Alan Hoskins of the Kansas City Kansan asked several experts -- ESPN people and some respected baseball writers -- if they think Derek Jeter will be the first unanimously-elected Hall of Fame inductee.
The response was itself unanimous: nope. No one, of course, argued that it was because he wasn’t deserving of first-ballot induction because that’s nuts. Rather, all of them noted the following concept, most eloquently stated by Adam Kilgore of the Washington Post:
There is always some schmuck, isn’t there? Two kinds of schmucks, really. The first kind is the “I vote for no one in the Steroid Era because I know everything and will turn in a blank ballot to draw attention to myself --er, I mean to protest some Great Wrong” guy. These people are terrible, by the way. Really the worst kind of person.
The other schmucks: guys who say that since Willie Mays didn’t get unanimously elected, no one should. Because the best way to right past wrongs is to repeat them.
Bah. There are a lot of people who should have been unanimously elected. The next one, as several of them note, should be Greg Maddux, but won’t be because some schmuck will come up with a reason. The next one should probably be Jeter and some other schmuck won’t vote for him either, because of some other schmucky reason.
Schmuck schmuck schmuck.
