Whither goest Jake Peavy now?

“I don’t know that,” the pitcher’s agent said. “We haven’t talked. He is very frustrated.”

As Peavy should be. He has had a difficult off-season. Peavy, the San Diego Padres’ pitcher, was the subject of extended trade talks for weeks. The Padres wanted to trade him to get rid of the $63 million he had left in his contract, and everyone in the baseball world knew it.

John Moores, the Padres’ owner, was going through a self-induced divorce, and Peavy was paying for it.

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Never has anyone had to work so hard to give away so much money. In fact, if the Yankees fire Brian Cashman in the next couple of years, he will be able to use his recent experience to get a job: salesman.

That is the role Cashman had to undertake recently. In an effort to induce CC Sabathia to take $140 million or more, Cashman traveled to San Francisco to meet with the free-agent pitcher. Then he stopped in Texas on his way home from the winter meetings in Las Vegas to meet Andy Pettitte to try to talk him into taking $10 million.

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Consider this the second part of a two-part series of columns about the Hall of Fame. In the first part earlier this week I addressed the foolishness of the Hall board of directors in fiddling with the electoral format in an unsuccessful attempt to get more players elected to the Hall. In this second part I will address the foolishness of the writers who vote for the Hall of Fame.

Obviously designating a player as a Hall of Famer is a subjective undertaking. Some players prompt a consensus view positive or negative, but others produce debate.

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