Baseball Hall of Fame Hopes to Contextualize Problematic Inductees

A plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., confers a kind of halo to each member. The gallery feels like a chapel, and the Hall of Famers are the saints. A few gilded sentences summarize the reasons to honor each one.

“Of course the people that have plaques in there, it’s all going to be about the good stuff,” Ozzie Smith, the artful shortstop for the Padres and Cardinals and a member since 2002, said by phone the other day. “But there’s some bad stuff, too, and that’s for all of us. I think we all have a dark side of our lives.”

For some, that dark side casts an especially long shadow. Baseball’s first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was inducted in 1944, when the color line he upheld was still in place. He is hailed for “integrity and leadership,” with no mention of the scourge of segregation. Likewise, a 1939 inductee, Cap Anson, is cited for his batting titles and pennants, not for his refusal to play in exhibitions with Black players.

An enduring legacy of 2020, this painful year, has been a reconsideration of monuments to racist icons. The notion has echoed in Cooperstown, where Jane Forbes Clark, the chairman of the Hall of Fame’s board of directors, has heard from people asking to remove some of the more problematic members from the walls.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/sports/baseball/hall-of-fame.html