FBJunkie

The big news in baseball over the last few days has been the sudden retirement of Manny Ramirez, upon word of a failed drug test. Inevitably, the next question that popped up is whether the slugger, who put up prodigious stats in his career, deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

For most people, the answer is a balancing test: stats vs. morality; achievement vs. shame; everything that supports his inclusion vs. everything that supports his exclusion.

We see a problem with this analysis — Namely, it ignores the real purpose of the Hall of Fame.

Over the years, Cooperstown has evolved into baseball’s equivalent of the high heavens. Those who vote on a player’s inclusion have become the equivalent of Saint Peter at the pearly gates. The Hall of Fame has ascended to such lofty treatment, no doubt pleasing the powers-that-be in MLB, but it obscures the fact that for all its pomp and circumstance, the Hall of Fame is really just a museum.

By now, steroids in the game is fact, and while unfortunate as this fact may be, to ignore the role that steroids has played over the last two decades is to be delusional about what happened in baseball during this time. All the moral agonizing and frustrating search for truth by voters (did this player take PEDs? Did that player?) would be irrelevant if it was acknowledged that the primary mission of the Hall of Fame is — or should be — to educate folks about the history of the game, both good and bad.

That’s part 1 of our argument. Now comes this…

This may sound strange coming from a website that’s devoted to statistics, but voters and Hall of Fame observers spend too much time considering numbers. Yes, the beauty of baseball was that the rules hadn’t changed much over the years, and thus, statistics became a nice measuring stick by which we could compare one player from one era with another player from another era, but by now, it should be well understood that while the rules haven’t changed, the way players have exploited those rules certainly have. In other words, statistics can’t and shouldn’t be the end-all of conversation when determining a player’s merit for inclusion.

The first part of this post may have sounded like a rationale for letting a player like Manny into the HOF whereas the last paragraph might have sounded like a rationale for excluding a player like Manny. There’s a good reason for this.

More subjectiveness should be incorporated into Hall of Fame selection. This will come off as totally against the sabermetric creed, but it’s the only position that really withstands both logic and a moral compass.

We believe Manny should be in the Hall of Fame because he’s important enough to the era that ignoring him is too big. He can’t simply be written off as never happening. Manny being Manny actually happened. He achieved all those great stats, and if his plaque has an asterisk for a couple of failed drug tests and further suspicion noted, we believe that’s ok. Actually, better than ok. To understand how baseball was played in the 1990s and early part of this century, a future visitor to Cooperstown must learn about Manny Ramirez. Otherwise, voters are guilty of white-washing the era and absolving the steroids cheats. They become complicit, in our view.

By the same measure, we would argue against the inclusion of guys like Craig Biggio, Todd Helton, and Mike Piazza — players whose superlative stats would in the commonplace test get them into the Hall of Fame, no problem, but might not pass the muster of being this past era’s most important players. That’s not to say any of these guys used steroids — who knows, really? But one thing we do know is that stats can no longer stand as the measuring stick, and so if we’re judging without leaning on a statistical crutch, these players might not pass the new test.

Or maybe they will. But each Hall of Fame voter should not make a determination based on a careful weighing of stats vs. suspicion, but rather which players should be in a museum in upstate New York. That’s it. Consider tomorrow’s baseball-interested visitor and figure it out.