In typical American fashion, Halls of Fame have lost their glory in their translation across the Atlantic from the original shrines established in Europe. Seemingly every high school has one for its graduates, and every profession seems to have its own miniature pantheon. There are Halls of Fame for pornography, social workers in California, and business leaders in Queensland. Yet while the concept has become commonplace, there is still one Hall of Fame in the United States that is endowed with a particular sanctity. Nearly a century after the first class of players was enshrined in Cooperstown, in upstate New York (purportedly where a Civil War general invented the modern game in 1839), the Baseball Hall of Fame still attracts a level of discord that is unparalleled.
Baseball itself has lost its preeminence as the top sport in the United States to the NFL, whose Hall of Fame has its own unique pageantry with inductees being presented with custom-made blazers. But what the Baseball Hall of Fame lacks in fashionable accoutrements, it makes up in the passions it stirs. While the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx is a forgotten relic and casual fans of the NFL or the NBA could not easily distinguish which players have been questionably inducted and which have snubbed, induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame still sparks violent debate.
The furious debate over inclusion and exclusion from the Baseball Hall of Fame comes in part from the unique nature of baseball as perhaps the easiest sport to measure quantitatively. After all, the scope of action is often limited to the 60 feet, 6 inches between the batter and the pitcher — there are no linemen blocking or forwards setting picks. This has resulted in a statistical revolution over the past few decades, with traditional barometers of greatness called into question. The long wars between crusty old scouts and newfangled nerds (depicted in deep sympathy for the latter in the movie Moneyball) have long since reached a truce. But the debates they sparked about who was worth enshrining still linger on.
The strife is also rooted in the weird ad hoc structure of how players are inducted. A century of revisions and tinkering with the process has resulted, and now roughly 400 sportswriters who have met particular criteria cast ballots for up to 10 players. If a player gets 75% of the vote, they are immortal. If they fall short 5% or spend 10 years on the ballot without reaching the 75% threshold, they are cast into limbo. Only a convoluted process historically called the Veterans Committee (an electoral system that is probably more at home in a medieval Italian city-state than in the modern world) can lead to their enshrinement.
What makes the Baseball Hall of Fame special comes from the patina of age and history that has accumulated around the process. Arguments about what merited induction go back to the Baseball Hall of Fame’s founding before World War II. With its plaques honoring men whose lives have spanned nearly the entire history of the United States, it represents a link to a distant past in a way that few things do in American life. Plaques of men who played in segregated leagues on dusty ballfields over a century ago are placed next to those of immigrants whose athletic feats took place in modern stadiums and were broadcast in high definition.
For this year’s inductions, the one player for whom there is no debate is Ichiro Suzuki. The star outfielder for the Seattle Mariners will almost certainly become the first Japanese-born player enshrined once the results are announced in January. It will be a symbol, in a way, to the continuity of baseball. As much as a Japanese athlete invariably known only by his first name seems removed from 19th-century America, it’s hard to think of a player who would fit in better on a baseball diamond 150 years ago. Suzuki hit few home runs and instead sliced line drive after line drive in a way that would have seemed just as familiar in the 1910s as the 2010s. It’s hard to imagine a leather helmeted football player of a century ago lasting a minute on a football field today. But the continuity that someone like Suzuki represents embodies why the passions around the Baseball Hall of Fame remain so high today.
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Ben Jacobs is a political reporter in Washington, D.C.