The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum will announce its Class of 2022 on Jan. 25, and rest assured that if there is joy in Cooperstown, it will be muted.
Once the highlight of the offseason, the baseball selections lost their appeal as a celebration of the sport years ago. Today, they serve as a referendum on the morals and values of American society — what types of behavior we will tolerate or even exalt, and which cannot be forgiven as stains on what we once called the “National Pastime.”
The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame will unveil its Class of 2022 at the NCAA Final Four in April. Smiles will abound. There will be high-fives not only in New Orleans, where the announcement will be made, but in Springfield, where the game was born and where its shrine proudly sits.
For years, comparing Cooperstown to Springfield was, in many minds, like placing Valhalla next to a TA Travel Center. Within the sport and out, the baseball museum was treated reverentially.
Naismith hall officials spent decades in fear the NBA, NCAA or some private enterprise would create a competing shrine in response to dissatisfaction throughout basketball with Springfield.
The two temples of sport are still viewed distinctly differently, but the impulse to exalt one and dismiss the other has gone the way of the single-admission doubleheader or the 6-foot, 4-inch tall NBA forward. And it is worth considering the differences before judging which hall of fame is on the right track and which is not.
Baseball’s selections are annually overshadowed by the debate over performance-enhancing drugs, known as PEDs. The lineup of players kept out for steroid use — proven or suspected — would probably trounce the roster of players who get in.
Full disclosure: I am one of the moralists who have not voted for players whose PED use is, to my estimation, indicated by overwhelming evidence. To me, there is value to defending and maintaining standards in a society that often treats them as inconveniences.
If Cooperstown were merely about statistics, computers should be doing the selections, not human beings. But that makes the task of selection an inexact goulash of fact, evidence and reasonable suspicion, and not particularly satisfying or fun.
The basketball hall of fame, for which I do not vote, wrestles with no such moral dilemmas. They’ll take anybody.
You can call Dennis Rodman a zany, colorful character, but that whitewashes a long list of misdeeds that include reckless driving and charges of domestic violence or abuse. These began long before Rodman’s 2011 election to the hoop hall, where his peerless rebounding and defensive skills were considered reason enough to induct him.
The Naismith hall also honors an array of coaches whose teams ran afoul of NCAA sanctions. Many of their legacies were tarnished after their elections, but that has never led to serious discussion over whether to remove them, or to at least tighten the standards for future picks.
Much of the baseball hall of fame’s list of greats reads like a Who’s Who of miscreants, too, especially if we apply modern racial mores to everyone from Cap Anson, who led the campaign to keep African Americans out of the major leagues in the 19th century, to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who extended nearly halfway into the 20th.
But if the Naismith hall is to be questioned for ignoring personal behavior, it is to be applauded for treating inclusion as a practice to be nurtured, not one applied only sporadically or when pressured or forced.
For years, a local man named Ed Pomeroy endured ridicule for campaigning to include women in the basketball hall. But Pomeroy was ahead of his time. In 1985, one year after the National Organization of Women protested the male-only nature of the hall — and 26 years after the first Hall of Fame selections — the Springfield shrine finally began inducting women.
Today, it’s a given that every year, deserving women will be included. There is no quota, no tokenism. That distinguishes Springfield from Cooperstown, which received deserved credit for an exhibit featuring the World War II-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League made famous to modern fans by the 1992 movie, “A League of Their Own.”
There is only one woman enshrined in Cooperstown, Effa Manley, co-owner with her husband owned the Newark Eagles team that won the Negro League World Series in 1946, and considered a civil rights trailblazer for Black players.
There are no stars from foreign leagues, including Japanese legend Saraharu Oh, for the same reason. Springfield’s reach for greatness is global, which helps explain why its once-faulty reputation within the basketball community has soared.
Even Cooperstown’s efforts to include Negro League players has been clumsy. Beginning with Satchel Paige in 1971, there are 37 such former players enshrined.
In a dramatic effort to catch up, the baseball hall added 17 former Negro Leaguers in 2006; Manley was inducted in that same year. That sounds like a lot until one considers it covered more than a century of systemic neglect.
Just when it looked as if the National Baseball Hall of Fame was serious about taking on past racism, another 15 years passed before another Negro Leaguer was added. Finally, in 2021, Buck O’Neil (whose omission from the 2006 list overshadowed most of the selections) and Bud Fowler (who played in white pro leagues 70 years before Jackie Robinson did) were picked.
This lack of consistency has taken some luster off Cooperstown’s otherwise well-intentioned efforts to right past wrongs, leaving fans to wonder if the baseball hall is honoring these players because they really mean it, or because they feel they must.
On inclusion, nobody questions the sincerity of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. On the other hand, nobody pretends the hoop hall weighs or considers character — which is fine with people who feel voters should not play judge, jury and God in the first place, but unsettling to others who believe the term “Hall of Famer” should stand for more than just a set of statistics.
What is certain is that the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame will celebrate its selections. The baseball hall of fame’s choices will provoke deeply divisive debate. For these two sports institutions, such is the very different price of fame.
Ron Chimelis is a staff writer for The Republican and may be reached by email to rchimelis@repub.com.
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