Keith Olbermann (43:40)
This is SportsCenter. Wait, check that. Not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann in Sportsball center. Tonight, you've heard the phrase inside baseball. I mean used in a non baseball context. Inside baseball. It comes from baseball. It's about stuff that's so inside the game, so meaningful only to people who really follow it, that it tends to be a little arcane or boring for people who do not Follow baseball intently. However, I do have one hook that may interest you in the subject of the latest baseball. Baseball hall of Fame veterans ballot. They've nominated eight fairly recent players, players whose careers began, or prominence began anyway, 1980 or later. For me, those are my friends. For you, they may be figures from baseball's ancient past who might as well have played in 1866. Nevertheless, I always think of the same story whenever a new veterans committee gets together to try to decide who is a baseball hall of fam and who is not. In the 70s and 80s, there was one committee, the Veterans Committee, that included some of the great luminaries of the game, including Ted Williams, who used to vote on who else got into the hall of Fame besides him. And one of the things Ted Williams did constantly was vote for his friends, vote for those few players that he had personal respect for who tended to be pitchers who were able to get him out. He for years voted annually for a pitcher from Cleveland named Mel Harder, who pitched for 20 years and then was a very successful pitching coach, but whose lifetime record was about 500. He won as many as he lost. There wasn't anything exceptional about his strikeout totals or his modern day subtle statistics or his game result statistics, or any of the metrics that are used to assess pitchers today. But Ted Williams couldn't get a hit off of him to save his life. And therefore to Ted Williams, that made Mel Harder a Hall of Famer. But the other thing that Ted Williams did and many of his contemporaries on the old veterans committee, and this is a legend more than it is a factually documented story, but I believe after 40 years or 50 years of hearing this story, I believe it is true. They also, besides constantly having to tamp down Ted's enthusiasm for otherwise obscure players, he just wasn't any good against. They had to keep him from doing what he liked to do, which was to throw a vote to those friends who he didn't really think were hall of Famers, but he wanted them to know somebody voted for them. These were called courtesy votes. And year after year somebody on the hall of Fame veterans committee would issue a courtesy vote for a long time catcher and Detroit Tigers executive named Rick Ferrell, supposedly one of the true gentlemen of the game and a who I believe lasted 18 years as a catcher in the American League, even though I think he only played in 100 games in the 154 game schedule of the time once or twice in his life he was sort of a regular player, but not really, and he certainly was not An All Star, and he certainly was not a Hall of Famer. And every year Ted Williams would say to his friends on the committee, all right, who's casting the courtesy vote for Rick Farrell? Or let's get Rick three votes this year, when I guess whatever, six or seven were needed for election. And inevitably, I guess, given the amount of alcohol that might have been consumed at these annual meetings and the hall of Fame voters, the baseball writers don't meet, they just mail in ballots. But the members of the Veterans Committee used to meet in person, usually in Florida, usually starting at lunch with alcohol and concluding sometime after dinner with alcohol. They would get together and then they would vote. And people would forget what they were supposed to vote and who they were supposed to vote for. And there came the announcement that if, say, the threshold for votes for election for anybody that year was seven votes, there it was, Rick Ferrell, eight votes. Look them up. Rick Ferrell is in the Baseball hall of Fame. Supposedly, that is how a great and very popular, but not quite hall of Fame shortstop named Rabbit Moranville got into the hall of Fame. But I don't have many details about that. The Rick Ferrell story I have from one witness who says what he remembers of that rather sauced evening consisted of what I just told you. So anytime there is an announcement that there's going to be a committee meeting to vote to elect new hall of. Keep thinking somebody's gonna get in by accident again. Yes, there it was the other day, the Baseball hall of Fame announcing that it was going to conduct another committee, yet another variation. This is the golden age since the 80s vote. And then next year will be the 17th century vote. And then the year after that will be the people whose names start with the letter Q vote. It's so stupid, complicated, inconsistent. It gets changed every couple of years. And of course, the reason they do that is otherwise no one would be of have any interest whatsoever in the hall of Fame vote. The controversies about who's in the hall of Fame and who's not in the hall of Fame will never be resolved because they manage to keep you talking about it. I'm talking about it now. I happen to