Fixing Baseball's Hall of Fame

I think everybody agrees Major League Baseball has a major problem with its Hall of Fame. It used to be a fabled hall of history, something no real baseball fan should go without seeing. Now it is a hall of glaring omissions, the most famous because of gambling and the rest due to steroids-era revelations. “Was he good enough to make the Hall of Fame?” debates full of statistics and anecdotes have been replaced with “Does he deserve to be in the Hall of Fame?” debates full of preached morals and personality judgments. Why do baseball writers now decide what is right and wrong? How did we all of a sudden change what being a Hall of Famer means?

Say what you want about Pete Rose, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa, but the Hall of Fame isn’t so historic if it is missing the most prolific hitter of all time, the most prolific home run hitter of all time, and two men who captivated the country (and basically saved baseball). But how do they let these guys in without encouraging their negative behavior? I think I have learned the answer from, of all things, teaching!

Just like anywhere else, you find good behavior and bad behavior in a high school classroom. For some reason, it is human nature to try to wipe out the bad behavior directly. But you learn pretty quickly in teaching that you get better results if you praise the well behaved instead of punish the ill-behaved. Why can’t this work with baseball?

My solution is simple, let in the poorly behaved ballplayers who earned a spot in the Hall of Fame, but don’t give them any extra attention. Instead, give the extra attention to the well behaved players by giving THEM an asterisk. They would be deemed “Clean” Hall of Famers. Being “clean” would be defined as “behaving, both on and off the field, in a way that was and is acceptable up to and including present day.” Ted Williams would be a Clean Hall of Famer. Pete Rose and the aforementioned PED crew would just be Hall of Famers. Sorry to Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, but alcoholism and womanizing mean no Clean label for you either.

The benefits of this system would be numerous. Instead of fearing a “tarnished” legacy, players would have a higher pedestal to strive for. The Hall of Fame would once again be a museum of complete baseball history. Children would be shown that if you do everything right, you will receive extra recognition. And the sportswriting world would have a whole new topic to debate: not if a player deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, but if the player deserves to be a Clean Hall of Famer.

Want more? Rewrite the record books to have records and clean records! Barry Bonds will have the home run records, but Maris and Aaron will be restored to holding the prestigious clean record. Albert Pujols doesn’t have a shot at 73, but you can’t tell me you wouldn’t be interested in seeing him make a run at 61*.

Somehow, at some point the asterisk got a negative reputation. But, again borrowing from the world of education, it can denote something positive like graduating with honors. Baseball players shouldn’t fear the asterisk. They should strive to deserve the asterisk. It could be the first piece of punctuation that solves a sport’s biggest problem. Let’s see a comma do that!