tried suing his way out of a suspension when testing caught him using synthetic testosterone. He even accused a sample collector of anti-Semitism.

After serving his Biogenesis suspension, Braun went out of his way to self-rehabilitate. He apologised publicly to the collector he smeared; he revived his charitable activities. But he was also never again the player he was before his PED issues, thanks largely to injuries.

In peak and career value terms, his performance papers fall too far short of Hall-worthiness. In trying to go scorched-earth when caught red-handed (and probably red-faced), placing his entire pre-test/pre-suspension career into question (fairly or unfairly), Braun cheated himself out of a Hall case. No.

Shin-soo Choo—The second Korean position player to make it to the U.S. major leagues (Hee Seop Choi preceded him), Choo was as talented as the day was long and just about as unfortunate. Injury bugs got to him too often. At his best and healthiest, he was as solid a tablesetter as a lineup could have. But it’s not enough to strike a plaque in Cooperstown. No.

Edwin Encarnación—As a Blue Jay in the middle of his fifteen-year career, he was one of the American League’s most feared sluggers. He was also a better baserunner than you might remember. His defensive liabilities probably did the most to keep his peak and career values below the Hall of Fame averages.

But he and Toronto will always have that monstrous three-run homer to send the Jays to an American League division series after Buck Showalter’s brain fart meant Encarnación wouldn’t have to get through the 2016 AL’s best reliever, Zach Britton. No.

Gio Gonzalez—Likeable. Durable. Dependable. And, according to Baseball Reference, the number 309 starting pitcher of all time. One fielding-independent championship isn’t enough to get you to the Hall after a thirteen-year career. Twice leading your league in walks won’t, either. But you kind of had to love this guy.

In the pre-universal DH era, Gonzalez had an all-time freak stat: he struck out more pitchers batting against him than any other pitcher in four decades preceding him. Not a Hall stat, but certainly something to warm the hearts of those who know baseball really is a funny game. No.

Alex Gordon—It would be easy to dismiss him because of his modest batting statistics, but Gordon was one whale of a defensive left fielder. He has eight Gold Gloves and two Platinums, and he didn’t get them as participation trophies, either. He is, in fact, the number three left fielder ever for run prevention.

The only guys ahead of him there? Some dude named Bonds, and some Hall of Famer named Yastrzemski. That’s bloody well elite company he’s keeping there.

I don’t know if that alone will get Gordon into the Hall in due course. But I say “in due course” because I think his case deserves deeper looks and I suspect he’ll last on the ballot for another couple of years at least. Not now.

Cole Hamels—He looked like a Hall of Famer once upon a time. Especially when he helped lead the 2008 Phillies to a World Series triumph with a 1.80 postseason ERA that year, not to mention bagging the Most Valuable Player awards in the National League Championship Series and the World Series.

Talent to burn and perfectionism likewise, seemed to be the cumulative assessment, whether in Philadelphia, Texas, or Chicago. He also dealt with enough injury issues to make it difficult to impossible to build the Hall of Fame case he looked to be beginning in the glory days with the Phillies. But I suspect he might linger on the ballot another year, at least. No.

Matt Kemp—He, too, looked like a Hall of Fame talent when he arrived. The bad news was a) Kemp’s dynamic style was offset by his frequent inabilities to re-adjust when pitchers caught onto his fastball dependency at the plate; and, b) he was a defensive liability as often as not.

He hit with staggering power when he was right, especially his career year 2011. But when measured against the rest of his career overall, that turned out to be kind of a fluke season. Kemp’s real problem might have been being a designated hitter type who played in the wrong league in the pre-universal DH era. No.

Howie Kendrick

Gallows pole: Kendrick’s power hitting helped the 2019 Nationals go all the way to the Promised Land.

Howie Kendrick—Eminently likeable, especially as his career neared its finish and he shone for the 2019 Nationals all the way through the postseason. Especially hitting a pair of ultimately game-winning home runs that paid the bill for every steak he might ever want to have in Washington for the rest of his life. (He also won that year’s NLCS MVP.)

Forgotten amidst those postseason heroics: Kendrick was a very solid second baseman, not quite an intergalactic presense there but in the plus column for run prevention. It won’t be enough to help him into Cooperstown, but when he was right he was a fine player and a terrific clubhouse element. No.

Nick Markakis—He’s one classic example of a terrific baseball player who was as solid as they came without being spectacular. (2,388 hits; 57 total zone runs as a right fielder.) Even as something of an on-base machine and a definite asset in right field, Markakis was the guy you couldn’t bear to replace, even if the rest of the world didn’t necessarily drop what it was doing when he checked in at the plate or ran down a right field fly. Not quite.

