Cooperstown Confidential (11 page)

Mazeroski needed at least twelve votes from the fifteen-member committee, and in 2001 he finally got them. “Toward the end, the Pirates got involved,” Bird says modestly. “When Hank Aaron and Juan Marichal joined the committee, they were on our side. And, of course, Joe Brown, Maz’s general manager with the Pirates, was the head of the committee that year, which was extremely helpful.”

Bird’s campaign paid off big-time—for Mazeroski. “Before Maze-roski made the Hall of Fame, he was really cheap,” Wexler told me. “But he had a huge surge when he was elected, and it lasted. Because of being in Cooperstown, he’ll always be valuable. For him, it’s a long-term thing.”

These days, few aspiring immortals are prepared to rely on the kindness of strangers like John T. Bird. They mount sophisticated campaign operations run by professionals with their eyes on the prize. This is a fairly new phenomenon. The convention is that you are not supposed to lobby for yourself. Thirty-five years ago, Cleveland pitcher Bob Lemon sent each member of the BBWAA a box containing a lemon, and purists still regard this as an example of the hard sell. Lobbyists tread carefully.

Bert Blyleven’s effort is in the hands of Bill Hillsman, a top Minneapolis politi cal con sul tant who worked for Senator Paul Well-stone and helped Jesse Ventura get elected governor of Minnesota. “Bert isn’t paying me, and neither are the Twins,” he told me over the phone. “The Twins are good for anything that doesn’t cost money. But a group of sponsors got together and put up the money to help Bert.”

Blyleven is a worthy candidate. He won almost 300 games for mediocre teams. Baseball-Reference.com compares him to Don Sutton, Gaylord Perry, Fergie Jenkins, Early Wynn, and other Hall of Famers. In 2007, he got 61.9 percent of the BBWAA votes. Hillsman felt that with a little push, he could go over the top.

“The BBWAA is a small universe,” he says. “And it can be a very tough crowd. They don’t want to be pushed. The trick is to get the information out there, keep the name in front of them, but not be seen to be trying too hard. That’s unseemly.”

If they had a spot for lobbyists in Cooperstown, Tim Gay would deserve one, with an asterisk. He is the Washington operator who put together the CITGO-Cooperstown partnership. Not coincidentally, he ran a Hall of Fame campaign for Hugo Chavez’s favorite shortstop, Dave Concepcion.

Concepcion was a lot like Bill Mazeroski—good field, no hit. His lifetime average was .267, with only 101 home runs in nineteen seasons. Those puny numbers were reflected in the balloting of the BBWAA. Concepcion’s first year of eligibility was 1994, and he got just 6.8 percent of the vote. By 2006, three years from the end of his eligibility, he had barely doubled that.

Concepcion is a national hero in Venezuela. Unlike a lot of Latin players who make it in the majors, he continued to go home each year and play winter ball. Concepcion grew rich, bought himself a large farm and a transportation company, and became a well-compensated spokesman for CITGO, which figured he’d be even more effective with an HoF after his name.

Gay took on the case and, like any smart campaigner, he began by mobilizing his base. He persuaded the Reds to hold a Davey Con-cepcion Day at the ballpark in Cincinnati and to publicly retire his number, 13. The Reds were happy to oblige. Cincinnati is a venerable baseball town—the Red Stockings, Lip Pike’s old crew, were the first openly professional team and Cincinnati has been a major-league town since 1876 (with the exception of 1881). But the quality of Cincinnati baseball hasn’t matched its longevity. The Reds still dine out on the glory of the Big Red Machine of the 1970s. Concepcion was the shortstop on that team, and getting him into Cooperstown would have excited the fans.

After Concepcion Day, Gay sent media kits to the members of the BBWAA. He got a couple of former teammates, Hall of Famers Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan, to vouch for him.

Another, Tony Perez, went down to the MLB winter meetings to talk to the writers in person. But despite all these efforts, the eligibil-ity clock ran out on Concepcion without his being inducted. Now, his only chance is the Veterans Committee. Gay is not optimistic. “It’s almost impossible,” he told me. “They are a very exclusive group and they want to keep it that way.”

