Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Sun-Times is a Hall of Fame voter. He just published his column explaining his choices for this year’s ballot as well.
His ballot contains three names out of a possible ten and he spends virtually no time talking about baseball. Instead, he talks about how important he personally is to the process of protecting the Hall of Fame and how he values keeping steroid users out of Cooperstown above all else:I woke up the other night thinking about the Baseball Hall of Fame, specifically about whether I had voted for a suspected steroid user by mistake the day before. This is no way to go through life. At 4 a.m., you should be dreaming that the college class you haven’t attended all semester is having its final that afternoon.
But keeping drug cheats out of the Hall has been one of my pet causes. How would it look if I voted for a guy who had performance-enhancing drugs oozing from his pores during his career? Like I had lost my fastball.
But, as it turned out, Trevor Hoffman’s name doesn’t come up in the Internet chatter about steroids in baseball, as I had fretted about deep in the night.
Here’s a question: If keeping PED guys out of the HoF is what you consider to be your most important task, how do you not have encyclopedic knowledge of who the PED guys are? How could you possibly be uncertain about Hoffman? If you were uncertain, it means that you’re bad at even the one thing you think is important. That’s just poor. An alternative: he knows darn well Hoffmann has no PED associations but he needed a gimmicky way to frame his column and fill column inches.
Personally, I would’ve gone with actually talking about the baseball careers of the players I was voting for, but what do I know? I’m not a big time, big city newspaper sports columnist with a Hall of Fame vote. It must be more complicated than I realize.