HOF Vote: Does Character Matter?

Baseball has plenty of characters, btw

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No, A-Rod isn’t going into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Hall’s annual voting results will be announced Tuesday afternoon, but Alex Rodriguez is polling nowhere close to contention for election. His support hovered around 40% among publicly available ballots, against a threshold of 75% for election. It’s only his fourth year on the ballot, meaning voters will not be done with this wearying, repetitive topic until potentially 2031, after which Alex can begin his backstage whisper campaign for induction to the Hall via a side committee.

A-Rod cheated his a** off. The voters have consistently understood and responded to that. He’s not going in — at least not now, not through the Hall’s most publicized route, which is direct election by the Baseball Writers Association of America.

Manny Ramirez is also a hard pass for the voters, polling somewhere around 36% among ballots made publicly available. It’s his ninth year. On the other hand, Ichiro Suzuki, a phenomenal player without a whiff of scandal attached to him, may well receive 100% support in his first year as a candidate.

This all might lead a person to surmise that actions have consequences. But wait! On this same current HOF ballot, there has been a massive spike in support for the candidacy of Carlos Beltran — in excess of 80% among votes made public.

Remember Beltran? Quality outfielder, hit 435 home runs, had great post-season numbers. Oh — he also was part of the Houston Astros’ massive cheating scandal in 2017 and 2018.

Did I say “part of?” Check that. Beltran was a ringleader. He was one of the architects of the sign-stealing system that helped the Astros commit baseball fraud win the 2017 World Series. This was not a casual observer or reluctant teammate. This was a flat-out, full-fledged, deeply involved person.

Beltran. Headed for induction, either this year or next.

Make it make sense.

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We are in the middle of a paradigm shift in Cooperstown. That’s the working theory, anyway. As someone who held a Hall of Fame vote for 15 years, let me squish the history into the smallest thimble I can find:

—Character, as a voting criterion, wasn’t taken seriously — or at least not front of mind — for decades.

—By the time I first received a HOF vote in the 1990s, “integrity, sportsmanship and character” did matter. They were three of only six criteria, spelled out in the letter accompanying the ballot itself, that I was asked to consider when formulating my decisions. (The other three: the player’s record, “playing ability,” and contributions to the teams on which he played.)

—Blatant cheating, whether by performance-electrifying drugs or straight-up stealing opponents’ signs in order to know what pitch was coming, seems like it comes at least somewhere close to violating the spirit of either integrity, sportsmanship or character.

—Right? I’m asking honestly.

—As voters responded to this charge of responsibility with their ballots, the HOF candidate pipeline developed a severe clog. No Clemens. No Bonds. No McGwire or Sosa or Rafael Palmeiro. Names like these littered the ballots, sometimes lingering for years without induction. The Hall of Fame became known for who wasn’t getting in.

—The HOF and the baseball writers’ group decided to move things along — not by changing the election criteria, but by pushing out older voters in favor of a younger generation that might not care so much about who did what to whom.

—But enough of the old guard remain upright that “character” is still a thing — sometimes. Apparently. Depending upon the situation. I mean, it’s possible that people just hate A-Rod, more than that they really care about his cheating.

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By this point, we’re so knee-deep in the topic, and the history behind it, that you can’t review a Hall of Fame vote without hearing a massive rash of whataboutism, as in, Aren’t there other guys in Cooperstown who cheated?

Boy, I’d sure think so. On the other hand, I wasn’t asked to vote for them — or if I was asked to, I passed. But I’ll use this opportunity to renew my plea to the Hall of Fame’s directors themselves, and to Major League Baseball, which informally controls the entire process: If you want a different Hall, make it different.

The baseball writers don’t have to have the vote, and even if they do, you can expressly direct them to stop considering character, integrity or sportsmanship. You can turn Cooperstown into a People’s Choice awards ceremony anytime you like.

You’re in charge, after all. If the Hall would be more profitable with Bonds and Clemens and McGwire and Alex Rodriguez having a plaque inside, and if that is your driving consideration, then knock yourself out.

You’re a business, not a holy grail. Nobody thinks you’re sacred anymore — we know too much. Do what you think is best for your operation; baseball fans will decide for themselves how much it matters that Mike Piazza and David Ortiz are in there but Bonds and Clemens are not.

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When the Astros’ scandal was first exposed by The Athletic in 2019, Carlos Beltran flatly denied that the electronic sign-stealing system even existed. He just simply said no way. It wasn’t until 2022, in an interview on the YES Network at which he’d become a paid analyst, that Beltran admitted the truth. Sort of.

“Looking back now—yes, we did cross the line,” Beltrán said then. “I made my statement about what happened in 2017, and I apologized…This happened in such an organic way for ourselves. We all did what we did. Looking back today, we were wrong. I wish I would have asked more questions about what we were doing, I wish the organization would have said to us, ‘What you guys are doing, we need to stop this.’ Nobody really said anything—we’re winning.”

Beltran didn’t have to ask too many questions about what the Astros were doing, because he was one of the people showing other players how to do it. We all did what we did. That is some first-class evasion right there. But maybe “character” is just too broad a term for a Hall of Fame vote. After all, Beltran certainly is one.

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