The most famous exclusion from the Hall of Fame is, of course, Pete Rose. I ran into Rose during Induction Weekend. He was in the back room of Ballpark Collectibles, seated behind a plush rope, signing autographs for sixty-five dollars apiece.

Even nearing seventy, Rose is a hard-looking character and there was something pathetic about seeing him roped off, mugging for the crowd. A couple of college-aged guys pointed their cameras at him and hollered, “Hey, Pete, say cheese!” Rose complied—his living depends on being nice to the public—but to my eye he seemed to be seething behind the smile. I imagined him wishing he could climb over the rope and pound the punks to death with their own Nikons.

The battle between Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame goes back almost twenty years. He retired after the 1986 season, which made him eligible in 1991. But he never got to a ballot. In August 1989, Major League Baseball put him on its permanently ineligible list for gambling. Two years later, the Hall of Fame decided, at the urging of the Commissioner’s Office, to formally exclude anyone on the permanently ineligible list. In the history of baseball, seventeen players have been banned for life, but only two were Hall of Fame quality stars. One, Joe Jackson, has been dead since 1951. The Hall’s new rule was clearly directed against Rose.

There is no doubt that Pete Rose bet on baseball as a player and a manager. And there is no doubt that he lied about it to the commissioner. He didn’t come clean until his book
My Prison Without
Bars
was published in 2004. Even then, he might not have told the entire truth. Rose admitted that he had gambled but claimed that he had bet on
every
game, and always for his own team, giving gamblers no helpful hints or selective information.

The suspension hit Rose hard. Sure it was a mistake to gamble, but the Hall of Fame was full of gamblers, wasn’t it? Players in other sports had done what he did. Hell, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras gambled in the NFL, and they got one-year suspensions, not the death penalty. It was wrong to lie to the commissioner, okay, but damn, Bill Clinton lied to the whole country and all he lost was his license to practice law.

A lot of players took Rose’s side. In his book, he describes a visit he made with teammate and Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt to the office of baseball commissioner Bud Selig to ask for reinstatement. In the waiting room, Schmidt pointed to some photos of great players hanging on the wall. “Just about every Hall of Famer in baseball is hanging on these walls and Pete Rose has more hits than any of them. Mickey Mantle’s dead, Jackie Robinson’s dead, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Satchel Paige, and Babe Ruth—all gone. You’re one of the last men standing from the old regime.”
*

Baseball’s ongoing snub has made Rose alternately remorseful and defiant. In 1993, he first came to Cooperstown, to “Mickey’s Place,” and signed autographs during Induction Weekend, upstaging the official ceremony. “Apparently, my appearance didn’t set too well with members of the Hall of Fame board of directors, either,” he writes. “But since I was already banned for life, what could they do . . . ban me again?”

In 1995, Mike Schmidt used his induction speech to argue for Rose. “I join millions of fans around the world in hoping that, some day very soon, Pete Rose will be standing right here.”

Schmidt’s hope hasn’t materialized. There is no sign that Bud Selig will reinstate Rose and none that the Hall of Fame will act in-de pen dently. But baseball occasionally sends Rose a hint of reconciliation. In 1999, he was chosen for the Major League Baseball All-Century Team, a promotion officially endorsed by MLB. The living members of the team were introduced at Turner Field in Atlanta, before the second game of the 1999 World Series, and Rose got a thundering ovation.

Bill James spoke for the many baseball people who feel Coopers-town is incomplete without Rose. “I don’t see that the Hall of Fame is so full of wicked people that it needs to abandon the effort to elect people who meet some standards of decency,” he says. “Neither do I see that its roster is so pure that it can’t honor Mark McGwire or, for that matter, Barry Bonds. They don’t ask me to vote, but if they did, I’d probably vote for Bonds, I think. I’d vote for Pete Rose.”

Joe Jackson is another story. James says Shoeless Joe betrayed baseball by selling games. Marvin Miller sees it differently. “In my world, a man who is never convicted is innocent,” Miller told me. “And Jackson was never convicted of anything.”

Everyone knows that Joe Jackson was one of the greatest hitters of all time, and that he was banned for life for allegedly taking part in the 1919 plot to fix the World Series. Jackson always denied it, claiming that he knew about the plan but didn’t partici-pate (he offered his .375 batting average in the World Series as evidence). It is not so well remembered that Jackson, along with the rest of the “Black Sox,” was tried and acquitted in a Chicago court in 1921.

