Slim pickings on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, with the threat of Bonds, Clemens still looming

There’s a decent chance that only Derek Jeter gets in, which would be a shame. Larry Walker and Curt Schilling deserve a place in the Hall.

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New York Yankees v Boston Red Sox

Yankees star Derek Jeter walks to the on-deck circle against the Red Sox during the last game of his career in 2014.

Al Bello/Getty Images

Baseball’s Hall of Fame isn’t just an idea or a goal. It’s a place. Players are so busy trying to gain entry with their performances that they often forget it’s a building with bricks and people and memories.

So it’s fun to watch wide-eyed inductees take in their surroundings during induction week in Cooperstown, New York. Is that the elusive Sandy Koufax standing there? Yes, it is. And over there, not far from a flesh-and-blood Willie Mays, is the jersey Babe Ruth wore the day the Yankees retired his number. And, yes, that’s Pete Rose down the street, autographing anything and everything for money while he continues to knock on a door that won’t open for him.

This is why I never take my vote lightly. The Hall means so much to so many people. The extraordinary is on display there all the time and in different ways. Baseballs from the mid-19th century. The first catcher’s mitt. Ty Cobb’s sneer. People can argue forever about whether former White Sox star Harold Baines deserved to be voted into the Hall last year by the Today’s Game committee, but nobody can argue that the speech the famously reserved man gave in Cooperstown wasn’t eloquent. The place can make the quietest guy on earth publicly introspective. Amazing.

The pickings are slim on this year’s ballot. There’s a decent chance that only Derek Jeter gets in, which would be a shame. Larry Walker and Curt Schilling deserve a place in the Hall. I’ll get to that in a second.

It’s frightening that Roger Clemens (59.5 percent) and Barry Bonds (59.1), both linked strongly to performance-enhancing drugs, continue to make progress toward the 75 percent needed for induction. It amuses me that former Cubs star Sammy Sosa, who cheated as much as the other two, only reached 8.5 percent last year. Apparently, voters have varying standards when it comes to scoundrels. None of the three belongs in. But how Sammy’s 609 steroid-aided home runs were more egregious than Bonds’ medicinal 762 homers or Clemens’ “B-12”-fueled 354 victories is a maze of an argument with no escape. Only two more years on the ballot for this trio of knuckleheads. Godspeed. 

I feel a bit sheepish about voting for only three players. To Sox fans who are happy to see Paul Konerko on the ballot for the first time: Me, too. I loved Konerko the ballplayer. He did everything very well (OK, maybe not baserunning), and he was a great teammate. He worked himself ragged. But a Hall of Famer? No. 

Here’s my ballot: 

Derek Jeter: Some of us got so sick of listening to national broadcasters drool over Jeter’s excellence, leadership, humanity, humility, saintliness, etc., that just seeing his face made us start retching. And he didn’t do much to stop the New York public-relations overkill. But he was great. He ranks sixth in history with 3,465 hits, and he was a five-time Gold Glove shortstop. In a record 158 postseason games, he hit .308. There’s a list of other statistics as long as your arm that speaks to his excellence. This is his first year on the ballot, and like a lot of what he did, getting into the Hall will be almost effortless for him.

Curt Schilling: His postseason winning percentage (.846) is third all time. In five of his last seven seasons, he led the American League in strikeout-to-walk ratio. Those two stats mean he was great when it mattered and still excellent when his 20-year career was winding down. The problem? His odious worldview, which includes the belief that Islam is connected to the Nazi Party. But the Hall is about performance, not political views. To my fellow voters who want to keep Schilling out because they hate his politics, I’d point out that a similar obstinacy, from a different direction, has kept Colin Kaepernick out of the NFL. 

Larry Walker: If we’re going to say that fielding matters in baseball, maybe we should follow through on the idea. Walker won seven Gold Gloves as a right fielder with the Expos and Rockies. That had nothing to do with the thin air at Coors Field, which has been strikes one, two and three against his getting into the Hall. Besides his excellent defense, he was a very good baserunner. He hit .348 at home in Colorado and .278 on the road, a discrepancy that, for some voters, is enough to keep him out of Cooperstown. I look at it differently: How much crazy talent does it take to hit that well anywhere? And .278 on the road isn’t shabby. It’s not as if he forgot to hit when he left Coors Field. This is his 10th and final year of eligibility on the ballot. Last year, he had 54.6 percent. He needs a lot of help. He deserves to get it.

The rest of this year’s ballot is filled with players with too many holes in their games or in their résumés. Nothing against them, but the Hall is supposed to be about excellence. It’s a place of greatness, where awe is the common language.

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