Daniel Murphy—A threshing machine at the plate for the pre-World Series 2015 postseason Mets, with those six consecutive games hitting a home run and breaking Hall of Famer Mike Piazza’s team record for total homers in a single postseason. Unfortunately, his Series fielding mishaps negated that hitting prowess on the way to the Mets’ Series loss to the Royals.

Murphy’s 2016 redemption (leading the NL in slugging and OPS) proved a one-off. His career overall was too far short of the Hall of Fame, but that pre-World Series postseason power display in 2015 keeps him a Met hero. No.

Hunter Pence—He got to play for two out of the three San Francisco Series winners in the 2010s. He was charmingly quirky, enough to earn a temporary trend of “ahhh, ya mother rides a vacuum cleaner” banners around the league. (Hunter Pence eats pizza with a fork! Hunter Pence says “Sorry” when he catches a fly! were typical.)

Well, Pence was a good, solid player when he wasn’t injured. That’s important and it counts, and if it’s married to a guy who’s delightfully flaky that’s a big plus. That might even keep him on an extra Hall ballot. Might. Not quite.

Rick Porcello—His 2016 American League Cy Young Award was an outlying season for him—especially since future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander should have won it. Porcello  opened the next season with a 1.40 ERA and 1.74 FIP in his first four games. That season ended with him showing a 4.65 ERA/4.60 FIP.

That was Porcello. Periodic short bursts of greatness, modest longer terms. He was smart on the mound and relied on his defenses. But that’s not always going to make a Hall of Famer, either. No.

First published at Sports Central.

Kent stands alone, for now

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Jeff Kent

Jeff Kent, now a Hall of Fame second baseman, during the height of his career, as a Giant.

In 1999, during which he earned his first All-Star selection, Jeff Kent told Sports Illustrated  writer Franz Lidz that, growing up, “I never watched baseball on TV. It’s slow and boring. I’m not a fan. Never was.” Well.

He played the game as a boy growing up in southern California, but it seems to have been a joyless activity. That, in turn, seems to have been the product of parenting in which his father, a motorcycle policeman of stern perfectionism, who took his children to Dodgers games, grounded his son similarly.

“I’d go 3-for-4,” he told Lidz, “and he’d chastise me for the out. I’d throw a one-hitter, and he’d tell me I could have gotten the hitter on a curve.” Reading that, you suspect that, if the boy Kent had broken his league’s home run record, the father would have harped and carped on the ones he missed. If he’d pitched a perfect game, perhaps Pop would have snarked about the ones the boy didn’t get over the plate.

Will Kent take his election to the Hall of Fame by the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee as a vindicating rebuke to such dubious parenting? Hard to say unless you can read his mind. More than one profile has revealed Kent as a high school player with both an “attitude problem” and a discomfort being sandwiched between a coach not unlike his father and teammates who itched for him to stand up for them.

Marry his father’s negativism to his apparently unpleasurable high school playing experience, and perhaps you get a better sense of how Kent came by a personality that either unnerved or annoyed teammates and reporters. It might have pained him to consider, but Kent had experienced joyless parental judgmentalism comparable to his eventual teammate/rival Barry Bonds. Bonds grew up having similar skirmishes with his own haunted, major league playing father. It only began with coming home from school with B’s on his report cards and hearing Pop’s retort, “B’s ain’t A’s, boy.”

Maybe that’s why Kent would earn a too-quick reputation as a malcontent after he was dealt as a rookie to the Mets (for star pitcher David Cone) in August 1992. His new teammates treated him to a rookie-hazing prank; he reacted with fury. From the Mets to the Indians to the Giants, Kent seemed to have a reputation as a solid enough player and something of a head case.

As a Giant, he launched a six-season run in which he’d hit at least 20 home runs and drive at least 100 runs home. He owed it to two things: 1) He picked up on lifting his hands a little more at the plate from Hall of Fame designated hitter Edgar Martinez; and, 2) he had Bonds’s protection in the lineup batting ahead of him. Come 2002, come highs and lows.

The lows began in spring training, when he tried claiming that he’d injured himself washing his truck but it turned out he’d done it popping motorcycle wheelies. They continued when a scuffle with Bonds prompted him to tell manager Dusty Baker he wanted off the Giants. The highs included a career-high 37 home runs, and a two-bomb World Series Game Five against the ultimately triumphant Angels. He also took a stand against actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances, admirably.

He went from there to have good seasons with the Astros. (And shine in Game Five of the 2004 National League Championship Series, a three-run bomb off Cardinals closer Jason Isringhausen.) From there, a two-year deal with his hometown Dodgers that turned into an extension. He’d have his moments again, but the injuries began taking a toll. He found himself questioning how professional some of his younger teammates truly were; his final postseason saw him limited to the bench after mid-season knee surgery.

When he elected to retire rather than try one more season in 2008, Kent let his vulnerability show. He also showed himself, as I’ve written before, a man who learned to say hello when it was time to say goodbye. “I’ve learned to love and appreciate the fans,” he said in an emotional announcement, “and I’ve learned to love and appreciate the Jeff Kent haters out there, too.”

