Hall of Blame

 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 14^th 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.