Admitting you’re wrong is tentpole of maturity, unless of course you’re a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America.
When I was in the ninth grade I bet my friend Tom Hinkley $100 the Boston Red Sox would win the World Series. He gleefully accepted and two months later I had to pay him his money. I was wrong and, shoulders sagged, I admitted it.
Where the BBWAA got it wrong was in their reporting during baseball’s steroid era. With rampant steroid use happening right in front of their faces all you heard from baseball’s best writers was, “Gee golly, baseball sure is great!”
When the BBWAA members didn’t vote any players into the hall of fame for the first time since 1996, the flood of columns from BBWAA members took valuable inches to explain why they were morally compelled to keep players like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds from Cooperstown.
Which is fine. If they want to appoint themselves as the unquestioned moral authority of a sport, go ahead.
But don’t stand in front of a television camera and say Bonds and Clemens are a stain on the history of the game when the lot of them missed the story in the first place. Either the majority of baseball writers were blissfully unaware or just plain ignored the fact that players got bigger and hit the ball further and more frequently.
Many writers opined how difficult it was for them to wrestle with this moral dilemma. The decision to cast the most vile accusations at players with the absence of definitive proof has to be hard. But it was their inaction all those years ago that put them where they are now.
Baseball writers can vote whatever way they like; they earned that right. They sat through an ungodly amount of baseball games for an absurd amount of years. But the time to make a statement about the cheaters of the steroid era is long past.
There’s no moral authority in their Hall of Fame ballots, only hypocrisy.
Mike Hopey is a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in journalism and media studies. He can be reached at hopey@mail.usf.edu.
