Curt Schilling should be in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens should not. Anyone who says the opposite is a logical and moral midget.
No offense meant to people whose stature rather than sense is tiny. In a way, though, the modern fetish for being offended is what this is all about.
The topic arises now because all ballots by Hall of Fame voters must be postmarked before midnight on New Year’s Eve. Schilling, Bonds, and Clemens, all of them controversial, are each in their final year of eligibility for the Hall. Let’s deal with Bonds and Clemens first. The evidence is voluminous that both of them used steroids to enhance their athletic performances. These athletes besmirched the integrity of the game itself. Their performance statistics bizarrely and suddenly improved (from very good to other-worldly) exactly at ages when most non-steroidal players begin fading.
(The statistical similarity between Bonds and his talented father Bobby at identical ages, until Barry’s steroid use allegedly got serious, was uncanny. The son suspiciously had his best years at ages beyond which his father had already retired, all while the son’s body changed so noticeably that even his hat size grew.)
Granted, some Hall of Famers may not have been of sterling reputations off the field. Still, occasional spitball pitchers excepted (spitballs being a somewhat minor sin), almost none are even suspected of regular, massive cheating in a way that completely unbalanced the game’s proverbial level playing field. The latter is what steroid users did. To destroy the very integrity of the game itself should be to abolish all claim to the Hall. Cheating is not acceptable. Period. As the great Hall of Famer Joe Morgan wrote, “if steroid users get in, it will divide and diminish the Hall, something [existing members] couldn’t bear.”
Then there’s Schilling, who did not cheat. Schilling’s career statistics are easily good enough to qualify for the Hall, with an almost identical number of wins, strikeouts, and “Wins Against Replacement” as first-ballot inductee Pedro Martinez and significantly better stats than 2019 first-ballot inductee Roy Halladay. His postseason performances were legendary. As top baseball writer Joe Posnanski (author of The Baseball 100) accurately notes, “an argument can be made that he’s the greatest postseason pitcher in baseball history” — including, of course, the starring and incredibly gutsy role in the famous “bloody sox” destruction of the most storied “curse” in baseball history, finally bringing a World Series title to Boston after 86 years of heartbreak.
Also quoting Posnanski, the famous baseball statistics guru Bill James “invented something called the ‘Hall of Fame Monitor,’ which adds up various stats to determine the likelihood that a player will be elected to the Hall of Fame. A monitor score of 100 gives the player a good chance to be elected. At 130, the player is a near-lock for election. At 150, the player should already be in the Hall of Fame. Schilling scored a 171 on the Hall of Fame Monitor.”
In sum, Schilling’s Hall credentials are overwhelming.
The problem with Schilling isn’t his on-field integrity or performance. The problem is that he has said some very offensive things.
He hasn’t robbed people or assaulted people, but he has said mean things about Muslims and transgender people, supported Donald Trump, and stupidly retweeted a T-shirt about lynching journalists. (Gee, I wonder if Shakespeare should be dropped from the literary canon for writing that first we should kill all the lawyers?) In this day and age, offending woke baseball writers is apparently adjudged worse than cheating at baseball.
And yes, there is a character clause in the criteria for the Hall of Fame. But by baseball’s own standards, Schilling has more than met it. He is one of only two players ever to receive not just one or two but all four of Major League Baseball’s annual awards for charity, community service, and admirable character on and off the field. His energetic, decadeslong charitable work against Lou Gehrig’s Disease is particularly noteworthy.
Yet by all accounts, Schilling is right on the cusp, for the tenth straight year, of failing to secure enough votes from baseball writers to be enshrined in the Hall. And early reports show Bonds and Clemens edging closer to success.
This is unconscionable. When it comes to living in the right moral universe, too many Hall of Fame voters strikeout.