To paraphrase late President Ronald Reagan, there they go again.
When Reagan, then the Republican presidential candidate, initially said “there you go again,” he was mocking President Jimmy Carter in a presidential debate. I borrow the phrase to describe yet another change the Hall of Fame is making in its format for voting by what it used to call its veteran committee but it now calls its era committees.
I call it the Jane Forbes Clark show.
Jane Forbes Clark is the chairman of the Hall’s board of directors. She is the heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortunes, owns much of Cooperstown, N.Y., and runs the Hall of Fame as her private fiefdom, doing with it whatever she wants when she wants.
The Hall’s announcements usually attribute developments to its board of directors, but the board does her bidding. Who on the board is going to oppose her and risk being removed from the board?
Frank Robinson, for example. When he was an executive vice president in the commissioner’s office and served on the Hall’s committee that voted on Marvin Miller, he opposed Miller’s election. Playing it safe and making sure he kept his cushy job was better than alienating the commissioner by voting for Miller’s induction into the Hall of Fame. Robinson no longer serves the commissioner, but he is a member of the Hall’s board of directors.
The Hall’s president, Jeff Idelson, denied that the latest change in the voting format has to do with Miller, but he likes his job, too, and he serves at Clark’s pleasure.
The latest change, at least the fourth in 13 years, is viewed by everyone I talked to as being about Miller and Bud Selig, the former commissioner. Under another change in rules of eligibility, Selig was eligible for consideration three years ago even though he was an active executive.
“There was tremendous pressure to get Selig in early,” said a person close to high-ranking baseball officials. “There was tremendous pressure put on by people who are close to Bud.”
Strong telephone pitches on Selig’s behalf were made to members of the historical oversight (writers) committee that was deciding who should make up the expansion era ballot. Despite the pressure, Selig did not make the ballot.
“We had so many conference calls, including one during the World Series, and they were about Bud,” a committee member said at the time.
The committee rejected Selig because members felt he should conclude his career before being considered for the Hall. Reacting to the snub, Selig told me, “When I’m done being commissioner, that’s the time to think about that.” However, a committee member told me, “He’s furious and his minions are furious.”
The matter, it turned out, was so sensitive that two members were bounced from the historical oversight committee because they were suspected of having talked to me. Too bad the Hall acted without talking to me, though I would have said nothing. I am proud that in my 56 years in the business, no one has figured out the identity of my sources. Sometimes people have thought they knew, but they didn’t.
But back to the present and Selig’s position. This time the historical oversight committee is certain to include Selig on the ballot, which with the change in format will be different from the one he wanted to be on three years ago.
It is called Today’s Game while the Miller category is Modern Baseball. Besides the difference in names, the most significant aspect is the schedule of voting. The Selig category will be voted on this year, the Miller category next year.
“How much BULLSHIT is this,” reacted one knowledgeable baseball man after he read about the new system.
“Why are you wasting so much time and effort on Jane Clark family business?” responded another.
Everyone I talked to about the chronology of voting had the same view of it, which concurred with mine. The Clark gang wants to make sure of one or two things:
That just in case Miller is elected on his seventh try, Selig would be elected first, and considering that Selig is 82 years old, well, he has been a big supporter of Clark and the Hall, so they want to make sure he’ll be around to sit on the stage in Cooperstown and deliver a speech.
I asked Hall President Idelson about the timing of the elections. He responded with this email:
“After two cycles of era committee voting that were conducted from most recent to least recent, we did the same with the current system. I find it amusing that you think we would structure a system around one or two individuals. “
I find Idelson’s last comment more than amusing. Clark and Idelson would “structure a system around one or two individuals?” I wish Miller were alive – he died in November 2012 – so I could tell him that one. I can hear him laughing now.
“Every time I get close they change the committee,” he said in November 2010, a month before his fourth time on the ballot. “You can’t fault these guys. They do their homework.”
The evidenced supporting Miller’s view speaks for itself.
In his first two times on the ballot, 2003 and 2007, when all living Hall of Famers, comprised the committee, Miller received 44 percent and then 63 percent of the votes. In that second time, he fell 10 votes short of the 75 percent needed for election. Using the history of writers voting for players, anyone receiving 63 percent would be elected the next year.
