I've Never Been To Cooperstown

My level of interest in baseball sits somewhere around 'well, it's better than watching golf.'  Going to a baseball game is a lot of fun.  The warm summer days, hot dogs, obscenely overpriced beer and a game paced in such a way that you essentially hang out with your buddies and relax.   Watching baseball?  Meh.  I use it as background noise mainly.

Other than that, it's hard for me to get seriously passionate about our national past time.  I'm not sure why...  maybe I lack that quintessential male bonding experience of going to a baseball game with one's father as a kid.  (We did go down to the pub for a pint of bitter one Christmas, which took far less time and was, I feel, a far better use of my time, bonding wise.)  Maybe it's because, like cricket, it remains vaguely incomprehensible to me, even now.  I can't speak in hushed tones of things like Merkle's Boner.  I giggle instead.

But it is with great gusto and amusement that I read and witness the outbreak of pearl-clutching from the numerous members of the Baseball Writer's Association of America when the identity of the member who had 'sold' his vote to Deadspin (who promptly let the fans vote on it).  For his trouble, Dan Le Batard has been  banned for life from voting for the Hall of Fame and suspended from the BBWAA (not actually sure what the second B stands for) for one year. 

(To rewind slightly:  this blew up a few months back, when Deadspin revealed that they had secured a vote and were going to let people vote on it!  Power to the people, man!)

Was this entire thing essentially a publicity stunt on the part of Deadspin and Le Batard?  Yes.  But it was a brilliant one... the BBWAA sits on the Hall of Fame Vote like a precious mother hen guarding her eggs, or, in perhaps a more apt metaphor, the College of Cardinals meeting to elect a New Pope at the Vatican.  I couldn't tell you the process or the rules- just that they're arcane and that you only have a certain number of times to get into the Hall of Fame and then you're done, which strikes me as bullshit, really.

The moribund and crusty gatekeepers of baseball's Holy Sanctum of Cooperstown rushed to guard their precious voting system.   Bob Costas (who, I guess is not a voter, so I don't know why he's making that argument) said it was a bad idea because fans would 'vote for their favorites.'  The PTI guys teed off on Le Batard's move, probably because ESPN was pissed they hadn't thought of it first. Indeed, baseball writers around the country were generally pissed about it.

Deadspin, of course, responded with some very good points of their own.

Me?  I think this is fascinating and I only wished I gave more of a shit about baseball so I could make some salient points in this debate.  I'll always come down on the side of giving a little power to the people, but as a sport, I think baseball needs to reinvigorate itself a little bit.  Used to be, The World Series was a banner event on par with The Super Bowl.  Now for some diehard fans, it might still be that but the television numbers don't bear it out.  What's wrong with giving fans some power of their own?  Why do baseball writers get to sit in moral judgment over a sport a lot of them didn't even play?  And more to the point, how can they, when they, along with baseball itself, looked the other way at the height of the steroid era only to demonize players they had been carefully ignoring when the full extent of the problem was revealed.

I've never been to Cooperstown and to be honest, it's not that high on my bucket list.  But if the BBWAA gives the fans a little bit of skin in the Hall of Fame game, well then, that might get a little more of my attention.