Major League Baseball

Hall of Fame: It Is Time to Get Rid of the Morality Clause

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 6:20 p.m. ET

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Fansided, David Hill/FanSided via Call to the Pen

Induction into the MLB Hall of Fame should be based on how a player performs on the field. Attaching a morality clause to the process, and one that has been selectively enforced, needs to stop.

Taking a look strictly at the raw numbers, players like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Rafael Palmiero deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. There are players, such as Curt Schilling, who may be a more borderline candidate, but still have a solid case. And yet, when they are considered for the Hall of Fame, their statistics and production on the field are not the only consideration.

Instead, the Hall of Fame has a “morality clause,” which is used in conjunction to the statistics to determine if a player, executive, or founder should be inducted. This clause has been a convenient way to exclude presumed PED users, and the foundation for quite a few voters to voice their moral outrage about those players. Of course, these are the same players that were being lauded by those writers for saving the game not even two decades ago.

And yet, when going through the ranks of those in the Hall of Fame, the actual enforcement of the morality clause is spotty at best. Ty Cobb, a part of the first Hall of Fame class, received 98.2% of the vote, the fifth highest total in history, despite beating a handicapped fan in the stands and allegedly killing someone. Tom Yawkey, a noted racist as an owner, is in the Hall of Fame. Tris Speaker had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

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The argument that Bonds, Clemens, and others, should be excluded from the Hall because they cheated is also laughable. Pud Galvin was the first PED user, taking the Brown-Sequard elixir made from monkey testosterone, in 1889. Gaylord Perry wrote a book about his usage of the spitter in 1974, in the middle of his career. Don Sutton and Whitey Ford were notorious for doctoring baseballs. And Willie Stargell, the Pirates beloved “Pops,” was accused of handing out amphetamines to anyone and everyone. That list is just a small sample of the players that could be considered to be under the purview of the morality clause.

So, how did we come to this? Because Stephen Clark, who helped found the Hall but was not a fame of the game, and Kenesaw Mountain Landis were determined to find a way to put Eddie Grant into the Hall. Grant was a decent third baseman, but was killed in action during the First World War. On the opposite side of the coin, Landis wanted the clause to keep Shoeless Joe Jackson out, after he banned the star and seven other players from the game for life due to the Black Sox scandal, despite their being found not guilty in a court of law.

Essentially, someone who barely had any interest in the game aside from helping Cooperstown generate revenue, and an overzealous dictator created this ideal. In their minds, ballplayers needed to be paragons of virtue, or else the game would suffer. However, that first class, including Cobb, made a mockery of the clause right from the beginning.

It is time that the Hall of Fame realizes that no one is perfect. To hold them to a clause that has nothing to do with their performance on the field is utterly ridiculous, and it gives the voters an ambiguous out to justify not voting for a player, instead of focusing on the numbers. It is time to put an end to the morality clause.

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