Clark, however, didn’t give Miller that third shot (she obviously knew the history of writers’ voting). For the 2008 election, the Hall dropped the Hall of Famers as the committee and named a 12-man panel. It was dominated by management people, and Miller received three votes.
The ludicrous outcome of that election was that Bowie Kuhn, the know-nothing and do-nothing commissioner, was elected with nine votes.
Two years later, the 2010 election was conducted by a 12-man panel again (it seemed safe), and this time Miller received seven votes, two short of election.
That vote was apparently too close for Clark so for the 2011 vote the panel was changed to 16 voters. Shockingly, Miller received 11 votes, only one vote short of election.
By the time Miller was on the ballot again, in 2013, he had died. Clark didn’t change the format, perhaps figuring even if Miller were elected, he wouldn’t be around to make a fiery speech at his induction.
But Miller got no more than six votes; the Hall didn’t announce specific votes except for the three managers who won. Having missed by a single vote in 2011, it made sense that Miller should have gained entrance in 2013.
However, a new reason for rejecting Miller was tossed onto the table. I don’t know if Clark’s fingers were in it, but voters were said to have opposed Miller’s election because late in his 95-year-old life Miller made some comments opposing testing for steroids.
The man had been retired from his position as the union’s executive director for more than 25 years and he was vilified in that expansion era committee meeting room saying players shouldn’t be tested randomly. Robinson was a member of that committee. Hmm.
The Hall’s rejection of Miller wasn’t just a recent development. In the early years of what should have been his eligibility, Hall officials claimed he didn’t fit into any of their voting categories, including executives.
They had done such a good job of selling that tale that even Leonard Koppett bought it. Koppett, a colleague of mine at The New York Times and as impressed with Miller as I was, cited that explanation when I asked him why the veteran committee didn’t vote on Miller. I thought the explanation was bogus, but I was not in a position to challenge it.
In 2009 Miller asked that he no longer have his name on a ballot, but the Hall and the Baseball Writers Association ignored his wish.
In an email response to mine last week, Miller’s son Peter wrote of his father’s failure to be elected:
“He said it was regrettable, and that his only disappointment was the failure to recognize what the union had accomplished for players and for Baseball. Later, when asked about the former players on the committee, he said he sympathized with their current circumstances, sitting around the same table as their current employer. Regardless of what the Players Association had done for them in the past, he said he couldn’t blame them for thinking of their own futures.”
As for not wanting his name on the ballot, Peter Miller said:
“If my understanding is correct, it would be impracticable for anyone to refuse to have his name placed on the ballot. The HOF can nominate anyone. Several times when my father’s name had been placed on the ballot, he would have preferred not to have that happen, as he knew the result of the balloting would be a foregone (negative) conclusion. Finally he wrote a letter to the HOF requesting not to be placed on the ballot anymore. I don’t know the date, but the letter was drafted by my mother, so it must have been before October 2009.”
I told him about the speculation that the voting schedule was fixed to get Selig into the Hall first:
“That’s amusing, in a mordant way. Doesn’t this desperate striving for Fame leave anyone else cold? Or am I the only one? The whole thing is ridiculous. Our memories don’t reside in Cooperstown, they are in our experience of the game played at the highest level, and the dramatic efforts that gave the players a piece of the action.”
In the unlikely even his father is elected next year:
“It is certainly my obligation to refuse any induction in the unlikely event it were to be offered. Given my father’s express instructions, reiterated often in the weeks and months before his death, I cannot do otherwise. My own view remains that it would be a disservice to his memory, and more importantly to the Players Association and its members past and present, to accept anything from the HOF or to participate in its ceremonies. This resolve has nothing to do with any feelings one way or another about the HOF, nor does it in any way demean the accomplishments of the players selected for HOF induction.”
Jane Clark is 62 years old, has never married and has no children. She is a wealthy woman, a billionaire some sources say. But in her transparent effort to curry favor with baseball’s club owners, who support the Hall of Fame financially, by blocking Miller’s entrance, she is cheap and petty.
In the interest of full disclosure, though, I have to acknowledge a connection between us. Clark’s family became wealthy on sewing machines. My family wasn’t wealthy, but my father sold and repaired sewing machines and my mother tested them after he repaired them.