I’m thankful for those people even more than the fans who gave me a hug every day, because those people motivate you . . . I leave this game proud that I have treated it with the utmost respect . . . I have tried to carry on a legacy of winning wherever I have gone. Any integrity that I have had in this game is something that I’m very, very proud of. I believe I played this game right, and I believe I’m leaving this game right.

His Hall of Fame case seemed almost entirely in his bat and his counting statistics: the most home runs by any expansion-era second baseman, among other things. (His black ink is limited to leading his league twice in sacrifice flies.) But would you believe that, by my Real Batting Average metric (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by plate appearances), Kent is the best batter among the post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball era second basemen?

That’s batter, not hitter.

Mazeroski’s is the lowest RBA among such second basemen, but he’s in the Hall of Fame because he’s still the single most run-preventive second baseman who ever played the major league game. Kent’s defensive statistics aren’t even in the same quadrant: he was 52 defensive runs below his league average. It cost him plentiful wins above a replacement-level player (WAR) and moved him outside the top twenty second basemen of all as Baseball Reference sees him.

Kent dropped off the Baseball Writers Association of America ballot after ten years in which he’d climbed steadily to 46.5 percent of the vote. The Contemporary Era Committee elected him to Cooperstown with fourteen out of sixteen possible votes, the only committee candidate to make it.

“The time had gone by, and you just leave it alone, and I left it alone,” Kent told a conference call after the committee result came. “I loved the game, and everything I gave to the game I left there on the field. This moment today, over the last few days, I was absolutely unprepared. Emotionally unstable.”

The guy who once admitted motivation from his critics while trying to exist in his own isolated baseball world now admitted that achieving the game’s highest honour caught him off guard and vulnerable. It’s enough to make you wish that Kent could have allowed this side of himself more room to breathe at the plate, at second base, in the clubhouse.

Of the rest of the Contemporary Era Committee candidates, Bonds plus Roger Clemens, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela, made fewer than five ballots. Meaning the Hall of Fame’s new protocol makes them ineligible to return the next time the Contemporary Era Committee considers post-1980 players. They can return to that committee’s ballot after that, but another five-or-less-votes shortfall removes them from Hall consideration permanently.

But it also means Carlos Delgado, Don Mattingly, and Dale Murphy can return on the next Contemporary Era Committee ballot, in 2028.

Kent wouldn’t commit to whether Bonds deserved a berth in Cooperstown, a stance he’s maintained from the moment each first became Hall eligible. “Barry was a good teammate of mine. He was a guy that I motivated and pushed,” Kent told the call.

We knocked heads a little bit. He was a guy that motivated me at times, in frustration, in love, at times both. Barry was one of the best players I ever saw play the game, amazing. For me, I’ve always said that. I’ve always avoided the specific answer you’re looking for, because I don’t have one. I don’t. I’m not a voter.

Time mellows even the harshest of rivals often enough.

A-Rod’s right about Coupmissioner Selig in Cooperstown

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Bud Selig

Maybe one of Selig’s few truly good deeds was the Show-wide retirement of number 42.

I hate to admit it, but Álex Rodríguez is right. There is a mountain of hypocrisy in former commissioner Bud Selig’s membership in the Hall of Fame. Especially when you marry it to A-Rod’s, Barry Bonds’s, Roger Clemens’s, and Mark McGwire’s lack of Hall memberships.

If the Baseball Writers Association of America is keeping Rodríguez, Bonds, Clemens, and McGwire (among others) out of Cooperstown for their actual or alleged use of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances, there should have been no reason why that Today’s Game Committee elected their prime enabler.

Have you ever read Coupmissioner Selig’s Hall of Fame plaque? It’s a minor masterpiece of a mealymouthful. What was then the Today’s Game Committee that elected the Brewers owner-turned-coupmissioner should have been ashamed.

It only begins with omitting that his coupmmissionership began with the “acting” tag after he and enough of his fellow owners of the time strong-armed Commissioner Fay Vincent into resigning before they could fire him.

From 1990 through 1992, you had to be deaf, dumb, blind, and limbness not to know that Vincent’s execution papers began with his futile but full-bodied efforts at making owners and players partners instead of combatants. The Lords of Baseball were anything but thrilled at being seen as a little bit lower than lords.

The bad news was limited. Unfortunately for Vincent, the owners weren’t amused when a) he refused to surrender his authority when it came to labor matters; and, b) he actually played fair (the horror) about expansion spoils and division/league realignment. Then drug-addicted, self-destructive relief pitcher Steve Howe—whom Vincent magnanimously allowed an umpteenth chance—followed a magnificent comeback with the Yankees by stepping in it yet again.

