Matthew Osborne
A Christmas miracle happened early this week – the Baseball Hall of Fame finally got one right.
Fred McGriff, known affectionately as the “Crime Dog” to his fans, was elected to the Hall by the Contemporary Era Committee, a group that included Braves legends Chipper Jones and Greg Maddux.
They certainly knew that their teammate McGriff was a Hall of Famer. Now everyone knows it, as the committee corrected a 10-year mistake by the baseball writers.
McGriff is a Tampa native who astonishingly will turn 60 next Halloween. When he came down to play for his newly-minted hometown Devil Rays (yeah, they were called that), we enjoyed having him back home.
And now he has a new home in Cooperstown, which is terrific news. That leaves one problem with the Hall of Fame solved and several others left unsettled. To wit:
• How about a couple of other Braves legends, Andruw Jones and Dale Murphy?
Jones got 41.4 percent of the writers’ vote last year with five years of eligibility to go. He drove in almost 1,300 runs and was the best center fielder in the league with 10 Gold Gloves.
I don’t have to tell any baseball fan here that Jones deserves another look.
Murphy has deserved one for decades. The two-time MVP was the absolute best player in baseball for a time, which unfortunately was a time in which the Braves stunk to high heaven.
But Murphy was a great player, and not only that, he was the first national baseball superstar on cable television. There was only nationally televised baseball once-a-week back then, and if you were not in an MLB market, that is all you got on TV, until TBS Superstation came along.
Then folks from Idaho to Cape Cod to Miami could watch the Atlanta Braves every single night. (It’s ironic that with Bally’s taking over, people in Atlanta can hardly watch them now, but I digress.)
The point here is that a “Hall of Fame” needs to be a little bit about the “fame” part. Murphy was the first baseball star on cable TV from coast to coast and that should have given him a little extra push. Instead, they let the steroid era home run hitters make his power numbers look pedestrian and pushed him down the list.
• Ah, now there’s the other Hall of Fame issue hanging around out there – the steroid guys.
Look, I am not in favor of cheating, but after Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens failed to get support from the committee that elected McGriff, most pundits are saying that they are more or less out of chances forever.
Forever is a long time, as occasionally one of these committees inevitably votes in Ossee Schrecongost or Rabbit Maranville or someone you’ve never heard of from the 1800s and we all go “Who?” That may be what happens to our grandkids when they vote in Bonds or Clemens one day.
But look, a lot of people were using back then, and it is impossible to know how many.
Yes, Bonds and Clemens took themselves from top-level baseball players into supermen with substances, but the Hall of Fame cannot pretend they never lived.
I think it’s a stupid facility that represents the history of baseball and ignores Bonds, Clemens and yes, Pete Rose.
There is a sportsbook opening inside the Cincinnati Reds’ Great American Ballpark this year. That is all you need to know about the hypocrisy of Rose’s lifetime ban.
Rose is far from a model American, but he deserves to be honored among baseball’s best, as do Bonds and Clemens.
Who are you going to tell your kids about when you walk through the hallowed halls of Cooperstown, Trevor Hoffman? Nothing personal to him, but when I think of my childhood in baseball, Bonds and Clemens are irrevocably stamped, while the Hoffmans of the world deserve a nod, but not a gasp or a flood of goosebumps.
Baseball writers cannot gatekeep our childhood memories, and those guys will always be Hall of Famers to me, whether I think they are good guys or not.
Put them in, put the truth on the plaque. Let us make our own judgments.
Matthew Osborne is the editor of The Northeast Georgian. Reach him at 706-778-4215 or editor@TheNortheastGeorgian.com.