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USA Today Sports Media Group
USA Today Sports Media Group
Sport
Andy Nesbitt

The Baseball Hall of Fame is a silly museum that we should just continue to ignore

This is the online version of our daily newsletter, The Morning WinSubscribe to get irreverent and incisive sports stories, delivered to your mailbox every morning.

The Baseball Hall of Fame is officially, and sadly, a joke.

Congratulations, baseball writers. You did it. You saved your little upstate New York museum and in doing so let everyone know you don’t really love the game, you just love having some power that you no longer deserve.

In cased you missed it, the 2022 Hall of Fame class was announced yesterday and it was made up of just one legendary baseball player – David Ortiz.

Left out of that class were some other legendary players, including Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa. Curt Schilling also didn’t get in and is now off the ballot.

While those first three didn’t make it because of their ties to performance enhancing drugs, Schilling was basically not voted in because of his personality and the things he has said and done in the past. I personally don’t like Schilling at all but the great Bomani Jones did recently make a good argument for why the former three-time World Series champ should have been voted in.

Not having those guys in the precious Hall of Fame makes the Hall of Fame a pointless place to visit or talk about it. It’s a sham and a waste of time because it’s a game of favorites picked by people who don’t care what you think, because level-headed people like you and I know that Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and yes, Schilling, deserve to be in that club.

Let’s stick with the steroid-era discussion, though. It’s easy to elect those guys and make a mention of what they did, or were suspected of doing, and allow them to be in the Hall of Fame. Everyone will be OK and the museum will remain standing.

Life will go on. Trust me!

Bonds is the home run king. Clemens is one of the best pitchers to ever take the mound. Sosa brought baseball back with that fun summer in which he and Mark McGwire chased Roger Maris’ home-run record.

Those legendary players are baseball and are big characters in the story of baseball, a story that can’t be told without them. They should all be in Cooperstown and they should have all been in the first time they were eligible.

Players who are in the Hall of Fame should stand up and boycott the silly museum until those former stars are put in, because without them there is a big stain on the reputation of the place, a stain that has been created by the writers who think they are doing the opposite of that.

Until that happens there’s really no point to visit the museum or talk about it or give it any serious thought. It’s a silly playground built by people who care more about themselves than the game that so many people love.

We know who deserves to be in and we don’t really need the voters to tell us who the great players were. We really don’t need Hall of Fames, to be honest. We saw those players play. We saw the incredible things that they did. We get it. We know.

Oh, and Jonathan Papelbon got 5 votes? Really?

LOL.

Quick hits: Awesome mic’d up video of Travis Kelce… Sean Payton/Kevin James jokes… NFL OT ideas… And more.

– This video of a mic’d up Travis Kelce during his game-winning touchdown on Sunday is too good.

– Sean Payton announced yesterday that he was leaving the Saints and everyone made jokes about Kevin James.

– NFL fans came up with a number of interesting ways to change the NFL’s overtime rules.

– Do you play Wordle? Here are 8 great starting words to use.

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