"To be blunt, sportswriters have no business deciding which men do and do not belong in Cooperstown. It's a farce. A joke. Having spent many of my days covering baseball from press boxes across the nation, I will now proportionately break down for you what, exactly, we scribes do during a nine-inning game:
20 percent: Watch baseball
20 percent: Write skeletal game stories, with blanks to be filled in later
15 percent: E-mail
15 percent: Facebook/MySpace/Twitter
10 percent: Attack press dining room ice cream dispenser
8 percent: Debate the Jerry Mumphrey-Omar Moreno deal
5 percent: Return to press dining room ice cream dispenser
3 percent: Return again to press dining room ice cream dispenser
2 percent: Complain to neighboring writer that press dining room ice cream dispenser lacks chocolate syrup
1 percent: Shoot evil looks toward the overexuberant radio dolt screaming, 'I'M FRANKIE ZACCHEO! IN THE FIFTH INNING HERE FROM PNC PARK, IT'S THE BREWERS 3, THE PIRATES NOTHING!!!!!' into a telephone
1 percent: Google 'public relations' and 'job openings'
In other words, while most baseball writers attend 100 or so games per year, they are no more qualified to determine a ballplayer's Hall worthiness than, well, you are."
Jon Heyman is wrong:
"I don't put quite the same emphasis as some on career statistics, especially in cases where I've had the chance to follow a player's entire career as it was unfolding, as was the case with this year's entire ballot. (That happens when you get old.)
I consider impact more than stats. I like dominance over durability. I prefer players who were great at some point to the ones who were merely very good for a very long time. And I do recall it's called the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Numbers."
When you feel the need to spend 12,000 words explaining why you did something, it's probably because you're trying to convince yourself.
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