Harold Baines?

It's been a week since the baseball world was stunned by the election to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Eras committee. Every article I've read by the baseball punditry has decried his election, with Sports Illustrated's Jon Tayler calling it an "embarrassment." Baines certainly doesn't deserve this kind of treatment, and though he didn't expect it and perhaps knows deep in his heart that he doesn't belong there, it seems tasteless to shit all over his moment.

So I have waited a week to join in the chorus. Baines was never a dominant player in his 22 seasons. I think the most telling statistic is that he received MVP votes only once, and he finished ninth. Typically there are over twenty guys who receive votes, so that's pretty fucking telling. He never won a batting title, and only one Silver Slugger Award.

You can squint your eyes and see reasons he got 12 out of 16 votes by the committee. He was one decent season away from having 3,000 hits and 400 home runs, which only nine other players have ever done (and who are all in the Hall, except for Alex Rodriguez, who isn't eligible yet and may never get in because of PED use). But it took Baines 22 seasons to get there, and after 22 seasons one would hope one's stats would be that good. Basically, he was a very good player and not a great one.

I've always found the "back door" entry into the Hall of Fame strange. It's kind of a good cop, bad cop thing, or like asking daddy and getting turned down and then going to ask mommy. Baines never received more than 6.1 percent of the writers' vote (you can scream all you want about the writers not being the right group to elect, but who else should it be? And they are stingy, and are always blasted for not putting people in, not putting the wrong people in). Yet this committee, which changes from year to year (Baines was already passed over once) deemed to put him in. We don't how much influence Tony LaRussa, who managed Baines for two different teams, or Jerry Reinsdorf, who is the owner of the White Sox, whom Baines played for more than any other team, had on the committee.

This second chance committee, which used to be called the Veteran's Committee, has had a strange history. It has been stingy. For a time it consisted of the Hall of Famer's themselves, and one year they voted no one in. It's also been a hive of cronyism. When Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch was on the committee, a shocking number of unworthy players went in, and they all played with Frisch. The two lowest rated HOFers, by today's metrics, are Freddie Lindstrom (for batting and defense) and Jesse Haines (for pitching) and they both were teammates of Frisch.

Perhaps the thing to do is limit this committee to nonplayers such as managers, executives, and umpires, who are not elected by the writers. But then again, no one had much bad to say about Alan Trammell getting in last year via this route, but there was bad said about Jack Morris. And setting a threshold of writers vote percentage, say 25 percent, would also leave out players like Lou Whitaker, who compares close to HOF second baseman such as Ryne Sandberg and Joe Morgan, but who amazingly only got 2.9 percent of the writers vote in his one and only time on the ballot.

I don't know what the fix of this should be, and frankly, I'd rather see errors of inclusion rather than omission. People like Leo Durocher and Ron Santo were elected after their deaths, which seems cruel. This is a major life event for these men and it seems shitty to play around with it like a cat with a mouse.

So congratulations, Harold Baines. But I hope this isn't the start of a trend, where players get in because they have better or similar numbers than Baines. That's good news for players who are deserving, like Whitaker, Dale Murphy, or Don Mattingly. But can players like Rusty Staub, Al Oliver, and Dwight Evans be far behind?