Reese Kaplan -- What Makes a Hall of Fame Player?

The Baseball Hall of Fame voting has taken place for the calendar year 2022 and last night the announcements were made as to who the writers feel is deserving of this lifetime commendation for their achievements on the diamond.  

I'm not going to get into the debate about specific players who deserve or don't deserve to be in the HOF.  That can be detail oriented yet tiring as everyone's opinions differ greatly.  No, the issue on the table today is what constitutes an all-time great whose selection is warranted as a positive part of baseball history.  

Let's get one thing clear right up front.  There are a great many players in Cooperstown who were far from being nominated as choir boys for their lifestyle.  Everyone knows about the hard drinking of Mickey Mantle, the racist rhetoric of Ty Cobb, and the entire population of the major leagues who fought hard against the arrival and career of Jackie Robinson when he broke the color barrier.  These issues are about personality and off-the-field learning that got misapplied on the field.

The bigger issue to consider is one of professional ethics and what it means to the fabric of baseball and the lessons being taught to future generations.  

Players who openly cheated on the field -- be it stealing signs, taking performance enhancing drugs or engaging in behaviors we would not like to see in our children -- they do not deserve to be memorialized as the greatest of all time.  Throw in some off-the-field issues like domestic violence and other aspects of implosion of relationships that hit the headlines and consider if that kind of lifestyle is what you want emulated.

Now the flip side of these issues is the ballplayer who follows all the rules, doesn't knowingly attract headlines for questionable decisions and produces regularly on the field.  Take David Wright as an example of this type of individual.  

He spent his entire career as a true professional, never had visible disagreements with other players, never evoked stories of wanton debauchery, didn't use artificial means to fight his many injuries and finished an aborted career due to health problems with solid All Star numbers.  His not quite lofty totals don't ensure him enshrinement nor does his quality behavior.  

When you have players who denied and then later admitted using PEDs to add to their fastball velocity, home run power or baserunning speed, you have to wonder once again if they should be in the conversation about who gets a trip to Cooperstown and who should be thankful for the big paychecks and notoriety, but not be hailed as an all-time "great" because how they achieved their performance was in violation of the rules.

Take it out of the realm of baseball for a minute and think about other sports such as auto racing.  If you found out that your all-time favorite driver with the record-smashing total of victories was using some kind of rocket fuel in his vehicle's engine rather than what was permitted by the the racing association, would that simply be good sportsmanship or would that cheating be a clear violation of the rules and an indication that he or she was not worthy of the accolades based simply upon the statistical total of wins during his/her driving career?

For this year and going forward let's celebrate the honestly earned votes to the Hall of Fame for the types of people who worked hard and behaved properly to help future generations know what to do and how to conduct themselves in life.  

Let's not heap praise on the individuals who cheated their way into the HOF nor whose off-the-field behaviors were not indicative of what we'd like to see in others.  We should look up to the elite members in Cooperstown and not excuse them with an asterisk by their names.