Visiting Column #35 -- I Was the Vote that Kept Jeter from Being Unanimous

OK, I wasn't.  I write, but I don't get a vote for who gets into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  I'm not a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America at all, let alone for ten years.

But had I been, the voter who actually did leave Derek Jeter off his Hall of Fame ballot would not have been alone.  I would have left his name off my ballot as well.  And here is why.

While I don't usually believe in blaming someone else for something I do, or would do, in this case it is extremely relevant.  Because there are two completely different issues at hand here -- whether a player belongs in the Hall of Fame, and whether he should be elected unanimously.

And where I will blame someone else for my decision not to vote for Jeter in 2020 is in pointing to about 85 years of precedent.

Back in the mid-1930s, when the Hall of Fame was created, there was voting by 226 members of the BBWAA to determine the first inductees.  The five all-time greats who received the necessary 75% of all the ballots were Ty Cobb at 222 votes, Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth at 215, Christy Mathewson at 205, and Walter Johnson at 189.

Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner.  Three players on anyone's top ten list of the greatest position players ever, and I'm talking now, more than 80 years later.  Not one of them was elected with all the votes, and from that time until last year, writers have taken that as a precedent and given not a single player a unanimous election until Mariano Rivera last year.

The writers have done this, and it is their legacy that we now have to deal with.

By that I mean that while there is, and has always been, a question as to whether this or that player actually belongs in the Hall of Fame, there is a second question as to whether a player deserves a unanimous election.

The writers have done this to themselves.  They did it by not unanimously electing Cobb in the first ballot; they did it by not unanimously electing Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial and others over the years; and they did it again by actually electing Rivera unanimously and thus setting a standard.

With that standard in place -- Mariano Rivera was legitimately the greatest reliever of all time and a fantastic human being -- his unanimous vote and the lack of unanimity for any other player ever before plants a flag that subsequent votes must honor.

Derek Jeter simply was not that guy.  He was a Hall of Famer for sure.  I'd have voted twice for him on his second year eligible if I could have.  But would you ever have traded Mays, Mantle, Williams or Musial for Jeter straight up?  Of course not!

So while I'd have voted for him every year after the first, in these days, where more than half the voters release their ballots to the public long before the results are made public, I would not have this year.  I would have known that 100% of the open ballots would have had Jeter's name on it, and that he was already "in", and my vote would not have cost him an extra year.

And he was not near that standard of unanimity.  He was certainly not the best at his position.  As I've written here before, it is a fallacy to call him a great-hitting shortstop, because his excellent hitting masked the fact that he should not have been playing shortstop at all for at least the last dozen years of his career.

He was a .310 hitter for his career, with well over 3,000 hits and a Hall of Fame resume at bat -- plus essentially a full season worth of post-season at-bats, in which he hit as well as he did during the season, only in pressure situations against better opponents.

What he didn't have was a position in the field.  Derek Jeter is the classic case of where the fan simply cannot recognize defensive quality, or lack thereof.

Adam Dunn, the powerful but stone-gloved first baseman who was not elected to the Hall this time, was the third-worst defensive player of all time (by Defensive Runs Saved).  And everyone knew it.  Dunn was a terrible fielder, born to be a DH but stuck for a while in the National League where he actually had to play in the field.  He missed plays, dropped throws and couldn't move.  Had he stayed in the NL longer, he'd have moved up to second-worst all time.

Derek Jeter was the mirror image.  He made the plays he got to, committed few errors and was seen as an athletic player.  So everyone thought he was a wonderful fielder, even winning five Gold Gloves, which then were voted on a combination of perception, reputation and hitting.

What the fans, writers and Gold Glove voters couldn't figure out was that while he made the plays he got to, he got to far, far fewer than any other shortstop.  His range compared unfavorably to league-average shortstops, let alone to the great gloves at the position.  And yet, the Yankees (who, in fairness, probably didn't realize how much of a liability he was until later in his career when the metrics got better) left him out there for two decades.

