THEY Don’t Get It

The National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is in trouble. They are on a downward slide and they don’t even know it. The biggest problem this Hall of Fame has is that THEY, the people who run it, and the people who vote for who gets accepted into it, and whose non-votes determine who does not get accepted, don’t realize that they are trending in a direction that is the exact opposite of the rest of the world. These are the people who matter most, the fans who attend and support the sport and its Hall of Fame, and these fans are thinking maybe this HOF is not even worth bothering about.

Amongst other things, Cooperstown is having visibility problems. Attendance is down, down, down. Attendance has supposedly dwindled down to yearly levels it had in the mid-1980’s, even though our overall population has risen by nearly 100 million people in that same time period. Young people, by and large, do not care anymore about showing up to “an old people’s thing” because there are very few people who they have actually seen play and can relate to that are even there. An entire generation of young people have grown up on the Internet and have found Twitter and Facebook and texting to be a more interesting distraction than MLB and its Hall of Fame. Where will growth come from?

Right now, the HOF really is an old people’s thing. Old historical figures who played the game a long time ago are the ones in the HOF whose bronze statues adorn the place. Old sports fans who watched those old players play a long time ago are the primary customers who want to come and see their former heroes. Them and the younger family members that they can rustle up (probably by promising to pay their way and buy them lunch) and can get to show up with them. Try polling a young group of people at a mall and ask them, “What would you find if you went to Cooperstown, NY?” You probably would get less than two per cent who would have a clue what you are talking about. If that.

Somehow, an attitude of sanctimonious entitlement has overtaken the voting process, where large blocks of same minded voters have decided they can use their own selective reasoning as a way to choose to not elect people whose careers might have otherwise “earned” them a Hall of Fame spot. They have decided that THEY control who they will allow in and who they will keep out. THEY do not care what the average baseball fan or member of the general public thinks. They care about those standards that THEY have come up with so they can play God. And THEY are helping to make the Hall of Fame irrelevant to the general public, until it has become “their” exclusive club that they want to keep as restricted as possible.

THEY are keeping out the some of the best of the eligible players with their rules and voting practices. The inflexible rule of a player needing 75% of all votes to win enshrinement is an archaic rule that is hurting the election process. This was a simplistic rule that may have made sense in the 1930’s when there were fewer teams and fewer players to consider. Now there are more teams, more players, AND all of the older players that are still eligible on the ballot, battling for the necessary votes from the electorate. And the voters still can only vote for 10 per year, a process which in some years, votes in ZERO new members. This is even though the latest backlog of eligible players has far more than that who were really good and are still out there waiting for the call. And there will still be more new candidates to consider next year. And more after that.

There are many players already in the Hall of Fame, who got in during an era when it was easier to get in, due to the fewer players that played during that time, and when the standards of excellence were not the same as they are now. Many of those already elected to the HOF, those .260 hitting shortstops that could “really turn that double play” could not hold the jock strap of some of the players that are being kept out of the HOF now because of this convoluted voting process. And fans KNOW that there are some bogus shenanigans going on and they don’t really like what they are seeing.

There are a large segment of baseball fans out there that don’t really think the whole process is fair. And the baseball status quo mentality is pretty much saying, tough, we don’t care about what you think, baseball fans (especially the younger ones). And the people are reacting with indifference and saying, “whatever,” and just not caring anymore. Attendance figures do not lie. When people stop caring, the whole house of baseball cards threatens to fall.

Every year this entitled THEY that controls this process chooses to utilize their “high standards” of voting (and the way the votes count to actually determine the “winners”) to keep more and more deserving people out, they will hammer another nail in the HOF coffin. If the powers that be are not careful, some day, there will be an abandoned old relic of a place in somewhere called Cooperstown where only old, old people with white hair will be left “guarding their sacred grounds,” and muttering things like, “we sure showed those whippersnappers, we kept those borderline candidates out of here,” and “WE are the great guardians of the past.” I’m sure they will cackle a lot, too.

And the only thing that might change that scenario is a “What, there’s an oldtimers game somewhere?” And then maybe THEY will all go out to their oldtimers game, and maybe someone else could step in while they are gone and fix this mess.