This is the Way the World Ends

So it’s time for my annual bafflement at the Baseball Writers of America and their twisted Hall of Fame sensibilities. Wade Boggs was a shoo-in, though I never liked him, and I can live with Ryne Sandberg in there too, though I never liked him either. But will someone please explain to me why Jack Freaking Morris can’t get in? Or Goose Gossage? Or Alan Trammell? Or Andre Dawson?! Apparently living in the Age of Steroids, Expansion Pitching and Tiny Little Ballparks has blinded some of us to what a Great Baseball player used to look like. It’s criminal, and as I first poured over the balloting results, I felt a 500 word rant building inside me. But this isn’t it.

Because when I’d read farther down the list, way down very near the bottom, I found a name. Down near the bottom, heaped in with the guys who didn’t receive the minimum 5% of the ballot that it takes to stay eligible for next year’s vote. Down with the guys who only showed up at all because they met the Hall’s minimum requirements (and what do you think of a person who only does the bare minimum?). Down there with Mark Langston and Jeff Montgomery I found Darryl Strawberry.

Darryl Strawberry.

Remember that swing? The big step with the front leg and the power in those forearms? Remember the smile?

Baseball is Way Too Big for me to just declare this the Biggest Waste of Talent of All Time, but it’s got to be somewhere near the top of the list. Do you remember 1986? Do you remember how easy it was to envision Strawberry and Doc Gooden (who’s younger than Roger Clemens, by the way) strolling together barefoot down the rose-petal-strewn streets of Cooperstown, New York to the Hall of Fame where a grateful nation would induct them and thank them for their contributions to the National Pastime and enshrine them forever among their Baseball Immortal peers, sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famers both?

But a funny thing happened on the way to Immortality. Darryl Strawberry, who was supposed to be the Mets’ long-awaited answer to all those Yankee legends, and whose potential made people drop names like Mays and Aaron, didn’t get there. Due largely to his cocaine addiction, Straw’s career unraveled prematurely -- he had already hit 84% of his eventual career homerun total by the time he turned 30, we just didn’t know it at the time. And what should have been a Hall of Fame career ended up…well, a damn good one. I mean, if you’d offered me 335 homeruns, (more than Hank Greenberg or Al Simmons,) 1000 RBI, 1401 hits and three World Series Championships (ironically, two of them with the Yankees) in a sixteen year Major League career, I’d have jumped at it. But then, I was never Darryl Strawberry.

And now that it’s all been said and done (or at least done) Darryl Strawberry’s road to Cooperstown ends down toward the bottom of the list. Sandwiched in between Jim Abbot and Black Jack McDowell, two Very Good Baseball Players who never had such unreasonably high expectations so very reasonably placed on them. Down there with just six more votes than I got.
Lou Whitaker fell off the ballot in his first year too, not long ago, and it made me mad because he deserved better from the Baseball Writers of America, who apparently had their heads up their collective ass. Darryl Strawberry’s Hall of Fame ride is forever broken down along the side of the road and it saddens me because he deserved better too.

From himself.