Angry Crank Makes Excellent Case For Hall of Fame Voting Reform

Blogger Murray Chass wrote two awful blog posts, combining anti-PED hysteria and proud ignorance about the quality of baseball players. Lazy arguments about PEDs, alas, are pretty common. But this kind of silliness is becoming a little less so. Explaining why his next ballot will consist only of Jack Morris:

I know the stats zealots don’t think Morris is a Hall of Famer because his rankings in their new-fangled ratings fall below their standards. But they don‘t have a formula for intestinal fortitude or determination.

Morris willed the Minnesota Twins to win Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, refusing to leave as long as the game was scoreless. The stats zealots are tired of hearing about that game, but it is symbolic of the fatal flaw in their way of viewing players. Numbers simply don’t tell the whole story.

Well, first of all, you don’t need any particular knowledge of sophisticated stats to see that Jack Morris isn’t a Hall of Famer — he’s plenty unqualified based on traditional stats. And second, Chass’s vote for Morris doesn’t really have anything to do with “intestinal fortitude or determination.” It’s about him having one really good and important post-season game, which unless Don Larsen has been inducted isn’t actually a Hall of Fame standard. More to the point, if this is your criteria, how can you justify Morris over Curt Schilling, when Schilling was not only a better pitcher, and a better pitcher in the postseason, but won an ALCS Game 6 in Yankee Stadium pitching on a badly injured ankle? Talk about “intestinal fortitude or determination.”

But, of course, none of this is about Morris’s Game 7 win or his “determination.” As demonstrated in his last post on the subject, saying he’ll reclaim his ballot because that will really piss off the people who pointed out how dumb his arguments were, his blog posts are just 100% pure resentment. Jack Morris hangs with the cool old fogeys, while Curt Schilling and Tim Raines and Alan Trammell hang with NERDS. They’re not arguments about baseball at all; unlike the more engaged writers Chass refuses to call writers because they make some effort to know what they’re talking about, I see no evidence that Chass even cares about the game anymore. He’s consumingly obsessed with PEDs, and anxious to settle scores with the writers who justifiably supplanted him, but baseball? That’s no longer a subject that seems to interest him. Which is fine as far as it goes, but as long as it has a monopoly on new inductees the BBWAA really should make some effort to limit its ballot to people who still actually pay attention to the sport.