It was as if as a rookie, the Yankees were so vested in Jeter being their shortstop of the future that it became a Yankee gospel thing.  "Oh, we can't try him somewhere else; he is The Yankee Shortstop^TM." 

When Alex Rodriguez was traded to the Yankees in 2004, the team didn't even ask Jeter to move to third or second to accommodate the much better-fielding A-Rod, according to Joe Torre -- and Jeter didn't offer.

He stayed there at short until he retired in 2014, accumulating enough poor defense to retire with -243.3 Defensive Runs Saved, incredibly about 80 DRS worse than Dunn, and far and away the single worst defensive career in the history of the game, distinguished from the rest by playing a position for 20 years that he could not play well at a major-league level.

So -- Hall of Fame and unanimity.

All of the rest of Jeter's game and his career were Hall of Fame.  He defined "fame" as it applied to baseball players -- played in a big market for a team that made the postseason a lot.  Played a bunch of World Series and was on five teams that won.  Lots of PR.  No scandal.  Fine hitter with a long career that allowed him to compile big hitting numbers.

But we have a difference now between a unanimous choice and a Hall of Famer.  You had better be far and away the greatest ever at your position to be unanimous.  You'd better have no scandal and not tick off the leftist writers (do you think the voters last year didn't know that Rivera was a Trump supporter?).

Derek Jeter was a sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famer.  But he would not have gotten my vote unless I knew already that another voter was leaving him off this year.  The writers over the years have set standards, and we now have them as guidance.  There is Hall of Famer, and now there is unanimously-elected Hall of Famer, and they aren't the same thing.

Honus Wagner was the greatest shortstop in the history of the game.  If he was not a unanimous pick, then Derek Jeter sure was not.  And I'd have been OK with being the only voter leaving him off in his first eligible year, had it come to that.

I wasn't that one voter.  But I'd have had the guts to explain why if I were.  I just did.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #34 -- The Best Thing President Trump Ever Did

Earlier today in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump did a fairly brief (for him) press conference.  Now, if you can tell me a president in our lifetime who has been more accessible to direct questions from the press, more frequently, I'm sure I don't know who it would be.  So in this case, a 10-15 question session seemed fairly brief, but I'm sure the president is a bit tired, too.

At any rate, one question piqued my interest, even though I can't recall what it was specifically.  Mr. Trump has a way of answering the question you asked and then a few more in the course of answering yours, so the question itself actually wasn't important.

But I recall it centered around the way he was handling the impeachment trial going on in the Senate, as he was representing the country and his spectacular economic performance at the World Economic Forum there.

President Trump talked about that for a bit, and while I can't quote him directly, he did point out that he thought his actions during the "witch hunt" were going to be among the most important things he did in his presidency.

I had to think about that a while, until the context gave me the clues to what he actually meant.  And then I agreed, so much so that it had to become a column here.

I think it is fair to say that Donald Trump has done a whole heck of a lot of things as president, both on the executive policy and legislative side, and on the conduct-of-office side.  And one of the most critical aspects of the latter has been in his conduct with the press.

Let me not beat around the bush.  President Trump has exposed the national media for what they are -- corrupt, thoroughly biased, almost invariably to the left, and far more interested in themselves and their own power than in actually reporting the facts.  We saw White House sessions where reporters preened for the cameras rather than asking substantive policy questions.

The USA now knows what "fake news" means.  While the average American might not appreciate the distinction between a news medium's editorial and reporting areas, or understand the meaning of the necessary "wall" between them, he or she now views any reporting -- actual news coverage -- from the major media through a lens that presupposes bias by the reporter.

Because of what the president has exposed, we know that the media do as much damage by what they do not report as what they do.  When the major networks spend almost (or actually) no time on the economic success of the Trump program, and hours by contrast on impeachment (which we all know to be a hoax), we now see it.  And we can thank Donald Trump for making sure we see it.

