The Oscars are coming up and I haven’t seen a single film nominated for best picture. In fact, I haven’t seen the last three winners or nine of the last ten. In the history of the award, four movies that I like have won the award (the best and most recent being The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in 2004) and none of the movies in my personal top ten have ever won. My favorite movie of all time, Empire Strikes Back, won just one Oscar (best sound) and was only nominated for two more. IMDB has it as the 12th greatest movie of all-time, yet it wasn’t nominated for best picture, losing out to Ordinary People.
Now, you may have been saying to yourself, “why is this baseball man on a baseball site talking about things he knows nothing about?” The answer is because baseball’s Hall of Fame is very similar. I love super hero, science fiction and baseball movies. The academy does not. They love war, but only when it’s fought with bullets, not lasers. They don’t have time for sports unless it’s boxing. How does this effect me? It doesn’t. I’ve never watched the Oscars because they aren’t for me. Obviously, some people liked Crash, but I thought it was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Our opinions don’t mesh and that’s fine. They can have their awards show and I can spend my time doing something better, like watching Deadpool (which was nominated for a Golden Globe for best musical or comedy thanks to the Salt N Pepa song in the opening).
With baseball’s Hall of Fame, it is more of the same, except they hate WAR. Barry Bonds was the best baseball player I’ve ever seen. He was so scary in 2004 that he was intentionally walked 120 times and he still hit 45 home runs and 27 doubles. The current scariest hitter in baseball, Miguel Cabrera, has been intentionally walked a total of 220 times in his entire career, never more than 32 in a season. The active best player overall in baseball by a mile, Mike Trout, plays in an absolutely terrible line-up and has never been intentionally walked more than 14 times in a year (of course a larger percentage of his value comes on the bases than either Cabrera or Bonds). At the age of 39, Bonds was intentionally walked in nearly 20% of his plate appearances, often with nobody on base, that’s how scary he was to opposing pitchers.
This is all besides the point that Bonds had won three MVPs, seven Gold Gloves, seven Silver Sluggers, knocked in over 1,000 runs and 374 home runs before he ever even thought of juicing. While the numbers after may be slightly tainted, he still got out there every day and if anything, worked harder than the others around him, allowing him to set the MLB record for both single season and career home runs. If the Hall of Fame is the house of the greatest players in baseball history, Bonds should not only be in, but deserves his own wing.
Instead, Bonds has been on the ballot since 2003 and just surpassed 50% of the vote on the most recent ballot. He may eventually get in (he has five more chances), but the more devastating blow by the Hall is to the smaller names. He was no Bonds, but in 2013, Kenny Lofton hit the ballot for the first and only time as he received only 18 votes (3.2%). A six time All-Star who played for 17 years, won four Gold Gloves and lead the AL in steals for five straight years, Lofton ended his career with a .299 average, over 1,500 hits and 11 post-season appearances, all things Hall voters generally like. In addition, he had a 68.2 WAR, nearly equal to John Smoltz and greater than Craig Biggio, who were both elected in 2015. It was also significantly greater than 2016 selection Mike Piazza and all three players chosen in 2017, Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines and Ivan Rodriguez.
In fact, Raines, who many well respected baseball writers have been lobbying for years, hit .301/.391/.437 with 635 steals and a -9.5 defensive WAR. Lofton hit .299/.372/.423 with 622 steals and a 14.7 dWAR. Raines played in about 400 more games over 6 more seasons and had a lower career WAR than Lofton. I’ve never seen a reasonable argument about how Raines, who played in an era where excessive stealing was the norm, had a better career than Lofton, who played in an era where stealing was nearly nonexistant. In addition, Lofton played clean in an era marred by steroid use. Despite being at least an equivalent player, Raines is in the Hall of Fame and had enough votes each year to stay on the ballot for a decade while Lofton couldn’t get enough votes to stay on for two years.
Now is where you can say, “it doesn’t seem like you’ve stopped worrying at all or love the Hall” and you’d be right. I don’t love the Hall, it is irrelevant to me. If the second best hitter in the history of the sport (Babe Ruth had a 183.6 WAR, Bonds 162.4) can’t get in on his first try, if two nearly equivalent players (except defensively where Lofton was much better) have such different experiences as Raines and Lofton, what is the point of the building. It’s almost surprising that they haven’t used revisionist history to remove Ty Cobb for being a racist and Mickey Mantle for being an alcoholic.
In the end, you just have to accept that some things aren’t for you. Captain America: Civil War was a fun movie. They even made an Empire Strikes Back reference (as did Deadpool), but the academy will do their best to pretend those movies don’t exist. The Hall of Fame will apparently pretend that the Indians were not the most dominant, non-Yankee AL team in the 1990’s and make it so their only Hall of Famers played the majority of their careers for other teams (Roberto Alomar and Eddie Murray at the moment). I see Indians fans already expecting Jim Thome to be a first ballot Hall of Famer and for Omar Vizquel to be taken within his first few years.
What I see happening is Thome joining Manny Ramirez and Bonds on the not questionable character list while Omar joins Lofton in the not even close club. While his defensive contributions were greater than Lofton’s, nearly every other part of Lofton’s game was superior, so it’s hard to imagine a different fate. When we watched the Indians in the 1990’s, it seemed for certain that we were looking at a minimum of three Hall of Famers (Ramirez, Thome and Lofton) with a few more close calls (Vizquel and Albert Belle). In the end, none may get in (although Thome probably will eventually). This could be a travesty, but at this point, it’s not even worth worrying about.
We know the players we loved to watch play and the movies we want to watch over and over again. Personally, if I’m going to watch a team from the late 1990’s, it’s not going to be the one with a Hall of Fame first and second baseman who couldn’t get out of the NLDS, it will be the one with a bunch of non-Hall of Famers who joined together to be the only non-Yankee AL team to make it to a World Series from 1994 through 2001. Let the elitists argue how much more moral Raines, who used cocaine before during and after games, was than Bonds. It’s just not relevant to reality.
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