STARK RAVING
Just when it didn’t seem possible any Hall of Fame could be a bigger farce than baseball’s, the Pro Football Hall of Fame stepped up and said, “Hold my Belichick.”
Bill Belichick reportedly won’t be a first-ballot Hall of Famer?
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Oh well, at least Shedeur Sanders made the Pro Bowl.
ESPN.com broke the story Tuesday: Belichick had not received the necessary 80% of the vote. Nobody has identified the 10 or so voters who robbed him. They vote anonymously, which must change. But former rival Bill Polian didn’t look overly innocent when he told ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. that he “could not remember with 100% certainty” if he voted for Belichick.
That seems problematic. The voting committee is composed of media mixed with former players, coaches and executives. They should all be ashamed, although they did perform a miracle: Everybody’s on Belichick’s side for once.
If Belichick isn’t first-ballot, then who is? The man won six Super Bowls as a head coach. Even if you felt inclined to strip him of one or two for cheating, that’s still four or five, plus two as a defensive coordinator.
Also, there is no “integrity clause” in football’s vote. It shouldn’t matter if you cheated or were an ill-tempered jerk. It’s all about your record. But the same kind of pettiness and ignorance that ruined the Baseball Hall of Fame has now tarnished football’s beyond repair (and I’m sure Jordon Hudson would have touched on that in her presenter’s speech).
“The Pro Football Hall of Fame isn’t some mechanism to punish people or settle old scores,” tweeted longtime NFL scribe Mike Freeman. “You don’t make Bill Belichick wait a year as a disciplinary action.”
What a joke. Meanwhile, just last week, the Baseball Hall of Fame indicted itself yet again by red-carpeting Carlos “Trash Can” Beltran while Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and the rest remain frozen out. Probably forever, because they (allegedly) used performance enhancers.
Never mind that cheating in baseball is older than Justin Verlander. Or that such cheating never deterred Hall of Fame voters until steroids came along and hasn’t deterred them since.
If they were interested in keeping cheaters and bad guys out of the Hall, based on the laughable integrity clause, they should have started earlier. As the New York Times’ Bill Pennington put it, baseball’s HOF is stocked with “multiple virulent racists, drunks, cheats, brawlers, drug users and at least one acknowledged sex addict.”
Yes, everybody but steroid users (alleged, admitted or convicted), except maybe some who were nice to them. That is where sportswriters — many of them questionable arbiters of morality themselves — drew the line.
Beltran got elected on his fourth try, with 84.2% of the vote, despite being a central figure in the Houston Astros literally stealing a World Series.
In 2017, the Astros used a video camera to steal pitch signs, then relayed the real-time info to hitters by banging on a trash can in the dugout (Belichick must have been saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?”). When the story broke two years later, it got Beltran fired as Mets manager before his first game.
But it wasn’t enough to bar him from the Hall of Fame!
The hypocritical writers green-lighted Beltran while again denying far superior hitters Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez.
In review:
• Performance-enhancing drugs, unforgivable.
• Stealing a World Series, no big deal.
To be clear, Beltran would get my vote. Numbers should be all that matter. He should be in. But so should Bonds, Clemens, Rodriguez, Ramirez and others who played in an era where Jose Canseco — who pretty much broke the steroids story — estimated up to 85% of players were on performance enhancers.
I find Canseco eminently more trustworthy than the voters, who overlooked Canseco claiming he personally injected Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez with steroids and made Rodriguez a first-ballot inductee in 2017.
I guess good ol’ Pudge, unlike Clemens and Bonds, must have been nice to them. He got 76% of the vote.
If he’d stolen a World Series, it might have been 100.
