No joy in Mudville
The BBWAA needs to change.
Taking a break of All Things Media to write about my other passion: baseball.
For the second time in eight years, there is no joy in Mudville, as the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) decided that there would be no members elected into the baseball Hall of Fame (HOF) this year. This is the ninth time in the HOFs history that no one was elected.
(Image via Hall of Fame on Twitter)
The NYT has a fun piece about the previous eight times no one was elected.
Not one player hit the 75 percent mark; Curt Schilling came the closest, knocking on the door at 71 percent.
The guidelines, as indicated by the BBWAA, are as follows:
Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.
This rule was amended in 1989 because of Pete Rose.
“It was only when it was realized by the Cooperstown guardians that there was a great danger (Pete) Rose (Appendix A) might be elected to the Hall while banned from baseball that the rules were amended (in 1989) (Vass, 2008)” to include “Rule 3 (E). Any player on Baseball's ineligible list shall not be an eligible candidate.”
The HOF is about to enter a period in which the bar to get in gets higher and more abstract, which will mean more years of no members.
Why? Well, if the two greatest baseball players of their generation can’t get elected by the writers who not only covered them, but looked the other way (recall, the steroid scandal came to light because of investigative reporting, and not baseball beat writers—more on this in a moment), who can get elected?
If you have “integrity, sportsmanship, character” as defining characteristics into the HOF, then many of the 333 members already in shouldn’t be.
(For the record, I am in the Bonds and Clemens should be in the HOF camp. And so should Pete Rose. No amount of juice can help you connect your bat with a ball travelling 100mph at your head; least of all 762 times. It can, however, keep you healthy to play for a lot longer than you should. And while not every ball player was juice, enough were. And let alone the uppers that players took in the 40s, 50s and 60s to help them recover. But the further away we get from on-the-field theatrics, we see that the writers are just upset that Bonds and Clemens weren’t very nice people when they played; hence the reliance on the character clause as justification. You can yell at me in the comments below.)
The writers, in their infinite wisdom, did, however, elect Bud Selig to the HOF in 2017. Bud Selig, who oversaw the game at the height of the steroid era, gets a pass from writers, character be damned.
And now we get to talk journalism and history: It’s a good reminder that sports journalism had historically been ancillary part of a newsroom, that the idea of an independent press, a fourth estate to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable is a newish phenomenon for sports reporting.
The relationship between the baseball press and the baseball establishment is a symbiotic one. The baseball reporter’s job doesn’t and couldn’t exist without the access granted by owners and executives. The owners and executives, naturally, expect something in return: free advertising and publicity, putting baseball into the minds of readers and viewers, ideally in a way that paints the league in a positive light.
In her book about Mickey Mantle, “The Last Boy,” Jane Leavy writes about the relationship between the press and the ball players, using the infamous Copacabana brawl between several Yankees and a bowling team (details only emerged last year of what really happened), as an example.
“The ‘Copa Caper,’ as it became known, might not have become public had it occurred on the watch of the baseball beat writers whose unstated code of honor was to look the other way. News-side reporters had no vested interest in maintaining cordial relations in the Bronx. When they broke the story, it was the first major breach in the Fifties seawall between ‘on-the-field’ and ‘off-the-field’ reporting.
Baseball writers ate, drank, and traveled with the team. Their tab was often paid by the team. ‘You couldn’t write one word of it, the debauchery,” said Jack Lang, the longtime executive secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America. ‘It wasn’t just the liquor. It was the women.’
Access journalism is a foundational aspect to sports journalism—it should come as absolutely no surprise why political reporters and sports reporters use the same language and processes to cover their industries; also, political journalists want to be sports journalists, and sports journalists want to be political writers.
Jack Shafer, writing in 2012, explored the mirror images of political and sport reporters:
The jobs of political reporters and sports writers are almost identical: Determine who is ahead and who is behind; get inside the heads of the participants; decode the relevant strategies and tactics; and find a way to convert reader interest into sustainable enthusiasm. Then, maintain reader enthusiasm for the months and months of caucuses or preseason games, primaries or regular season games, conventions or playoffs, and the general election or Super Bowl (or World Series).
Robert McChesney wrote that sports coverage became important to newspapers in large part because sports is ideologically safe — it doesn’t offend people, boosts civic pride and contributes to the perceived well-being of a community. This ideological safety, however, runs counter to the self-perceived role of traditional news journalism. This leads news journalists to view sports journalism as mere entertainment, not “real journalism.” Where news journalism has its roots in the idea of being the fourth-estate and the public watchdog on public officials, sports journalism’s roots are far more promotional.
So the BBWAA had a long and storied history of not actually telling stories that would threaten the symbiotic nature of their role. This, by the way, is also the biggest challenge in trade media. It’s hard to cover a company or executive when your publication’s CEO and sales team are asking them to pay to enter made-up awards and honorifics.
It’s this history that BBWAA casually ignores as it puts itself up on a pedestal. How, they think to themselves, can we vote in a ball player accused of taking performance enhancing drugs? Or in Schilling’s case, aligning himself through words and actions with the worst people?
Schilling took to Facebook on Tuesday evening to post a letter he said he sent to the BBWAA (he starts out saying it was “written privately and for their eyes only”, and then posts it on the world’s largest platform). It’s meandering and pandering, but mostly it’s him trying to walk around the BBWAA character clause, as his reputation has plummeted since his bloody sock days.
He frames his life with those of Bonds and Clemens, though doesn’t actually mention their names (wonder if this is a legal thing, as neither Bonds nor Clemens has tested for or proven to take steroids, big heads and biceps aside):
But I’m now somehow in a conversation with two men who cheated, and instead of being accountable they chose to destroy others lives to protect their lie.
Schilling closes by saying he wants to take his name off consideration for next year. The BBWAA said, “nope.”
Sports journalism stopped being a backwater section of the industry a long time ago, and as the digital age has ushered in new ways of covering teams—from artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that write reports based on the box score to MLB become its own high-powered media company and platform—the role of the BBWAA and selecting the greatest players of an era also needs to evolve.
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The Simpsons, “Talking Softball”
Some interesting links:
For the dying of the TV light:
TV providers on track to lose around 5 million subscribers in 2020 (Protocol)
For important video journalism:
Proud Boys Were Key Instigators in Capitol Riot (WSJ)
For context on media hiring (you can hire me!):
Washington Post joins publications searching for an editor-in-chief (Axios)
For tech companies trying to be media companies:
Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital behemoth, plans to eat the media (CJR)
Nextdoor Is Quietly Replacing the Small-Town Paper (One Zero)
For tech policy:
Social justice groups warn Biden against throwing out Section 230 (The Verge)
For media criticism:
I Left My Career in Prestige Media Because of the Shitty Men in Charge and They Are Still In Charge and Still Fucking Up (Jennifer Barnett)
Newsweek's opinion editor has an anti-tech side gig (Axios)