be talking about something a little bit more, again, arcane, but I'm still talking about it. And if they had perfected, which would probably be easily done, a system for the hall of Fame that would satisfy everybody, people would stop arguing about it. They just say, well, the system produces X number of hall of Famers every year or people with these kind of credentials. Yay. That's the way they do it in Japan, there is a statistical hall of Fame. If you get, I don't know what the total is, 375 home runs, you are in the statistical hall of Fame and automatically in the general hall of Fame. And they are premier to elect additional people who don't meet those criteria statistically to the general hall of Fame. But there is an automatic threshold hall of Fame. One of my ideas that again would defeat the whole purpose of the controversy would be to have a four tiered hall of Fame. You'd have that statistical hall of Fame in which I guess if you hit 600 homers, you're in. And then there could be the all time greats, the immortals, the Babe Ruths, the I guess we're expecting Shohei Ohtani, but not quite yet. Folks like that, Henry Aaron, Roberto Clemente. Then there'd be a second tier or third tier in this case for players who were unable for whatever reason to complete their careers or their expected careers. Pitchers like Sandy Koufax, who retired at age 30 because doctors said the next pitch might not only be your last, but you may use your arm for the last time throwing that pitch. You may literally really not be able to use your arm for anything. All the nerves may be dead. And he went, I'm going to quit. And he did. And his records do not. His compilation records do not match that of far lesser pitchers, although he is considered perhaps the greatest five season pitcher of all time. But you could have a category of hall of Famers who only had five great years for whatever reason. The late catcher of the New York Yankees, Thurman Munson, could fit into that because he died in the middle of the his 11th season in major League Baseball and never fulfilled or went downhill from there because he was not alive to do so. The last category of our four tier hall of Fame would be everybody else whose statistical performance is such that they should be in the hall of Fame but had some sort of blemish in their personal conduct. Pete Rose, gambling. The problem with underage dating, which I think we have to call it that legally, although it's probably closer to pedophilia. Pete Rose, as I said, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, the steroid users of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox who were involved in a plot to throw the World Series that year. Some of them may have thrown the World Series and some of them may have not thrown the World Series. Almost all of them got money to Do. So you could put them all in there and they could be, I don't know, in a room that isn't totally lit, or they could have bad portraits of themselves or like, I don't know, a sound of booing being piped into the room in which their plaques would remain for eternity. But you would say, all right, Pete Rose is in the hall of Fame. Flawed human being who, oh, by the way, got more hits than anybody else. So that's the solution. And of course it will never be done because it would eliminate most of the arguments and then we wouldn't have these conversations. But back to the original point. I wanted to discuss the qualifications of these eight guys. Again, this sorting out. This latest category is players who achieved prominence in the game after 1980. Not owners, not managers, players just on the field stuff. There'll be an owner manager Vote later, 70 years from now. I don't know. I've completely lost the plot on what they are doing to elect people to the hall of Fame. Okay, here are the nominees. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are on the list. All that is needed from this committee is 75% of the vote and they are in the hall of Fame despite everything that happened. And there's no tiered structure now. So the, the plaque for Barry Bonds probably would not say his head grew bigger at the age of 33, even though that's physically impossible unless you're doing human growth hormone. It probably wouldn't say that. So he could get into the hall of Fame and somebody might be planning to cast a courtesy vote for him right now. So Bonds and Clemens are there. Gary Sheffield, who also at times faced accusations of deliberately throwing away baseballs in protest to how his team was treating him and deliberately using performance enhancing drugs, although nothing I believe in Sheffield's case was ever proved. Jeff Kent, a great second baseman, considered to be a jackass, generally speaking. Dale Murphy, the exact opposite of that. Two time most valuable player of the Atlanta Braves, one of the most beloved figures in sports anywhere in the last half century. And a man who, after I believe, the first of those MVP awards, the moment the season ended, got on a plane and went to Florida to play in the instructional league because he wasn't doing well enough the last month of the season. I have asked Dale Murphy about this, a man I have had the pleasure of knowing since the early 