Baseball Hall of Fame Voting Is Still Racist

For Gary Sheffield, a 22-year career, nine All-Star game appearances, 509 home runs, 1,676 RBI, a World Series championship, and a career .292/.393/.514 batting line earned a mere 64 votes from the Baseball Writers Association of America in Tuesday's 2015 Hall of Fame vote. Sheffield's inclusion on 11 percent of the ballots ensures he will be eligible for next year's election, but his chances of reaching the 75 percent threshold for induction by 2024 are fantastically slim.

Sheffield's statistical profile in one of the greatest offensive eras of baseball history leaves room for debate, particularly given his reputation as a defensive butcher. But what we see here isn't debate. These votes imply baseball writers believe Sheffield belongs squarely in the Hall of Pretty Good, perhaps worthy of memory but certainly not enshrinement. There he can sit alongside men like Fred McGriff and Don Mattingly, players with lesser statistical records who have earned similar vote totals for the past nine and 15 years respectively.

It's hard to imagine the electorate coming in so universally against Sheffield without resorting to the "character clause" in the Hall's voting instructions. Some will point to accusations of steroid use. Sheffield admitted in 2004 to using a cream from BALCO, giving him about as much of a tie to steroid use as his former teammate Andy Pettitte, who has largely avoided the condemnation reserved for most steroid era players. Rather, Sheffield's vote total is more likely the result of a career spent antagonizing the largely white baseball media. As Sheffield's former manager Jim Leyland bluntly put it, "If you have different views on something and then you expose those views, you're going to be exposed in some controversy, that's just the way this is."

Sheffield spent much of his career speaking to the unfair expectations heaped on black players. The proportion of black players in the major leagues has been steadily dropping for decades, and Sheffield has been one of the rare outspoken critics of MLB and its complicity in the drop in black representation on the field. He continues that work today as one of the few black agents in the game.

Those views, as well as what Sheffield himself called his "inner rage," are why he never stayed on one team for long. Sheffield's complaints over losing the shortstop job to Bill Spiers in Milwaukee in 1990 led to the first of what would be five trades in 15 years. "They cry about money and everything, so get rid of me," Sheffield said just before the San Diego Padres traded him to the Florida Marlins. As a member of the Yankees, Sheffield was outspoken about "The Corporation" and the organization's lack of respect for its players, particularly its black players, which partially led to the final trade of his career, to Detroit in 2006. By daring to claim agency, Sheffield enraged many in baseball.

It is fitting that Sheffield's effective dismissal from the Hall of Fame comes one month after the Veteran's Committee failed once again to elect Dick Allen, former Phillies and White Sox great. Allen mashed 351 home runs, made seven All-Star games from 1965 through 1974, and won the 1972 MVP award, but never received more than 16 percent of the vote from the BBWAA. Like Sheffield, Allen's attitude was tagged as problematic by a large segment of the media early in his career. Allen was traded thrice in three years from 1969 through 1971. A Chicago writer profiling Allen for Baseball Digest in 1972, after Allen had become a star for the White Sox, said he was warned by a Philadelphia beat reporter "not to trust the inveterate SOB."

Allen spent 1963 at Triple-A Little Rock, the first black player to play professionally in Arkansas. He faced death threats and racism throughout the season and was forced to live in a separate part of town from his teammates. Writers routinely dismissed the abuse he faced or brushed it aside as a rite of passage necessary to succeed in the major leagues. Things didn't improve in Philadelphia, as hate mail and threats on himself and his family continued. Faced with the constant tide of racism, the suppression of his salary through the reserve clause, and the trashing of his reputation by writers, Allen was hardly left with any other option but to antagonize.

Both Allen and Sheffield have admitted, in autobiographical accounts and interviews, that they have made mistakes, that their anger has at times gotten the best of them. This hardly makes them rare, and among professional athletes, it is harder to find those without such stories in their past. What may make a white athlete voicing the same concerns or exhibiting the same behaviors "edgy" or "controversial" makes an black athlete an "inveterate SOB" or, as Jeff Pearlman called Sheffield in 2007, a "dangerous moron."

In his autobiography Inside Power, Sheffield recalls watching Hank Aaron chase the home run record in 1973, as a five-year-old. His introduction to the Hall of Fame was watching highlights of Aaron chasing the record in front of empty stadiums in Atlanta and hearing from his grandpa of how the Hall failed to acknowledge when Aaron donated his 500th and 600th home run balls to the museum. "This is a beautiful game, a beautiful sport," Sheffield's grandpa told him, "but baseball will sure enough break your heart." It was a lesson learned early and reinforced often.

Allen has no desire for enshrinement and has requested the Phillies not campaign on his behalf. Allen's son told the Philadelphia Inquirer that his father "hates" the efforts he and a friend have expended for Allen's Hall campaign. In his autobiography Crash, Allen laid it out very clearly. "Who elects guys to the Hall of Fame? Sportswriters. You think they're going to get behind Dick Allen? I don't care about the Hall of Fame."

The Hall of Fame claims its mission is "preserving history, honoring excellence, connecting generations." In continually refusing players like Dick Allen and Gary Sheffield, voices who dared to dissent and refused to conform, the Hall of Fame is creating a false history and failing to represent the full range of people who made the game what it was. Including only those black players who fit a mold accepted by the establishment is not true inclusion. Sheffield and Allen were and are flawed humans, but so is every single person enshrined in Cooperstown. Failure to acknowledge them robs the baseball world of a critical piece of its story, and to dismiss them on the basis of "character" or "integrity" is unjustifiable, however predictable it may be.