Zeise: Snobby baseball writers need Hall of Fame voting help

Jose Canseco is obviously a bit nutty these days, but he is exactly right in his assessment of the hypocrisy of baseball Hall of Fame voters and how broke that system is.

Make no mistake, the system is broken beyond repair. Many voters should have their votes yanked away from them because they clearly don’t quite understand what it is they are being asked to do.

We don’t need them to be our moral compass, and we don’t need them to act as if they are the last guardians of righteousness.

What we need them to do is vote for the players who were among the best of all time based on what they did on the field. That’s even if they think there is evidence that those players were using PEDs; MLB itself obviously cared so little about PEDs it didn’t even test for them until 2003.

Canseco took to Twitter over the past 36 hours or so to rant about the fact that baseball writers who vote for the Hall of Fame seem to be selective as to who gets penalized for their ties to the steroid era of baseball and who doesn’t.

Two of the three players elected on Thursday – Jeff Bagwell and Ivan Rodriguez – played in the steroid era, and while neither tested positive for PEDs, there were questions about the use by both. Canseco also pointed out that Mike Piazza, who also had plenty of stuff swirling around him about PEDs, has already been inducted into the Hall of Fame.

And therein lies the problem with the steroid era: Very few guys, including Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, ever tested positive for PEDs. Thus we have a bunch of baseball writers, many of whom turned a blind eye to PEDs when home runs were saving their grand game in the late 1990s after the strike, picking and choosing who they are going to punish from the steroid era and who they are going to give a pass.

And now, not surprisingly, a group of self-important voters have branched out and decided that “becoming a nutty right-wing commentator after your career” should be added to the list of things that should disqualify a guy from induction.

I mean, how else do you explain Curt Schilling dropping so far in terms of how many votes he has gotten from last year?

I’d be willing to give voters the benefit of the doubt, except, a number of them have publicly said they wouldn’t vote for him because he is mean on TV and said some inflammatory things during the election last year.

Yes, Schilling is borderline nuts, but that has nothing to do with the fact that he was a great pitcher, part of some great teams. He has the resume to be strongly considered for the Hall of Fame.

We annually have writers who “refuse to cast their ballot” as some sort of a misguided protest. We have writers who leave a no-brainer first-ballot guy (like Ricky Henderson, for instance) off their ballot to avoid having a unanimous selection. We have guys who vote for some steroid suspects but not others.

Enough is enough. It is time to blow this system up and save some of these writers from themselves.

The good news for the steroid guys is that next year, every vote will be made public, and that might mean some voters will vote differently if they know they will have to answer for their ballots. But that will only serve to increase the self-importance of these people; that much is clear every year when a portion of them feels the need to write “why I voted the way I did” type blog entries.

GET OVER YOURSELVES, NOBODY CARES.

All we want is that you people do the right thing and vote for players based on how good they were, not whether you think Saint Peter will let them cross the pearly gates.

Let’s stop this madness and put together a small committee of people that votes for the Hall of Fame each year. Make it former general managers, scouts, players, managers, a couple of former writers and even a few long-time public relations directors and have them sit in a room each year and hammer out who deserves to get in.

Let’s also make it easy for them by having a special commission put together to induct all of the no-brainers – Bonds, Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and, hell, even Pete Rose – before this committee takes over so they never have to stress about whether or not to put them in.

This actually isn’t far-fetched. The BBWAA rules state pretty clearly that the Hall of Fame board of directors can amend the rules at any time.

This would help greatly and would also spare us all from the self-righteousness of a group that has proven time and time again that they just aren’t capable of doing this the right way.