I would like to think that today, when he was referring to his handling of the impeachment process as being a significant part of his legacy, he was actually thinking along similar lines.

Donald Trump the candidate pledged to "drain the swamp", and we all understood that he was talking about an entrenched Washington bureaucracy that was effectively accountable to no one, and which included much of Congress, people elected over and over with little challenge, and who had grown rich and fat on working the system for their own gain.

I believe that what the president meant was that, unlike before, we now truly understood the swamp and how pernicious its entrenchment was.  The impeachment?  The president has actually used it to expose the corruption of the people serving as "leaders" of the swamp -- the Schumers, the Pelosis, the Schiffs, and the Nadlers of the DC swamp.

These people who cannot possibly believe that Donald Trump has committed an impeachable offense -- they couldn't even include an actual crime in the bill of particulars -- still blather on in public, making up things and lying about what we have in front of us.  Yet on they blather.

And now, because of Donald Trump, we see them in a different light.  We realize that it is not merely opposition to this president that drives them, but rather preservation of their entrenched positions.  We get it, now.  We get it, because this president has brought the swamp to light.  We understand that a Nancy Pelosi has made millions off her office, and is horribly afraid of losing those golden eggs and attendant goose.

We get it now.  Maybe we thought we knew it before, but we really know it now, because this president does not come from a world of entrenched power-by-election, and thus has pointed out to the USA -- consistently -- that there is indeed a swamp, and it needs to be drained.

The impeachment nonsense shows that.  We know, because the Democrats have been talking impeachment since before the inauguration.  We know, because Maxine Waters (another who has made a few bucks off her office) has been screaming "impeach 45!" since 2017.  We know, because even though there is no crime being found anywhere in the articles of impeachment, the Democrats pressed forward with trying to get rid of President Trump.

We know that there is no bigger threat to the swamp than President Trump.  He has exposed that, and his conduct during the long process, consistently pointing out the corruption of those leading it, is what he was talking about.

It will be a part of his legacy that we no longer trust the press and view Washington with great skepticism.  It will be a significant part of that legacy, and we need to thank him for it -- including this November.

Drain the swamp.  MAGA.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #33 -- Da Doo Tehran Ron, Da Doo Ron Ron

I have a feeling that my zero readers in Iran might have a quizzical look on their faces upon reading the title of this piece.  But since there are non-zero readers in places like Russia and Ukraine, let me mention up from that the title is a very poor allusion to a 1960s pop song written by Phil Spector and recorded by the Crystals.

I probably can't tell you anything about what has been happening in Iran the past week or two that you didn't already know.  Their leaders instigated a siege of our embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, which we resisted, and then President Trump authorized the drone bombing of Qasem Suleimani, the Iranian general responsible for the attack and for uncounted killings of American servicemen and Iranian civilians who protested their government.

The Iranian mullahs who seized power there then forced the people to come out to protest and do their "Ooh, ooh, death to America" chant, presumably in Persian, and certainly at the risk of their lives if they didn't.

At that point, it came out that a Ukrainian passenger jet that had crashed after taking off from Tehran had in fact been blown up by an Iranian missile -- a fact that the mullahs denied until, you know, Russian-made missile parts were found with the luggage, and videos showed a missile, and all that.

The American left, including both the press and the Democrats in Congress, couldn't be satisfied with the fact that Mr. Trump had gotten rid of one of the two or three leading terrorists in the world.  No; the key was that it was this president who had authorized the droning of Suleimani, and therefore it was by definition a bad thing. 

Nothing that Donald Trump does can be allowed to be seen in the press as successful, even if it entailed removing from the Earth a vicious, sadistic terrorist who had been targeting Americans for years and was, apparently, about to launch further attacks.  If, as I heard this week, President Trump were to cure cancer, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and CNN would be arguing for the rights of tumors.

So we were graced with Democrats actually blaming Mr. Trump for the missile attack that Iran had launched on its own territory, a claim that had to have Americans shaking their heads.

