There are few things I care about less than the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame now. On a personal level I am bitter about the way the voters treated Ron Santo. Also, I am just flabbergasted at the treatment of the steroid-era players. The voters are embarrassed, pure and simple. It is a really personal issue for them and as a result I lack much of the respect I had for them in my youth. The amazing thing is if they remembered how to be journalists at any point in the 1980s or 1990s maybe they would have discovered information about the situation in a timely manner. But they didn’t. Instead they were too busy thumbing their nose at the football writers telling them that baseball did not have a P.E.D. problem like their sport. They also have a ridiculously convoluted voting system that creates a separate standard as well. It is not good enough to just be in the Hall, it is now important to be a first-ballot selection. This creates a completely different set of standards that matters mostly to the voters and few others. So let’s be clear about this, at a very real level I do not care if Pete Rose gets into the Hall of Fame or not.

Continue reading Incentive Alignment: Pete Rose and Public Policy