Baseball Writers: Quit the power play and vote on merit

Obviously, this message isn’t directed toward the 73.7% of writers that don’t act like they were stuffed in a locker every day by their high school baseball team. I am strictly speaking to the 26.3% of baseball writers that didn’t vote Roberto Alomar into the Hall of Fame.

Where are these writers? At least have the stones to come out and say you intend to use your vote to exert what little power you have over people’s lives just so you feel important one day out of the year.

Hall of Fame voting is simple: Either the guy deserves to be in, or he doesn’t.

Andre Dawson had the same amount of career home runs and hits this year as he did when he retired in 1996, yet it took him eight years to get voted into the Hall of Fame. Why is that?

Because the voting has become a complete farce where writers try to dictate when and what percentage of the vote each player gets, all because they feel the voting percentage is a measure of just how great the player was.

It’s the preschool argument of “Babe Ruth was way awesomer than everyone and he didn’t get 100% of the vote, so no one should.” In other words, we have baseball writers out there playing with votes like toys, rather than using the vote to place deserving players like Cal Ripken and Ted Williams into the Hall of Fame.

How is it that five or so people that are actually able to vote on the greatest players of all time could actually throw away his ballot and say “I’m not going to vote for Cal Ripken (who received 98.5% of the vote in 2007) because no one should be unanimous”?

Plain and simple: They need to have their privileges taken away, because that’s abuse.

Give me a vote. I’m a self-proclaimed writer (but a writer nonetheless). I write about baseball most of the time on this site. I was never shoved in a locker and don’t hold high school grudges that seep into my writing and voting. How about divvying up the voting privileges  to folks that don’t abuse it?

I’d like to push for full disclosure of the names of the cowards that abuse their vote and leave surefire Hall of Famers like Hank Aaron, Nolan Ryan, Ted Williams and Steve Carlton off their ballots. They really deserve a ban from baseball writing altogether, but at the very least, they deserve some heavy spam from angry fans and bloggers.