Baffoe: HOF Got It Right In All The Wrong Ways
By Tim Baffoe-
(CBS) I hope Vicki Santo and her children are really pissed off and for good reason. This should be a happy day for them and all fans of Ron Santo, but instead it ranges for many somewhere between bittersweet and a downright slap in the face.
The process of electing former players into baseball's Hall of Fame is a damn joke and long has been such. That includes the Golden Shower committee that Monday decided that a dead Santo was finally worthy of joining their precious country club.
This new committee of voters seems to be a plus compared to the arcane group of druids known as the Veterans Committee that used to do everything they could to make sure nobody joined them in playing grab ass. Screw every single baseball writer and Hall of Fame election committee member who kept Santo out in the past. They are a pompous group of trolls who act like they are electing the Pope every year. Joe Morgan, the face of their retardation, can drive off a cliff for all I care.
But the new committee is still a committee, and any of us who have dealt with committees know that they can and will eventually foul up the unfoulupable. And then a committee will be formed to try to fix the committee.
Besides Santo getting the enshrinement he deserves, if any other positive can come from this, it is that light continues to be shed on the sham that the Hall of Fame is. The organization has a list of rules for a person to make it into their exclusive group of Freemason ticklefighters, but that's about as hard and fast as a Whitey Herzog bowel movement.
The group has long conspired against Santo because of personal beefs many writers and his peers had against him. Santo's exclusion was not because he lacked proper statistical credentials, no matter what any of those members will say or have said.
If Ron Santo was not the most affable guy to play against or deal with in a locker room as many have said he was, fine. Did he hurt his own cause by never shutting about the injustice being done to him? Certainly. Did he use his lifelong disease—one exacerbated by his own irresponsible lifestyle—as an attempt to garner sympathy from voters? Yep. But I was not aware that it was the Baseball and Congeniality Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
What also is glaring about this is a question that always arises from Hall of Fame elections—if a guy was not worthy one year, what makes him worthy the next? I believe Santo is worthy, and I am glad he is now going in, but he had to die to do so, and that ain't right.
That was plan of baseball's sadist club all along, though. They punished Santo, and they enjoyed having the power to screw with a man's head and life. No. No. No. No. No. Oh, you're dead now? Welcome aboard!
Vicki Santo said upon hearing the news of her late husband's election that his request to get in while still living "was certainly a reasonable request." Not for the Stickball Illuminati, lady. But Mrs. Santo, who has said all the correct polite things about this while surely secretly cursing this whole process and those involved, said she expects to give the speech at Ron's induction ceremony.
And now she has the power.
What I hope Vicki will do is use the pulpit to call out the Hall of Fame and its sad sack processes. I hope she condemns the voters of the past who made her husband and thus her and her family mice in a maze. I hope she says what Jim Rice and Bert Blyleven probably won't because now that they are in I assume they will forget what they went through to get in or at least be muzzled by Joe Morgan's secret police in laughable shirt/tie combos.
Politeness and graciousness be damned. This woman should grab all these crusty old men by the cajones and twist them in front of everyone on their biggest day of the year. She should go scorched earth on the whole crappy museum (and it is, if you haven't been there. Nothing overly impressive in Cooperstown) and then drop the microphone and walk away.
That would be a proper tribute to her late husband, and one he would most certainly enjoy if he were still alive.
Tim Baffoe attended the University of Iowa and Governors State University and began blogging at The Score after winning the 2011 Pepsi Max Score Search. He enjoys writing things about stuff, but not so much stuff about things. When not writing for 670TheScore.com, Tim corrupts America's youth as a high school English teacher and provides a great service to his South Side community delivering pizzas (please tip him and his colleagues well). You can follow Tim's inappropriate brain droppings on Twitter @Ten_Foot_Midget , but please don't follow him in real life. He grew up in Chicago's Beverly To read more of Tim's blogs click here.
