Gwynn 'n' Juice

Consider this another product of the Steroid Era of baseball, one that has not only tainted the game but apparently the logical reasoning of those people who cover it as well. ...

Eleven members of the Baseball Writers Association of America didn't believe Tony Gwynn was worthy of the Hall of Fame. When considering 545 ballots were cast, 11 doesn't seem like that large of a number, and it isn't.

When looking at it the other way, however, that figure is absolutely obscene. The thought of being able to find 11 people, 11 people who cover the sport for a living for heaven sakes, who believe somewhere in their logic-deprived brain that one of the greatest hitters in the history of the game doesn't have the right credentials — and then provide an argument to back that up — is exactly what motivates me to write things like the other day when I suggested that sportswriters are often a pitiful group of petty, lazy, and all-around valueless hypocrits. Sometimes all of the above.

Listen, there are THOUSANDS of great sports journalists who bring the craft to a level of excellence. This is not damning of the countless many who deserve to be read regularly. Good sports journalism still does exist, despite the fact that so much of it has become formulaic and indifferent.

Unfortunately, there are THOUSANDS of sports journalists who fit the former mould. They are niggling and self-important. They are the ones who openly admit to not voting for someone simply because they don't want a player to go in unanimous (as Gwynn and Cal Ripken, Jr should have). They are the ones who cast blank ballots as some sort of vain and pointless protest that only succeeds to put their name above the process.

As ESPN.com's Jayson Stark wrote earlier this week, anyone who doesn't vote for Gwynn should be embarassed. If Gwynn isn't a Hall of Famer, then why do we even have a Hall of Fame?

• Career .338 batting average, better than any player since Ted Williams.
• Hit. 350 or better five years in a row, a streak no one has remotely touched in the past 70 years.
• Fifteen-time all-star, five Gold Gloves and batted .500 in the 1998 World Series against a stacked New York Yankees team.
• Most remarkable: Five times Gwynn struck out less than 25 times in a season he hit .350 or better. He was virtually impossible to strike out.

On top of all that, Gwynn is widely accepted as one of the great class acts of the game, which still amounts to something in this era of distrust and antipathy towards modern-day ball players.

Yet 11 people — for whatever their reasons, which we likely will never know — found him unworthy of going into the Hall of Fame even though he did things many couldn't come close to repeating, and did it over the course of 19 seasons.

Tony Gwynn is a better man than I, I suppose. He doesn't care about those 11 imbeciles who chose to butcher their prestigious honour by casting completely disgraceful ballots that fly in the face of the spirit of the Hall of Fame.

To steal Jayson Stark's line, with people like this entrusted as the decision-makers... why do we even have a Hall of Fame?

Words worth

Many people have heard me say that sports reporters are a joke. Many are hypocrits, many more take themselves way too seriously and a select few more really give us all a bad name.

One problem is that sports reporters are given way — and I mean WAY — too much of a voice for the rest of the public to hear. It's not proportional to their role in society, either. Let's face it, rarely is what a sports reporter does of any great import on a grand scale. Collectively, we tell some stories, try to paint those stories in an interesting light and hope we've provided a unique or compelling angle to what you've seen.

That's it. It's the toy department in the hardware store of life.

Not that you folks who read us would get that mixed up, but every once and awhile one of the reporters seems to mistake his or her role in this galaxy.

Perfect examples have come to the fore in the past few weeks as sportswriters have taken their yearly place at the voting booth for various honours.

Most recently, a story moved on the wire on Monday pre-empting any drama over Tuesday's Baseball Hall of Fame announcement. Tuesday's announcement has been anticipated because of the fact this year's eligible cast includes the much-battered Mark McGwire who has received nearly every headline as sportswriters debate aloud the morality of including a man who very likely took steroids during his playing days.

Now, while the debate of McGwire's inclusion is an understandable and just one, what appeared on the wire today went out of bounds of discussion.

Paul Ladewski, a columnist with the Daily Southtown in suburban Chicago wrote in a column Monday that he submitted a blank ballot because of doubts he had over performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

He wrote:

At this point, I don’t have nearly enough information to make a value judgment of this magnitude. In particular, that concerns any player in the Steroids Era, which I consider to be the 1993-2004 period, give or a take a season. This isn’t to suggest that (Tony) Gwynn or (Cal) Ripken or the majority of the other eligible candidates padded his statistics with performance-enhancers and cheated the game, their predecessors and the fans in the process. But tell me, except for the players themselves, who can say what they put into their bodies over the years with any degree of certainty?

Well, thank you Paul. Thank you for taking your one measly vote and in the process make yourself the loudest voice and the champion of morality in sports. Gwynn and Ripken will be in the Hall of Fame, of that there is no doubt, and they will likely have been voted in by the time you read this on Tuesday.

The only drama for those two was whether either of them would be the first-ever unanimous selections. Ladewski saw to it that they weren't with his pitiful attempt at protest.

By his logic, Ladewski might as well start handing in all his ballots blank for the next decade or so. After all, if your theory that you can't make value judgments on players in this era stands as gospel now, then logic would dictate that it has to hold true next year, and the year after, and the year after. Put a lid on the Hall of Fame folks, Ladewski can't make up his mind who's clean and who isn't.

What's most upsetting about this is not the fact that genuine, not-a-doubt, not-even-open-for-debate, 110 per cent Hall guys like Gwynn and Ripken are somehow lumped in with McGwire, but rather that sportswriters like Ladewski feel the Hall is somehow a place for them to place their soapbox and then rail against the sport in a feeble attempt to protest something you know very little about. Who's using steroids now? Who was then? What was being used? What benefits precisely did it serve? Is baseball the only sport?

Ladewski, and those backers he's undoubtedly going to have, has made this year's voting an issue about one man and in so doing made his name bigger than it needs to be.

Your job is not to be the clearing house for moral turpitude in sports. No one cares about what your moral stance is and no one cares to have your individual code of ethics override something that is meant for everyone. Take your very lofty privilege and do something good with it. Vote for those who deserve to be in the Hall and save your opinions for the pages of your newspaper.

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On a much smaller scale, a sportswriter somewhere in Canada apparently lost his mind recently, too.

NBA star Steve Nash was, very deservedly, named the Lionel Conacher Award winner for the country's male athlete of the year just before Christmas. What was alarming about this was not that Nash won the award — it's hardly a shock given that he won his second straight league MVP award — but what the voting breakdown showed us.

While Nash was the runaway winner, apparently one Canadian Press-authorized reporter who had a vote (they are secret ballots) decided to use his or her vote to nominate Carolina Hurricanes' forward Rod Brind'Amour for the award.

Nothing against the 36-year-old Brind'Amour, but I would love to have the thought process explained to me that says he is more deserving of this nation's athlete of the year award over not only Nash but also American League MVP Justin Morneau and Joe Thornton, the MVP of Brind'Amour's league.

The short answer? There is none, other than the fact that someone doesn't understand the importance of the privilege they are given. Either that or they fall into the category of sportswriters who actually don't know a lot about sports at all, and trust that there are tonnes of those.

(Side note: Montreal Gazette sports editor Stu Cowan called Nash "our Wayne Gretzky of basketball." Can we stop this please? Not only is it apples and oranges, but do we have to compare any athlete with success in this country to Wayne Gretzky? Not only that, the comparison really makes no sense at all.)

I'm by no means sickened to be a member of the sportswriters family, but often times a look around at some of my brothers and sisters makes me wonder if I was adopted. Hopefully.