The Baseball Hall of Fame’s character clause was a mistake

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s stated mission is to “preserve history, honor excellence and connect generations.”

With the Baseball Writers’ Association of America — the voting body that elects players into the Hall of Fame — displaying a committed effort to keeping everyone associated with performance-enhancing drugs out, history is being lost, excellence is being ignored, and someone will have to explain to the younger generations why several players atop the all-time leaderboards are nowhere to be found at the sanctimonious museum.

Barry Bonds, who in this writer’s opinion is the greatest player in the history of the sport, already fell off the ballot. So did Roger Clemens, the closest facsimile to Bonds on the pitching side. That’s 762 home runs and 4,672 strikeouts just vanishing into thin air. And while most can agree that there’s more than enough evidence to cast PED-related suspicion on Bonds and Clemens, and both have reportedly done heinous things when not wearing a baseball uniform (Bonds’ ex-wife testified that he regularly beat her while they were married and Clemens purportedly had an affair with a 15-year-old girl) neither was ever suspended by Major League Baseball for failing a drug test.

If that is in fact a voter’s line of demarcation — a positive test means no vote, no matter what — it makes sense to leave out players like Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, who were caught red-handed. But players like Gary Sheffield and Andy Pettitte, who were both named in the infamous Mitchell Report but never busted by the league, have been trending upward according to Ryan Thibodaux, the internet’s most official vote counter.

Sheffield, who admitted to using steroids in 2002, and Pettitte, who fessed up to his own use of human growth hormone, were nowhere near the caliber of player that Bonds and Clemens were. The hypocrisy of keeping Bonds and Clemens out for steroids while the same voters have seemingly come around on lesser players with similar levels of shadiness is hard to figure out. Any number of compromises could be reached here, such as creating a section of the museum for players to have plaques that make mention of their drug connections, whether they showed up on a test, were very loud stories heard through the grapevine or came straight from the player’s mouth once they wore the invincibility cloak of retirement.

In my eyes, Bonds’ domestic violence and Clemens’ relationship with a minor are significantly more troubling than whether they ever stuck a needle in their arm. Had I been eligible to vote when both were still on the ballot, those would have been my reasons for ultimately not voting for them, not the drugs.

Every person is programmed with a different moral code and every baseball writer has differing opinions about what makes a Hall of Famer. Most of them have thought about the issue long enough to have nuanced opinions about steroids. But what most reasonable people can agree on is that, in the grand scheme of things, the act of maybe cheating at work is far more forgivable than committing domestic violence off the field.

Two prominent members of the current ballot, Andruw Jones and Omar Vizquel, have both been jailed for domestic violence. Jones was taken to jail after his wife told police he dragged her down a staircase and threatened to kill her. The former Braves’ center fielder was charged with battery. Vizquel was also booked and taken to jail after his wife said an argument turned physical and ended with him pushing her. The charges were eventually dropped at her request, but Vizquel was also sued for sexually harassing a bat boy. The lawsuit stated that Vizquel, at the time managing the Double-A Birmingham Barons, “deliberately exposed his erect or partially erect penis” to the 25-year-old autistic bat boy.

During this election cycle, Jones is gaining traction while Vizquel has stalled out. The Hall of Fame notes that a “player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played” should all be taken into consideration. Both Jones’ and Vizquel’s incidents could definitely be enough for a voter not to check their name.

But reserving the same kind of pearl-clutching for a player who tried to find a competitive advantage with steroids and a player who was accused of actual crimes against humanity has always felt silly to me. I am a member of the BBWAA but do not have a vote yet. For full transparency, if I were participating this year, I would vote for Rodriguez but not Jones, Vizquel or Ramirez, as the latter was formally charged with misdemeanor domestic violence in 2011 when his wife said the former World Series MVP slapped her in the face. Using my own personal interpretation of the character clause, Ramirez’s off-field life is much more disqualifying than A-Rod’s, whose only non-steroid missteps are mostly just being a bumbling weirdo. Anybody who is connected to steroids but, as far as we know, lived a relatively ethical life away from the ballpark, is fine in my book.

That’s where we get into the tricky question of how much moral rot is too much. Trying to parse what constitutes a serious enough offense — being charged vs. not being charged, weighing the different severities of accusations, etc. — makes a compelling case to just get rid of the character clause altogether. Every museum in the world features some truly abhorrent people, and it’s still very possible to preserve the history of baseball while acknowledging that some of its best players were far from upstanding citizens. A whole mess of the early Hall of Famers were against racial integration, after all.

It is also interesting how certain, specific issues seem to cloud writer’s visions for a more perfect Cooperstown. Curt Schilling’s big and often offensive mouth has kept him out, due surely in part because some of what he’s said or posted on the internet was directly aimed at journalists, the very group in charge of his Hall of Fame status. Among other things, Schilling has also been openly racist and transphobic, and it is now abundantly clear that the BBWAA has decided he is not worthy of induction. For the record, I would never have dreamed about voting for Schilling, the most glaring modern violator of the character clause. If that clause didn’t exist, though, and the Hall of Fame simply honored the best players based on the backs of their baseball cards, people like Schilling, Bonds and Pete Rose would be in easily.

But then we have men like Roberto Alomar — who spit on an umpire during a game, was suspended for it, and still got in with 90% of the vote in 2011 — and Todd Helton, one of this year’s biggest vote gainers who also has multiple DUI citations. There is no true right or wrong answer to which is worse, spitting on another human being, driving drunk or being vile on Facebook, though the voting body has made swift judgement as though there were.

Because of the impossible nature of morally policing every single person to hit the ballot, again, it seems easiest to kill the character clause and make mention of a player’s transgressions on their Hall of Fame plaque. What’s the harm in writing that Rodriguez was both one of the best hitters ever and served a 162-game sentence for taking a banned substance? Until the character clause is eliminated, baseball writers are put in the position of deciding whether things like drunk driving, domestic violence charges and testosterone injections are okay so long as the person doing it was also nice to them in the clubhouse and could hit a baseball.

Everybody is entitled to choose what actions or allegations run afoul of the character clause, just as they’re entitled to decide what statistical accomplishments warrant a Cooperstown induction. But if the Hall of Fame museum truly wants to preserve history and connect generations, it seems like a disservice to fans not to, at the very least, have an objective approach to the steroid era. That period undoubtedly helped baseball drum up fan interest with each 50-homer season. I personally do not care if those seasons were drug-aided, especially during the time before Major League Baseball instituted official drug testing, which inadvertently created the steroid boom in the first place.

For me, though, reported violence against women, sexual abuse and unabashed racism are enough to enact the character clause. Disservices to “the game” — which is a non-sentient concept, not a real person with feelings — is not, in my opinion, enough to completely erase the best players of a generation. Surely the nine-year-old Cooperstown visitor can understand how impactful Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were while also reading a sentence or two about their attachment to steroids.

While you could say the same thing about spousal abuse or, in Schilling’s case, comparing Muslims to Nazis, do you really want to be that person? Wouldn’t you feel better explaining to your kid that trying to gain a physical edge is a much different thing than allegedly sleeping with a teenager or hitting a loved one?

My feelings are clear. If the character clause is here to stay, give the purely drug-tainted guys a plaque with a brief explanation and ignore the ones who have inflicted harm on people in the real world. Or, we can get rid of the character clause. In a sport littered with people that you’d love to watch on the diamond but would never want to hang out with, the only way to build a museum that truly preserves its history is to do so warts and all.