80s, and he then says, well, to be fair, I'd had a very bad finish to the season and I was a little hurt. I needed basically to do some rehab and get my swing back and I said, I don't care why you were there. Nobody else in the history of baseball has ever won the most Valuable Player award and then gone to the instructional league to work on things to get better for the next year. So Murphy is on that list, along with Carlos Delgado, who was a good and power hitting catcher and first baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays and the New York Mets. Don Mattingly, who once again does not have a Hall of Fame ring even as a coach with the Toronto Blue Jays. And the less I say about that, probably the better. But Don Mattingly, longtime first baseman for the Yankees, limited in particular power numbers later on in his career because of a bad back in my hall of Fame. He would get in in the limited career category. He would be in those guys who did not do what they might have done. He might be next to Adi Joss, the great Cleveland pitcher of the early 1900s. Go and look him up to see why. And then the eighth nominee, Fernando Valenzuela, the legendary pitcher of the Los Angeles dodgers who set LA aflame in 1981 in a good sense. When not expected to make the Dodgers starting rotation, he wound up pitching opening day and throwing a string of shutouts and creating Fernando Mania and. And. And actually introducing almost for the first time the Hispanic Latino crowd to the Dodgers. The Dodgers were not the darlings of that audience until Fernando Valenzuela came along. And Mexican baseball players were not largely recruited or sought in major league bas until Fernando Valenzuela. The problem is, as with Mattingly, that there were limitations. Fernando Valenzuela was a great pitcher for three or four years and then he began a rather rapid decline that was hastened by injuries and by eating. And he hung on for six or seven years, during which he dropped down to mediocre and getting released twice or three times a year. And yet he is a Hall of Fame nominee. There is a statistic that baseball people use with varying degrees of confidence in it called Wins above Replacement War. It is a complicated formula that tries to take in everything from a player's natural talent to how he did and how that was influenced by how his home ballpark fit him him as opposed to not fitting other players and what he did relative to the seasons in which he played, which I think is a valuable barometer. It comes up with one large number which can be added to if you play 25 years instead of 12, but which gives you, although I don't think I would sign onto it as the only arbiter for who's better Than whom? It does give you relative statistics. For instance, Barry Bonds war is 162. Roger Clemens is 139.2. Next on the ballot is Gary Sheffield, 60.5. So Gary Sheffield, the third highest war among these eight nominees, is less than half of the second nominee. And it's just a little bit better than a third of the first nominee. Jeff Kent 55.4, Dale Murphy 46.5, Delgado 44.4, Mattingly 42.4 and Valenzuela 8th at 41.4. I think among all of these, I would not and could not still under these circumstances vote for Barry Bonds or for Roger Clemens. I cannot do it. I do not know how much of their careers owes to performance enhancing drugs. I do know that they made a decision to go and use them. And like the hall of Famer or would be hall of Famer Shoeless Joe Jackson, no matter what you were when you made that decision to do something morally bankrupt, you made the decision to do something morally bankrupt. You do not get credit for the time. You were not morally bankrupt, you kind of forfeit it. You only get one moral bankruptcy assessment unless you decided to come clean at the end and ask for forgiveness. And we have not heard that from Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens. I suspect if either of them had at any point said, yes, I use these drugs, I was wrong. It threw the balance of the game out of whack for the entirety of my career. And I hope nobody ever does them again. If they had done that, I think they probably would have gotten into the hall of Fame legitimately and quickly and could still do that. But there is one thing about being a competitor like those two men that makes that impossible. They could not do that. I would vote, even though he is literally one quarter of the war of Barry Bonds, I would vote for Dale Murphy. This is why I don't have a vote for all my analysis. And I think my baseball historian skills are comparable to almost anybody. I do have personal prejudices. I've always been delighted to see Dale Murphy and I'd like to see him in the hall of Fame. But if you are saying, okay, we're not going to count character, we're not going to make that an issue. We're going to put Bonds and Clemens on the ballot. Well, maybe, maybe there should be some extra credit given to the good guys of the game like Murphy. Maybe Murphy should be in the. In the war, the winds above replacement of ethics. Maybe he should be credited with 40 points. What I found most interesting among all of these. And no, I would not vote for Mattingly, even though I've known him forever and he and I have one