A flawed protest
January 7, 2007
The Union-Tribune revealed on Sunday that a Chicago-area sportswriter named Paul Ladewski did not vote for Tony Gwynn (or Cal Ripken Jr.) on his Hall of Fame ballot because he's protesting the steroids era.
This is flawed thinking on so many levels it's hard to tell where to start.
First, a sidebar: I don't know Mr. Ladewski and I have no reason to think he's not acting, however mistakenly, out of conscience. Also, I was for many years a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America (whose members vote on the Hall of Fame) but no longer am, due to the BBWAA's apparent disdain for the status of dot.com writers.
So this is no personal attack on Mr. Ladewski, though it hurts to see a voting member of the BBWAA misuse his vote.
Mr. Ladewski told the Union-Tribune's Tim Sullivan that he no longer feels he can vote for any players who were part of the "steroids era." Nothing personal against Gwynn and Ripken, he said, but even if they were not juiced, they should've done more to rid the game of those who were. So he returned an empty ballot.
Whew!
Seems to me it it's a more meaningful protest to return a blank ballot to make a point that, for example, Pete Rose isn't on it. Or vote for Gwynn and Ripken but not Mark McGwire because you suspect he used steroids (though in McGwire's defense it's never been proven and the subtance he admitted using, Androstenedione, was legal).
But not to vote at all is like targeting an ant with a shotgun. Like a stern headmaster determined to teach a lesson, he's penalizing the entire class for the actions of a few. And to expect the "clean" players to have policed the dirty ones is naive.
By that thinking, Mr. Ladewski shouldn't have voted for any contemporaries of Gaylord Perry, whose teammates had to know he was loading up the ball. Hell, he wrote a book about it ("Me and the Spitter"). He's made a second career of joking about it.
Personally I was more offended by the cokeheads of the early 1980s than the current crop of juicers. At least they took performance enhancers. The guys who played coked-up 25 years ago used performance detractors. If you don't think so, check Dave Parker's statistics. And they still collected their salaries.
By that specious thinking, you might as well go all the way back to the days of Prohibition, and nothave voted for Babe Ruth or Hack Wilson or their contemporaries because they willingly swilled bootleg liquor, which was constitutionally banned. And they made no bones about it.
It seems to me if Mr. Ladewski wants to mount a meaningful protest and can't stomach the idea of voting for any of the ballplayers who will become Cooperstown-eligible over the next decade, he should take himself off the Hall of Fame voting list -- and write a column telling why.
But to paint everyone with the same brush is the opposite of what journalism is about.
