Baseball Hall of Fame

I've been a baseball fan since before Free Agency and while I applaud the fact that players now have greater autonomy, I miss the days when a team carried the same roster from season to season.

But I digress.

The thing I most don't understand about baseball today is how the Hall of Fame can maintain that it's just the building housing the recordholders rather than any sort of body setting policy for who can/cannot be inducted. I get it that the selection of players is outside the realm of their authority.

The part I don't get is how they expect baseball fans to be satisfied with that lame excuse.

If it's truly the case that the Hall of Fame takes whomever the sportswriters vote in, would it be okay if the sportswriters decided to vote the goat in for MVP? If sportswriters decided to vote the Bambino's cleats in for longest hitting streak, would that be okay with the Hall of Fame? And how about that hapless fan from Chicago? You know the one. Could they vote him in as Error King or something like that?

Few would argue that performance enhancers are a greater scourge than Free Agency. Or that the game of baseball is clean enough as it is played today. Owners and players can debate and make all the new rules and testing protocols they want, but if the Hall of Fame simply refused to induct dirty players and ejected players who later proved to be dirty, there'd be no point in using steroids or corked bats. Period.

Why go through all that to set a new record that won't count?

Forget the asterix, footnote, or endnote. If the Hall of Fame had any reverence for the records and players it houses, they'd come out from behind their excuses and make sure their inductees were deserving of the honor.