We’re really good at giving awards. We’re really lousy at taking them back.
After all, O.J. Simpson’s bust still resides in Canton’s Pro Football Hall of Fame. Closer to home, Bill Conlin’s name remains on a plaque in Cooperstown, listing the BBWAA’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award winners. No matter how loudly and often Martin Scorsese’s fans protest, nobody’s taking away those Best Picture Oscars somehow earned by Ordinary People and Dances With Wolves. In 1942, How Green Was My Valley won the award, and nobody’s taking it back. Citizen Kane be damned.
So, I get it. Once you elect Alexander Cartwright and Morgan Bulkeley and Chick Hafey and Rube Marquard to the Hall of Fame, they’re not going anywhere. They’re Hall of Famers in perpetuity.
Except perpetuity doesn’t always mean what we think it means.
In 1973, a music philanthropist named Avery Fisher donated $10.5 million to repair the Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall, with the stipulation that his name grace the building in perpetuity. Last month, the Lincoln Center agreed to pay his descendants $15 million to expunge the Fisher name from the building.
“Perpetuity is usually a matter of negotiation now,” said William D. Zabel, a lawyer representing the Fisher family, who had threatened to sue on their behalf 12 years ago when Lincoln Center considered changing the name at that time without its permission.
“It’s like in ‘Alice in Wonderland’: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,’ ” he said.
This time, both sides came to a mutually satisfactory agreement for the right price.
Now, there are obviously some real differences between paying to get your name on the building and getting elected to the Hall of Fame. The former involves what is presumably a legal contract, subject to negotiation and revision; the latter is simply a sort of gift, and I don’t believe the descendants of Morgan Bulkeley would have any legal recourse if the old gent’s plaque was taken down.
In one sense, though (and paradoxically), the fact that the Hall of Fame has every legal right (I think) to remove members might actually make it less palatable. Because if the financial factor is removed from the equation, then it can just seem mean.
But the fact that we’re even discussing the meaning of perpetuity – and yes, it’s true that ‘til death do us part has long been just a phrase in our society – does suggest to me that we should at least be allowed to discuss what removing a few people from the Hall of Fame would look like. All of which I bring up only because the very idea of such a thing seems so difficult for some to even consider.
Why so difficult? I don’t think it’s about fairness. Nearly everyone who’s actually studied the question believes that electing Chick Hafey to the Hall of Fame was a mistake; a mistake, I would argue, that’s actually unfair to the Hall of Famers who deserve to be there, on the merits.
No, I think it’s difficult to consider excising Hall of Famers because the idea touches a deep, dark reality that we prefer to ignore: Nothing lasts forever. Our parents won’t, we won’t, even our children won’t. We crave stability and fear change, which leads to otherwise reasonable, sensible people holding on to ideas and prejudices long past their recommended shelf lives.
But what if we acknowledge the inevitability of change, perhaps even embrace that inevitability? Suddenly all sort of possibilities appear. So let us imagine, just for these next few moments, what a better, smarter, more relevant Hall of Fame might look like. It would, for one thing, include Roger Clemens but not Chick Hafey. I’ll bet that 90 percent of you will agree with that.
How do we get there, though? I’ll leave Clemens for another day. Or days. Many days, past and present. As for Hafey, I’m not actually sure he doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame. It’s just a feeling. I don’t have any real interest in ejecting Hafey, specifically, or for that matter Cartwright or Bulkeley. I have my opinions, but my opinions might be in error.
What I would do is create a process whereby people who know more about these things than I do could take a look. In the case of Hafey, I might simply begin with a list of players who compiled fewer than (just spitballing here) 50 Wins Above Replacement. There are, by the way, many players with more than 50 WAR who aren’t in the Hall of Fame and never will be. Fifty’s actually a pretty low bar when measuring baseball greatness.
So I’m suggesting that we get rid of all the guys without 50 WAR?
Of course not. That list includes Roy Campanella and Dizzy Dean, probably a few of your other favorite (and deserving) Hall of Famers. But you have to start somewhere (if you’re going to start at all). Once you’ve got a list, then you can ask some smart people to review the list with a great deal of care.
Oh, and by the way? Nobody’s on the list while they’re still living. So don't worry, Goose Gossage, Rollie Fingers, and Bruce Sutter: Nobody even thinks about questioning your legacy until you’ve been gone for five years. Or 10. Or 20. Hell, I don’t really care. Make it 50 if you want, so even your children don’t have to worry about it.
Your children’s children, though? Apologies, but at some point the grandchildren have to find their own ways, without any help from those plaques in Cooperstown. Yes, I’m sure that Chick Hafey’s great-grandson does have strong feelings about this, and his feelings do matter. Just not much, here. I don’t believe the feelings of all the great-grandchildren of all the (at best) marginal Hall of Famers are collectively more important than the integrity, the credibility, and the relevance of the institution.
The Hall of Fame does owe a measure of respect to ol’ Chick’s descendants, and I suspect it’s a debt that has been repaid many times over. The Hall owes more to itself, and to its supporters who believe in the institution’s stated mission.
