It’s that time of year for baseball. We are truly in the depth
of the offseason. The Winter Meetings in Las Vegas are wrapped up, but the Hot
Stove still continuing to sizzle. There is a more compelling case though with
baseball that I have come to discuss and that is the Hall Of Fame. I have wrote
about this topic in various forms, but there has been new light there has been
shed. During the first day of the Winter Meetings, it was revealed that Lee
Smith and Harold Baines were voted into the Hall Of Fame by a mixed committee
of Executives, former managers and players. Every year they rotate eras. They
are a few problems I have with what transpired with the vote that was done.
Many people’s first
and only issue is how Harold Baines got voted into the Hall. Truthfully, that
is a little further down on my list of issues. My first issue how the hell
George Steinbrenner and Lou Piniella were not voted into the Hall Of Fame. George
revolutionized the game in such a positive aspect, granted a few bumps along
the way. He always put the team first before anything else. He prioritized
winning and saw what it took to win. Money was never an issue and he made sure
that he spent whatever it took to win. Besides for trying to sign the best
players, he always had baseball people in the right places. He revolutionized
the TV Networking with YES and made regional TV networks a thing way back in
2002.
The bigger crime
though was not inducting Lou Piniella as a manager into the Hall. I get the he “missed”
by one vote, but that’s the true crime. Lou is 14th on the all-time
wins list for managers, ahead of Hall of Famer managers Tommy Lasorda and Earl
Weaver. With all due respect to Tommy and Earl, Lou was just as good, if not
better, a manager as they were. If you want to be honest, Piniella and Weaver seemed
to have very similar managing styles. Lou took an underdog Cincinnati Reds team
all the way to the World Series and won! As well, he managed a Seattle Mariners
team to a regular season record of 116 wins, even though they didn’t win the
World Series that year, it’s still impressive. As well, Lou had the task of managing multiple
personalities on a same team of Ken Griffey, Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Edgar
Martinez, and Randy Johnson to name a few. That’s something a manager needs to
deal with on a daily basis. If he can manage multiple personalities and make it
work, then that also helps him out.
When these results
came out (we are still waiting for the BBWOA results), Chris “Mad Dog” Russo
had a highly heated debate with Hall of Fame Manager Tony LaRussa. As most of
us do, we respect LaRussa’s baseball knowledge and what he’s done throughout
his professional career, but he was stumped on why Baines should be in the
Hall. The voters who did not vote for George Steinbrenner and Lou Piniella
should also be stumped. If you are not going to vote 2 deserving people into
the Hall, then maybe you should be voting for who should go into the Hall at
all.