So then the White House did a briefing, for congressional leadership, on what happened as far as the drone strike was concerned.  It included mentioning that our intelligence services had good reason to believe that there was an attack on multiple embassies and other attacks coming very soon, led by Suleimani had he not been turned into dispersed body parts.

Now this is how low the Democrats have gone. 

Let us recall that a few years back, while Barack Obama was president, our intelligence determined that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in a house in Pakistan, and the military indicated that Navy SEALs could get in and take him out.  Over the objection of then-VP Joe Biden, according to Joe Biden (he denied it last week, but he is on tape from back then saying that he had objected), the raid went forward and bin Laden was killed.

The Democrats loudly celebrated that a leading Middle East terrorist had been removed and 9/11 avenged.  Barack Obama ran around saying that "bin Laden was dead and GM was alive."  Not a soul on the Democrats' side seemed to have an issue with that.  But of course, St. Barack could do no wrong.

The left seems to have forgotten that, however.  There is no conscionable difference between bin Laden and Suleimani.  Both were Middle East terrorists who targeted Americans and killed many.  Oh yeah, bin Laden was killed under Obama's watch, Suleimani under Trump's, though, and apparently that's a problem.

So after the briefing was done, the Democrats got handed their talking points, and my God, were they stupid.  In the White House briefing, they were told that the intelligence had indicated the attacks, on embassies and elsewhere, were "imminent."

You wouldn't believe this, except you know it happened.  Every Democrat went to the nearest podium, talking points in hand, and challenged what "imminent" meant.  No, I'm serious.  A top terrorist will never harm anyone again, and Democrats are upset about semantics.

I would have supposed that whether "imminent" meant within hours, or within a couple of weeks, would not have mattered in the sense of taking out Suleimani.  No one would think it would have mattered; in fact, the issue of what bin Laden happened to be plotting when his fate was SEALed never came up.

But this is your set of 2020 Democrats.  The logical inference is that if the attacks being plotted were two weeks off instead of two days off, then Suleimani should not have been blown up and should have been allowed to go his merry way.  Isn't that the inference?  Why else would it matter to anyone what "imminent" meant?

And you're right -- it didn't matter a bit.  If the Saudi Air Force type who shot up the Navy flight school in Pensacola had been identified two weeks before he planned to attack people there, then what -- should we have just let him go?  By Democrat "logic", that's what it sounds like.

Well, as you might have expected, things changed quickly in Iran after the confession of having been responsible for the Ukrainian airline disaster.  Remember all the people who crowded the streets at the life-or-death order of the mullahs to cry about Suleimani?  Remember how CNN called him a beloved figure in Iran, and compared him to Princess Diana and Elvis (I'm not kidding)?

Hmmm. Yesterday, the actual, unpaid people of Iran started crowding the streets screaming about their leaders lying to them, and defacing the posters and banners of Suleimani, the apparently-not-so-beloved figure. 

And the mullahs, without Suleimani, now have their own forces firing on the protesters, their own citizens.  That will not end well.  President Trump's tweeted Persian-language exhortation to Iran not to attack their own people became the most-read and most-liked tweet in Persian in the history of Twitter.

Of course, the Democrats are paying no attention to the people's uprising, because it -- say it with me -- doesn't fit their narrative.  President Trump took out a terrorist murderer, and the Iranian people are thrilled, but it was President Trump who approved it, and therefore it can't be good in the left's view.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a surprise in just about every corner of the USA.  Up to the last moment, it was not what polls were suggesting, and not what people thought in a nation that had elected Barack Obama twice.

The reelection of President Trump this fall may be the least surprising outcome, though, since Ronald Reagan's reelection in 1984.  The Democrats have made such utter fools of themselves, by being unwilling to acknowledge the outstanding progress in the economy, by seeing everything through the lens of identity politics, and by starting an impeachment effort before the man was even inaugurated.