Commissioner Landis saw this as an occasion for jury nullification. “Regardless of the verdict of juries,” he ruled, “no player that throws a ballgame, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are planned and discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball . . . regardless of the verdict of juries, baseball is entirely competent to protect itself against crooks, both inside and outside the game.”

Jackson had already been convicted by public opinion. But it took a federal judge of Landis’s arrogance to boldly set aside the presumption of innocence, the legal rights of the acquitted, and the validity and relevance of the jury system. Landis wanted to make an example of Shoeless Joe, and he did, sentencing him to a life without baseball (and, in the pro cess, sentencing baseball fans to a life without Jackson). A prece dent was set. Baseball was not only above the Constitution, it was also above the rulings of the criminal courts.

Joe Jackson slunk away and died in obscurity in 1951, at the age of sixty-three. But he has not been forgotten. On July 16, 2008, the official Shoeless Joe Jackson Web site published birthday wishes to its hero. He would have been 121 years old. These birthday greetings were not the work of hopeless baseball romantics. The site belongs to GMC, which owns Jackson’s intellectual property rights. Right now, that amounts to his likeness, a couple of posters featuring his image, and a line of baseball bats. You want to use Shoeless Joe in a shoe commercial, for example, or work his picture into a baseball collage, you come to GMC Worldwide.

Jackson is a dependable earner, bringing in $75,000 in a good year, occasionally more. But making it to Cooperstown would be a great career move. “If Joe gets into the Hall of Fame, it would increase his annual revenue stream by a factor of five to ten times,” a se nior executive of the company told me. “A lot of corporations and companies like to make ad campaigns around a Hall of Famer. If he isn’t reinstated, we can’t sell him in uniform, we can’t market him in major-league stadiums or in MLB’s online stores, and mass marketers licensed by MLB won’t take him.”

GMC has tried various approaches to this problem. From time to time, it petitions Bud Selig on Jackson’s behalf. (All requests for re-instatement remain, as they have since the Harding administration, “under consideration” by the Commissioner’s Office.) There have been congressional lobbying efforts, which have garnered support from South Carolina senator Jim DeMint and others, but Congress has no authority in the matter. And there is the Virtual Joe Jackson Hall of Fame (and gift shop), whose goal is “to educate” the public to the “injustice” done to Jackson and offers fans the opportunity to contribute money to sustain the effort.

It is hard to imagine what Jackson himself would have made of all this. Once, the story goes, Ty Cobb ran into him working behind the counter of a liquor store in Greenville, South Carolina. “I know you, you’re Joe Jackson,” Cobb said. “Don’t you know me, Joe?”

“I know you,” Jackson supposedly replied, “but I wasn’t sure you wanted to speak to me. A lot of them don’t.” Jackson died thinking he was worthless. He wouldn’t have believed that his ghost would be making more than he ever did, and that there’s a whole corporation out there, working to get him into Cooperstown.

Steve Verkman doesn’t care if Joe Jackson gets into the Hall of Fame or not. Verkman is the president of Clean Sweep Auctions, a memorabilia dealership. He sells mostly autographs, and Jackson’s is “golden.”

“Jackson was illiterate, and his wife signed for him,” Verkman explained. “He could scratch out his name, but there aren’t more than twenty signatures extant. One of those is worth a fortune, Hall of Fame or not.”

No one passing Verkman’s nondescript premises, on a leafy side street in suburban Long Island, would imagine that it contains some of baseball’s most valuable trea sures. In the front of the building are a couple small offices. Behind it is a large work room strewn with signed memorabilia on its way out to customers. And, in the back, there is a windowless, two-thousand-square-foot space crammed with baseball history. Verkman’s got the first baseball card ever made, featuring the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings and its two future Hall of Famers, George and Harry Wright. Two cinderblock walls hold approximately one thousand autographed baseballs, including one signed by the entire 1927 Yankees team. There are mountains of World Series programs going back to the start of the twentieth century, plastic boxes holding one of the biggest pre-1960 baseball card collections in the world, a bat used by Willie Mays (priced at $9,000), and even some boxing memorabilia for the eclectic.