Induct Jeff Bagwell Into The Baseball Hall Of Fame, Along With Every Other Player Ever

/clears throat

If the Baseball Hall of Fame’s mission is to spark triviality, sow absurdism, and spread chaos, it’s succeeding. As individuals, the majority of members of the Baseball Writers Association of America are reasonable, intelligent people who possess a profound understanding of the game of baseball. As a group, their votes mold the Hall of Fame roster into an increasingly Dadaist sculpture.

Two decades ago, 400 home runs were enough to enter the Hall, but 398 were not, and now 491 is not enough, but 500 might be, as long as the player in question didn’t use steroids, which is something we can rarely be certain of. Pete Rose is strictly forbidden from entering the Hall of Fame until the day he enters the Hall of Fame, and not a day before. Voting statutes allow for the same debate to occur every year for as many as 20 years, normally with the hemming and hawing of voters servicing as the only variable.

I’ve decided to withdraw my sentimental investment from the Hall of Fame, because if I participate in one more argument over whether a “probably didn’t do steroids” guy with a 130 OPS+ makes a stronger case than a “could have maybe done steroids” guy with a 150 OPS+, I will go insane and start carving Tom Brunansky’s career stats into my living room wall with a rusty dagger. So! In a last-resort effort to shout myself back into the world of reason, I suggest this:

Let every baseball player in the Hall of Fame. All of them. Every player who ever played Major League Baseball, or at least, every player who wants to bother. Some, like Bagwell, had a fairly long career and were very good. He goes in the Hall, and so does Ray Shook, and so does every man in between.

Plaques reportedly cost about $2000; players ought to be able to cover this cost if they want to be inducted. The plaques are about 10.75 inches wide. Allowing for a little space between them, let’s multiply 15 inches by the... I don’t know, 50,000 players of record in MLB history? Split that in half and put 25,000 plaques on each side of a hallway.

The hallway will need to be about six miles long... what? Listen, I’m trying to enable your silly obsession here, not mine. I’m only half-joking when I say that such a tribute would be nice.

Were we to visit, we’d certainly seek out the plaques of Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax, but we also have a tendency to cherish the game’s lesser-known players. The Bill Pecotas and Sal Fasanos of baseball would be recognized for what they were: two of the tens of thousands of co-authors of the endless chronicle of baseball.