Santo for Hall

You may recall the initial reaction when the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee was reconstituted to include all the living Hall of Famers. These voters were going to let admissions standards slip, and pretty much everybody who was a pal of a Hall of Famer and had worn spikes was going to be enshrined in Cooperstown.Right. And the Gobi Desert was going to turn into a tropical rain forest.

What has actually occurred? It was announced Wednesday that for the second consecutive vote, the new Veterans Committee elected nobody. Far from easing the entrance requirements, far from playing the old boys' network, the Hall of Famers are guarding Cooperstown's gates even more zealously than the baseball writers, who annually cast the primary ballot.

And guess what? This is both human nature, and, on balance, a good thing.

Now, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth in some quarters and understandably so. You can look on the 25-man ballot this year and every single former player on the list has considerable merit. Arguments in favor of these candidates will run from the objective and the empirical to the sentimental and the emotional. These players all had meritorious careers. But were they Hall of Fame careers? That is in the eye of the beholder.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame is professional sports' most exclusive club. This is not like, for instance, the voting for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, in which a given number of candidates MUST be elected each year. The baseball Hall of Fame demands 75 percent of the vote in both the annual baseball writers' balloting, and in the Veterans Committee elections, which are held every other year.

Read the full article