Selig, Bonds & Clemens

Like so many other public institutions, the Baseball Hall of Fame has become something of a battleground. Who belongs, who doesn't. Who has been unfairly ostracized, who has been unfairly admitted. The allegations (and the debate) goes on and on and on.

The current disagreement is over the players who benefited from steroid usage. While technically not a rules violation (baseball was notoriously slow to act on their usage), it obviously provided an under the counter advantage for those who imbibed.

Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro and Jose Canseco are only the most-prominent names who admitted to using. Dozens (probably hundreds) of others also used them. But even in an era of bloated hitting statistics, steroids didn't turn everyone into Mickey Mantle.

Which is fundamental to the pro-steroids argument. Bonds and Clemens would've made the Hall of Fame, anyway. Why should they be punished for enhancing their skill set?

And I agree. To the first part, anyway. Both enjoyed notable and highly-successful beginnings to their careers. But as we were to see, that wasn't enough. It didn't matter that Bonds was a Gold Glove All-Star and a perpetual MVP candidate. Or that Clemens was a consistent Cy Young contender. They had to be Babe Ruth, too.

Bonds also underwent pronounced physical changes, including an enlarged head. Never one of the games nice guys, he became highly irascible, lashing out at fans and the media at the slightest provocation. I'll never forget his pronouncement that “we” didn't like him because he was Black. 

Really, Barry? Is that the reason? Are you saying that if you were white I'd be your fan club president? 

Hmmm.

Whatever regard I carried for him evaporated at that point. I relished his unofficial nickname: Asterisk. In addition to his chemically-enhanced output, he became the game's biggest asshole. Is that what's known as a win-win?

To the remaining members of the steroid club, Bonds was a blessing. As the player who enjoyed the greatest, most eye-popping benefit, he took a lot of heat off of those performing in smaller markets or with under-achieving teams.

The most convincing pro-steroids argument came from a baseball writer at the Chicago Tribune, who defended her picks thusly: The Commissioner who turned the blindest eye possible to the steroids scandal was voted into the Hall of Fame. Why? Because he made his employers a whole lot of money.

Should we really punish the players?

It is an argument I cannot fault. 

After the 1994 strike, baseball found itself on shaky ground. Or at least ground as shaky as a multi-billion dollar business ever finds itself on. It was scared. It's probably an overstatement to say the 1998 home run chase between McGwire and Sosa saved baseball, but again, it poured an awful lot of black ink into baseball at a very crucial time.

Being businessmen first, last and always, it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to envision team owners urging Bud Selig to go as easy on steroid use as the public would allow. And for that reason and that reason only, I'm grateful for Barry Bonds. His outsized success was impossible to ignore. Ditto questions about the game's integrity.

Judging by the vote counted Monday by the Contemporary Baseball Era Player's Committee, plenty of questions remain. And none of them appear to be answered with the words 'Hall of Fame'. Neither Bonds, Clemens, Palmeiro or Curt Schilling received the number of votes required for entrance.

I'm sure another generation, by and large ignorant of the steroid era, will look at their numbers and wonder why a previous generation had a problem with them. But for now, justice has triumphed. And in 2022, that's something.

 

The Baseball Hall of (Kinda-Sorta) Fame

I'm kind of pissed. The Frambozen is gone. The end-of-the-year glow provided by the twin holidays of Christmas and New Year's Eve is also gone, replaced by the bitter, sub-zero, salt-encrusted ugliness of January.

If that weren't bad enough, the Baseball Writers' Association of America has again seen fit to dismiss the career of Lee Smith, a player as uncommon as his name is common.

Lee Smith was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in the mid-seventies, which might be the only smart thing they did that decade.

After several years in the minors, Smith was called up to the major leagues in late 1980, the first of eight seasons he would spend in blue pinstripes. During that time, he reliably served as the Cubs' closer on those rare occasions they held a late-game lead in need of protection.

Built like a tight end, Smith would take the mound with Jheri curls glistening in the mid-summer humidity. He would glower at a succession of hitters from beneath a cap pulled low until they had, more often than not, surrendered to futility.

Sadly, in December of 1987 the Cubs saw fit to trade Smith to the Boston Red Sox for future Hall of Famers Al Nipper and Calvin Schiraldi. (For those of you not knowledgeable about baseball, I'm being sarcastic. Really, seriously and totally sarcastic.) 

This despite the fact that between 1982 and 1988, Smith never ranked lower than fourth in saves, and finished first or second four times. Is it lazy thinking or just too easy to suggest the Cubs felt there was nothing left to, um, save? 

At any rate, Smith continued his late-game heroics in Boston for two years before being traded early in the 1990 season to the St. Louis Cardinals in exchange for Tom Brunansky.

In St. Louis, playing for surprisingly mediocre Cardinal teams, Smith elevated his profile and recorded three successive forty-save seasons with just a single ERA over 3.20. He was rewarded with three consecutive all-star berths.

Following a late-season trade to the Yankees in 1993 and by then in his mid-thirties, Smith split time between four teams, enjoying an all-star season each with the Baltimore Orioles (1994) and California Angels (1995) before retiring in the summer of 1997 as a Montreal Expo.

It is significant that in the fourteen seasons between 1981 and 1996, Smith never finished lower than ninth in saves and led the league four times. Only once in that span did his ERA climb above 3.65, or his strike-outs-per-nine-innings average fall below seven.

He assumed the all-time lead in saves in 1993, and held it through 2006. He set a single-season record for saves in a season with 47 in 1991, and was good enough, long enough to be named an all-star with four different franchises.

And yet Lee Smith remains unelected to the Hall of Fame.

Smith set about his career with the same quiet intensity Henry Aaron did his. He never made headlines by feuding with teammates, managers or GMs. Armed with a fastball that burned like the heat in his native Louisiana, he merely excelled.

But low-key personalities without multiple World Series appearances for big market glamor teams apparently aren't sexy enough to warrant BBWAA attention. After being named on 50.6 percent of the ballots in 2012, Smith's support has shrank alarmingly.

In what must rank as one of the larger insults of his life, Barry 'Asterisk' Bonds and Roger Clemens have been named on more ballots than Smith in each of the last two years.

Really, BBWAA? Really?

To my knowledge, Lee Smith has never killed anyone. Never patronized a puppy mill nor introduced legislation that would consign millions to economic deprivation while enriching a tiny percentage of the population.

Then why should he be made to suffer the indignity of trailing self-important gas bags like Bonds and Clemens in the BBWAA's annual Hall of Fame vote?

Let me try this again: if being very good for a very long time is the criteria for entrance to the Hall of Fame, Smith belongs.

If being the first relief pitcher to amass four-hundred saves, or remaining solidly entrenched in third place on the all-time saves list nearly twenty-years after retirement means anything, Smith belongs.

If a career ERA of 3.03 or averaging nearly a strike-out per inning over an eighteen-year career in the pressure cooker of relief pitching is just a wee bit out of the ordinary, Smith belongs.

The stretch of thirteen consecutive seasons with at least twenty saves remains the second-longest ever assembled by a relief pitcher. The six-straight seasons with at least thirty saves remains third-longest, and the three successive seasons attaining at least forty saves is second.

Does it need to be said again? Smith belongs.

Lee Smith was a rock. Others might have posted more glittering statistics over the course of a season, perhaps even picked-up a Cy Young award. But Lee Smith was better longer than just about anyone not named Mariano Rivera.

At 107 years old, the Baseball Writers' Association of America clearly should know better: Smith belongs.