And now that foolishness is exacerbated, if that is even possible.  The Democrats, along with the press, are in the bizarre position of defending the rights of a terrorist who is responsible for hundreds of Americans' deaths and far more deaths of his fellow Iranians.  In their anti-Trump fever, in their inability to concede even one thing he has done as being a positive, they have embraced an Iranian bin Laden, a man his own people hated.

They have no chance in November.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Visiting Column #32 -- Explain It to Uncle Joe, Please

Joe Biden, the former vice president and former senator, is running for president these days, as you surely know.  That's enough to keep him in the news, of course, along with the fact that he is leading in the polls.  That is, although, without a very high percentage of those polled, given that there are 5,446 people running.

But Uncle Joe is in the news for something else, and it's not good.  As we all know, while he was vice president, and while he was ostensibly the person in the Obama Administration responsible for USA policy in Ukraine, his son Hunter joined the board of the Ukrainian company Burisma.  Burisma is a corrupt energy firm that paid him somewhere between $50,000 and $85,000 per month to be on the board, despite his lack of knowledge of energy or, you know, Ukraine. 

Hunter himself has said that he doesn't get that job if his father were not the Veep.  Duh and double duh.

So now we have President Trump possibly impeached, depending on which Constitutional professor you listen to.  "Possibly" is because the House voted out two articles (neither of which is a crime) but refuses to send them to the Senate for trial.

But it is actually those articles that are relevant to our discussion of Uncle Joe.  You see, the whole premise of the impeachment is that President Trump supposedly withheld aid to Ukraine until the new president there launched an investigation of Burisma and the Bidens' involvement in the company.  By USA law, however, foreign aid is contingent on some kind of certification of lack of corruption, but let's set that fact aside.

Because now Joe Biden is saying he wouldn't obey a subpoena to a possible Senate impeachment trial, because (paraphrasing) such a subpoena would be only to "distract from Donald Trump's guilt."  Of course, then later he said he would testify, because ignoring a subpoena would be sort of committing the same thing that Trump is accused of, in the other article.

But even that misses the message.  Follow:

If Hunter Biden had extensive knowledge of energy, or of Ukrainian affairs, and his father were not the sitting vice president and in charge of policy toward Ukraine when he was hired, it would be one thing.  In that case, his hiring would have been defensible.

In truth, though, his father was vice president and in charge of Ukrainian USA policy; the son did not have any expertise to bring to the table; and worst of all, Uncle Joe had gone video threatening to hold up aid to Ukraine while he was VP until they fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma.  All of that might have been a total coincidence, but it is a huge crap-pile of circumstance.

And here's the thing.  If President Trump had a legitimate reason to ask the Ukrainian president in July to look into the Hunter Biden hiring and the hold-up of aid by the Obama Administration, then it doesn't matter that Joe Biden was running for president.  The fact that he made himself a political opponent does not insulate him from liability for possible corruption accusations.

Got it, Joe?  If there was a legitimate reason for President Trump to ask for the investigation, there is no impeachable action of any kind.

That's critical.  If the Senate trial includes witnesses, then anyone trying to gather the facts of the case would need to know what the heck was going on with Burisma.  Why?  Because if there was legitimate reason to ask the Ukrainians to investigate Burisma, and the Hunter Biden hiring during his father's tenure as VP, and the huge payments, and the Joe Biden hold-up of aid, then nothing President Trump did was in any way improper.

And that means that Joe and Hunter Biden would be the people that the Senate would want to have testify as to their involvement, under oath.  So of course Uncle Joe didn't want to testify, but it sure wasn't because it was "distracting from Trump's guilt", but because honest testimony from the two of them would show that Trump had all the good and legal reason in the world to ask the Ukrainian president to investigate them.

So for me, if the Senate decides to have witnesses, sure, fine with me, because there'd be some uncomfortable subpoenas handed out, and the public testimony by Uncle Joe, under oath, would be must-see TV.

I hope someone explains all that to Joe Biden, but I believe the candidate knows all of it quite well already.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton