The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is a wonderful place. It’s located in the little town of Cooperstown, in the middle of New York state, at the base of Otsego Lake, equidistant from Schenectady and Binghamton, which is to say in the middle of nowhere.
That remoteness, among other things, is its lasting charm. Cooperstown is cradled by hills and fields and nestled, as purely and sweetly as you ever would want, in the arms of baseball.
And baseball, my friends, is America.
I say all this as preamble to making my 2025 Hall of Fame ballot public because everybody ought to know whom the voters choose to be honored in the place that showcases Babe Ruth, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and, yep, Gaylord Perry, who cheated constantly, doctoring his pitches with Vaseline, emery boards and spit, and Orlando Cepeda, who served 10 months in prison for drug smuggling.
Then there’s Ty Cobb, an alleged near-psychopath, who came in with spikes high and was implicated with Tris Speaker in a game-fixing scheme. Speaker is also in the Hall.
That’s America for you. We’re as competitive, hardworking, virtuous, nasty and corrupt as anything anywhere. Sometimes the good guys win, sometimes the bad guys do. You can see it all in the Hall.
I voted for eight players this year. One, Ichiro Suzuki, was such a no-brainer that my pen almost melted as I marked the box. The left-handed hitter was almost halfway to first base after his swing, and he had 3,089 hits in the majors to show for it. His fielding was spectacular, too, and he had a 94 mph arm.
Rick Telander’s Hall of Fame ballot
One of my favorite moments was watching Ichiro and Mariners teammate Mike Cameron warm up before a playoff game at Yankee Stadium in 2001, standing almost 100 feet apart, Ichiro with a blank face, throwing full-tilt knuckleballs to Cameron that were so unexpectedly goofy and hard to catch that Cameron could do nothing but laugh.
It’s little things that make me vote for a player. They’re already on the ballot, so you know they’re good. Anybody can look up the stats. I voted for catcher Brian McCann. You may barely have heard of him, but he was a seven-time All-Star and six-time Silver Slugger winner and hit higher than .300 twice. For a catcher, that’s something.
Then there’s Sammy Sosa, back and beloved by Cubs fans after apologizing for, well, God knows what. If you said steroid ingestion, he’ll holler, ‘‘No, no, no.’’ So it’s like a weird penance for being human.
He’s with Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens and the rest of that flawed, steroid-taking crowd that had crazy numbers but were rejected for years by we baseball writers and now are off the regular ballot. Maybe those players will get voted into the Hall someday. Pete Rose, too. Maybe the Era Committees will forgive. Maybe younger writers will forgive. Not me. I’m old, and I have my reasons.
No matter what, the Hall of Fame, with its busts, displays, little ballpark and pristine village, remains a shrine, better and more entertaining, I’ve always said, than Disneyland. Go visit. Take your kids. See America, warts and all. It’ll take your breath away.