After which Vincent himself stepped in it. Howe’s relapse prompted three Yankee personnel including manager Buck Showalter into facing an official hearing and character witnessing for the drug-battling righthander. Vincent tried strong-arming the Yankee trio into changing that character witnessing. It took press outrage to get Vincent to back off, but it gave those Lords so predisposed room to denounce as dictatorial a man who normally preferred discussion, debate, and reason.

“Formally named [commissioner] by unanimous vote of all 30 owners in 1998,” Coupmissioner Selig’s plaque continues. That’s like handing Kim Jong-un a loving cup for stable, unanimously-acclaimed leadership but forgetting to mention the thousands of bodies whose owners’s extermination made it so.

“Presided over an era of vast change to the game on the field while extending its breadth and depth off it.” So the dilution of championship, the advent of the wild card era with three-division leagues, the birth of regular-season interleague play were just think-nothing-of-it participation trophymongering hardly worth losing your sleep over, eh?

“Fostered an unprecedented stretch of labour peace . . . ” The achievement of which took the season-killing, World Series-ditching, near-ruinous 1994 players’ strike that should have been called an owners’ strike for the manner in which Coupmissioner Selig and his allies all but forced. The only thing the 1994 strike proved, other than how easy it was to manipulate the sporting press of the time into swallowing the owners’ side without investigating the recipe, was that no former owner should ever be allowed to hold the office Selig helped to besmirch.

So much for “acting” commissioner. It’s alleged that the owners spent six years searching for a permanent commissioner. Then, they decided to just remove “acting” from Coupmissioner Selig’s title.

“Under his leadership, umpiring was centralised and replay review was established” Umpiring became worse enough after its centralisation that replay review, which should have been established well before, became all but mandatory.

What the plaque also leaves off, of course, is that Coupmissioner Selig and enough of his fellow owners looked the other way long enough as actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances poured into the game. Looked the other way and never once sought to investigate the whys. Looked the other way until Capitol Hill decided to fashion player perp walks and threaten to spank the game’s bottom unless it moved. Fast.

Did some players take the actual/alleged PEDs up simply believing others doing it meant they needed to catch up, regardless of whether their chosen substances actually did enable that? Of course they did. Did other players take them up believing they’d help faster injury recovery? Of course they did. (Yes, you can look it up.)

Did Selig and his fellow owners make even a cursory effort to determine who did what and why before Capitol Hill roared? Did they make even a cursory effort to investigate when enough players did speak about the injury reasons they took up the stuff? No to both.

Enough of the players who tried the substances were and still are pilloried, with or without real, hard evidence. The coupmmissioner who averted his gaze before Crapola Hill forced his and the owners’ hands into beginning and securing testing has a plaque in Cooperstown. A plaque that also looks the other way at his role in the owners’ flagrant salary-suppressing collusion of the mid-to-late 1980s that ended up costing them $280 million.

The should-be Hall of Famer who was caught red-handed indulging in Biogenesis-provided substances, and threatened to sue baseball’s heads off over it before accepting his precedent-setting suspension, has been a changed man since that suspension ended.

“Once I put myself in therapy, and the year suspension was two years into that, and it took me, and I’m still in therapy,” A-Rod told Stephen A. Smith. “It’s important to explain to the young people, not just to share, hey, here are my great stats and my home runs, but here’s how I screwed up.”

He even compared himself to Derek Jeter, the Hall of Fame shortstop who was once one of his best friends before an ill-considered remark sullied that friendship and his arrival to the Yankees compelled a reconciliation strained at first.

“Not only the ego but the lack of self-awareness and understanding my place in the clubhouse, understanding my place in the world,” A-Rod went on. “You know, the truth is, Derek is a phenomenal guy. I first met Derek when he was seventeen. I think I’m catching up to Derek at seventeen, now at fifty. Now we’re pretty much on the same level at seventeen. I mean, Derek’s never made a mistake in his life, and I’ve made every mistake in the book. And I love myself for that. I love myself for the good, the bad and the ugly.”

I’ve looked around. Rodríguez doesn’t have a book for sale.

Maybe it’s time to think about enshrining a man who really did try to save baseball from itself, the one who made only one or two mistakes trying. The man about whom Thomas Boswell once wrote that he, “perhaps more than any other commissioner, took his mandate seriously.”

He came to believe that he really should try to act independently in the “best interests of baseball.” Like [predecessor and best friend A. Bartlett] Giamatti, he viewed baseball as an institution that was both indestructibly strong and constantly vulnerable. Nobody could kill it. But plenty of people, from Pete Rose to narrow-minded, dollar-obsessed owners, could tarnish it.

Maybe we can’t purge Coupmissioner Selig from Cooperstown. But we ought to think hard about prodding to have Vincent enshrined. His plaque won’t look half as ill-placed.

First published at Sports Central.