running joke that dates to the mid-90s, if you can imagine such a thing. Thing. I would not vote for Mattingly under these circumstances. Although I would welcome him into a tiered hall of Fame. I would also not vote for Valenzuela. Again, the same thing. If you're going to have part of the hall of Fame in which a guy is the biggest figure in baseball and changes the sport in one community for a while, yes, I could see it. But that's not the rules right now. And again, if we're going to put in Valenzuela, we're going to put in Mattingly, we're going to put in Tim Lincecum, we're going to put in Buster Posey, we're going to put in a lot of guys, guys who really don't have hall of Fame careers, but had hall of Fame five year spans. And again, there's a lot of space in Cooperstown, New York, as they said in a somewhat flawed movie in which a friend of mine, Josh Charles appeared, called Cooperstown. It's a rural area. There's lots of extra space in Cooperstown. You could add 100 or 200 hall of Famers and not really have to knock any other buildings down. Why not? Why not have more hall of Famers? Why not let these guys charge more for their autographs? Why not say we don't have just 300 or 400 hall of Fame, we have 500 hall of Fame players. What's the difference? So I'd like a big hall of Fame, but until we have a big hall of Fame, I can't vote for Fernando, I can't vote for Don Mattingly. No on Carlos Delgado, no on Jeff Kent, a good second baseman, but not a great one, and no on Gary Sheffield, in part because there are two guys of this era, era who are not nominated who I would actually have as my second and third votes. Dwight Evans had the best outfield arm I ever saw until the time of ichiro Suzuki. His War 67.2 would place him third on this list. And Keith Hernandez, the first baseman of the New York Mets and now their commentator and first baseman of the St. Louis Cardinals, had a war of 60.4 which would put him right behind the number three guy on this list, Gary Sheffield at 60.5. Keith Hernandez was the most impressive and the most aggressive defensive player I have ever seen. He played first base the way a really talented safety, played safety in the National Football League. Or the way a pass rusher, a linebacker like Dick Butkus, played that position in the National Football League. Or the way a good goaltender plays it in hockey. He said, let me stop the offense. And he was a very good hitter as well and one time MVP of the National League. So that's the way I would do it. But of course, as I said, if they were to adopt my plans, which I have been proposing more or less continuously since. Let me check my notes here. The first article I wrote about redoing the hall of Fame vote was in, oh, 1981. Oh, no, that's not the first one. I wrote one in 1978 when Dale Murphy was a rookie. They still haven't gotten around to approving it. In fact, every time they talk about changes in the hall of Fame, I don't even get a goddamn courtesy vote. I do like that idea of having the hall of Fame, though, with a Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens steroid era place with Mark McGuire and Pete Rose in it and Joe Jackson and a lot of the other players who were thrown out of the game for gambling and other nefarious acts. I like that. And you keep the lights low and you know, if you really want to go in there, you have to like, rent a flashlight. I think I'm onto something here. Could be the decline of my own mental faculties, but I'm onto something. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Most of our Countdown music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Chenale, our musical directors of Countdown. It was produced by TKO Brothers. Mr. Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums, and Mr. Chennail handled orchestration and keyboard. You know, you could put the designated hitters in the limited career category too, because they're not actually hall of Famers because they don't play defense. I'll do a commentary about that sometime. Gist of it being in the old days, somebody who fielded so badly that he could not have been a regular hitter, wasn't a regular hitter and usually wasn't in the major leagues. How many guys made it to the major leagues and now to the hall of Fame because they instituted this rule? Who otherwise would have spent their years, their lives, playing for Salt Lake City of the Pacific Coast League? Not that there's anything wrong with that. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Foust. The Older men theme from ESPN2, written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Is the sports music, other music arranged and performed by the group no horns allowed. My announcer today was my friend Mariner Kenny Main, who will vote for anybody from Seattle. Everything else was, as always, my fault. That's Countdown for today. Day 291 of America held hostage again, and just 1,172 days until the scheduled end of his lame duck and lame brain term. Unless he is removed sooner by MAGA and Jeffrey Epstein and the pavement patch on his hand or Tylenol or the jet made out of poop or his next scheduled Alzheimer's test. The next scheduled countdown is Monday. Until then, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck.
