Get ready for some righteous indignation

Roommate celebrating xmas on the lake; ice keeps the beers cold, camo is slimming

I don't like baseball. It's boring, the games take too long, and it's boring. The Fox telecasts are unwatchably bad. They introduced the now en vogue quick-cut style, where they cut from crowd, to pitcher, to manager, to pitcher, to crowd, to batter, to crowd, to batter all in about 15 or 20 seconds, in between pitches. They do this to give you the illusion that something is happening. There are two things wrong with this: 1. Nothing is happening, and 2. The important part of what is happening is happening on the field, with the players, and they rarely show that. (I hate crowd shots.)

So, baseball is not my thing. Whatever. I don't hate it, and I'll turn the game on if Vin Scully is announcing or if the Giants are featured or similar. Whatever.

What I HATE about baseball is the judgy, sanctimonious nonsense surrounding the baseball hall of fame. Hate it. With a fervent passion. The character clause invites sportswriters (bitter because they're ugly and the pay sucks) to sit in judgment on players for more than their performance. It's bad enough that every sportswriter would sell his soul to be a major league ballplayer, and spends their entire career at their mercy. This is not the type of atmosphere that fosters good subjective judgment. So you get words thrown around like 'impact' and 'feeling' and etc.

There was a minor victory for rational argument over 'gut feeling' this year with the election of Bert Blyleven. The case against him was mostly based on the idea that Blyleven didn't 'feel' like a hall of famer (more on that in a moment). The case for him was based more on other stuff, like numbers and objective metrics and math and comparables and other shit that attempt to reduce or eliminate the 'gut feeling'.

Jon Heyman, never one to miss an opportunity to broadcast his idiocy, weighs in with an entire article on the subject. Heyman's main reason for not voting for Blyleven is that he doesn't 'feel' very good. Then he cites a bunch of stuff about how no one thought he was very good at the time, like Cy Young awards and All-star balloting. In essence, he says, "We didn't think he was great then, so he's not great now. Numbers? Piffle!" The good news is that a great percentage of the voters actually changed their minds about Blyleven after reconsidering his career. So, a small victory for open mindedness.

I was all set to break down Heyman's post but I don't have time and no one would read it. Joe Posnanski addressed it, which you can read here: http://joeposnanski.si.com/2010/12/30/hall-of-fame-the-eight-definites/.

Apparently Blyleven was a bit of a touchstone, because it set off a wave of commentary from other clowns about how the hall should be reserved for only the 'great' players. Blyleven's greatness apparently doesn't rate with people like Bob Costas, whose primary qualification seems to be a willingness to gargle the balls of worshiping Mickey Mantle. Posnanski writes about that, too, and I'll leave it to him because presumably he gets paid to write 5000 word blog posts. I know I don't.