Baseball Fans Should Decide Which Baseball Writers Decide Which Baseball Players Make The Hall Of Fame. Change My Mind
John Greim. Shutterstock Images.Football is almost gone from our lives while the basketball and hockey seasons enter the comfortably numb stage of the regular season, which means it's time to embrace debate about which players deserve to be honored in a museum in Bumblefuck, NY! I don't want to #DI2RE2PECT the Hall of Fame but when you see videos like this, it's hard not to laugh about how absurd it's all gotten.
Which brings me to my point. Why should writers choose the baseball players that enter the Hall of Fame? I get that the Baseball Writers' Association of America (that apostrophe is so pretentious) chooses which writers get to vote and all that mumbo jumbo. But how is that fair? The media is only one big part of baseball. The players are another. And the fans are the third. The most important! Or at least that's what Major League Baseball tells us in between labor negotiations where fans worry about there being no season because of a bunch of money. Plus we all know how much MLB wants to grow that game and what better way to do that than giving fans power in making the players they watched immortal.
Oh yeah that's right, they don't give a shit about actually growing the game at all!
If the fans and the Hall of Fame are really so important, why don't we have a hand in the voting process to help #ProtectTheGame as #Gatekeepers? We have votes for the All-Star game and that used to COUNT for something, no matter how stupid that idea was. If a writer is a great writer or scoops the fuck out of everyone else, the fans will obviously give them a vote. If a writer is a bad writer with the worst sources known to man (I'm looking at you Bob Nightengale) or a moron that goes viral for an awful Hall of Fame or MVP ballot, they won't get a vote. And if a writer is a great writer but wasn't nice to people or took performance enhancing drugs in order to write better or stay awake to hit their deadlines, their vote will be decided with how they treated baseball players who committed similar offenses, with their fate being revealed when they are sent one of these two pictures through snail mail (the preferred method of communication for baseball writers).
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My pal Sean raises a very good point here considering how much the internet hates everything.
However my response to this is that it would be a shame if there were a bunch of blank ballots in a given year, which resulted in no writers having the ability to vote on the Hall of Fame. A REAL shame.
Ahhhh who am I kidding? People care more about debating the Hall of Fame vote much more than who is actually in the Hall of Fame. But if there is a chance I can deliver this speech to a hardo Capital J Journo that lost his vote after disrespecting Jacob deGrom's Cy Young candidacy one year, I'll take it.
Or we could just have Mike Francesa decide who does and doesn't make the Hall of Fame.
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Yeah, that's probably the move here.