Tag Archives: MLB Hall of Fame

Sports news

Heavens no! Don’t waive waiting period for Brady, Belichick

An essayist for NBC.com has gone off the rails. He needs to obtain a reality check.

Mike Florio has opined that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and his head coach Bill Belichick deserve to be inducted immediately into the Pro Football Hall of Fame after their retirement from the game.

Stop! Get real! Do not go there, National Football League gurus!

The NFL places a five-year waiting period on those who retire from the game before inducting them into the hall of fame. Why? They don’t want them coming back to the game after their induction. It works well for the NFL, just as it works for Major League Baseball.

There should be only one reason to waive the five-year wait for induction: the death of a shoo-in inductee.

Major League Baseball waived the waiting period in 1973 for the great Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente, who was killed in a plane crash in December 1972 while transporting relief supplies to Nicaragua, which had suffered a terrible earthquake.

Clemente was a sure-fire bet to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. His death meant he wouldn’t be coming back. That’s when a friend and former colleague of mine, the late Joe Heiling, stepped in. Heiling — with whom I worked at the Beaumont Enterprise — was a baseball beat writer for the Houston Post when Clemente died; he was serving as president of the Baseball Writers of America, which votes on the Hall of Fame induction. Heiling proposed that the BBWA waive the rule and include Clemente immediately on the next Hall of Fame ballot. The BBWA agreed, Clemente’s name was added and he was elected overwhelmingly into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Do we waive the five-year rule for Tom Brady and Bill Belichick? No! As long they still draw breath on this good Earth, they need to wait their turn.

Read Florio’s piece here.

Sports news

Hall of Fame induction finally goes unanimous

I am delighted to see that the great “closer” Mariano Rivera became the first Major League baseball player to win induction into the Hall of Fame unanimously.

Rivera could be depended on to finish off a game by coming in during the eighth or ninth inning to get the final outs. He belongs in MLB’s Hall of Fame.

However, I have to wonder: What in the world took the baseball writers so long to induct someone unanimously?

How in the world did, oh, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, Johnny Bench, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio — I could go on forever — fail to obtain unanimous induction into the Hall of Fame?

I can see how some of the all-time greats might have gotten “no” votes from the baseball writers. Ted Williams was pretty much despised by the writers who covered him, and he returned the negative vibes during his entire career. But still . . .

My bet for the first unanimous pick would have been Derek Jeter, the retired New York Yankee infielder who soon will become eligible for HofF induction soon.

Whatever. It’s politics, I suppose.

Now that the baseball scribes have broken the unanimous-vote ice, there might be more to come. That would be my hope.

Sports news

'Mr. Cub' leaves the field

Ernie Banks has died and I’m feeling strangely out of sorts.

At one level, I am — of course — sad to hear the news of Mr. Cub’s death at age 83. He might have been Major League Baseball’s premier ambassador, although St. Louis Cardinals fans have made the case for their icon, the late Stan “The Man” Musial.

But at another level, I am somewhat chastened by the notion that I never really took the opportunity to cheer for Mr. Cub. I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s and much of my baseball attention was gobbled up by some other pretty good athletes. Guys like Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Stan the Man and Roberto Clemente all commanded much of my attention. You had the occasional flash in the pan, such as Roger Maris, also getting attention.

http://espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/story/_/id/12219755/ernie-banks-former-chicago-cubs-great-dies-age-83

Ernie Banks? All he did was belt 512 home runs in his 19-year career with the Chicago Cubs while playing shortstop and then first base.

Mr. Cub had the misfortune of never playing in the postseason. No World Series. No playoffs to get to the Big Show. Nothing. Most of his teams finished with losing records. Maybe that’s why I didn’t care. Hey, I was a kid who was interested in winners, right?

None of that mattered to the Hall of Fame voters who inducted Banks into the Cooperstown, N.Y., shrine in 1977, his first year of eligibility. They knew baseball greatness when they saw it.

Little did I understand until much later that you didn’t need to play on teams that routinely scored more runs than the other team to be a winner.

Mr. Cub’s enthusiasm for the game he loved was infectious. “Let’s play two,” he said famously — and that quote will be repeated endlessly over the next few days.

Pro sports has suffered a bit of an image problem of late. Baseball’s been tainted by steroid and other “performance enhancing drug” use. Pro football has been shamed by the off-the-field savagery of some of its stars against women.

Against that backdrop, now we say “goodbye” to a seriously good and decent man who, by the way, could play a pretty good game of baseball himself.