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First off, I’d like to formally apologize to the five or six people that were waiting with baited breath to see the conclusion of the college football playoff. I would’ve never taken over such a task if I had known that it would cut into my time already allocated to my real job and my prevailing laziness.  For those that care, I had Colt McCoy and Texas winning the whole thing. Best part: No way you can prove me wrong!

With no real smooth transition to The Baseball Hall of Fame selections,  I’d just like to point out how much I love the nearly seamless transition from Monday Night Football to Big Monday and college basketball. For the past few years I haven’t even had to change up the channel rotation! The habit is completely locked in! And you now see that prevailing laziness I was talking about before! But enough about college basketball for now…

For the most part, the Hall got it right. Rickey Henderson was a first ballot guy, no doubt about it. I personally am hoping to make it for the induction for his acceptance speech alone.

Jim Rice though? Having to wait 15 years? Really? Did Rice really get that much better 20 years after he retired? Truth is he didn’t. Rice deserved to get his induction call well before the last year. The fact that he had to wait so long–and Andre Dawson, Ron Santo, and a litany of others are still waiting–is just idiotic.

Rarely am I a man to present a problem without much of a solution and after pontificating about how the selection process sucks, I feel like you deserve one…

…So here you go:

Look, sportswriters are sportswriters for a reason. I know this because I used to be one…and I was one because I couldn’t be an athlete.  So when we got the chance to talk to the athletes that we always regard as heroes it was a big deal…we made a life around it. Then we found out that these heroes were actually just people and in being people, some of them can have a tendency to be less than nice…especially when they are super competitive and just lost a game.

Sportswriters take this–and their generally pathetic pay wages–and become bitter. So when they get a Hall of Fame vote, they take it out on the guys that didn’t treat them right. In the end, deserving players get left out by a bunch of old men trying to get back at guys that ignored them years ago.

My point–and I promise I have one–is that these guys have the entire vote! So let’s go ahead and cut that down to 1/3.

To get rid of the bitter-heads that are only out to ruin the post-career lives of certain players, we make them pass a test. Make them explain why they are voting a player “no” beyond the simple, “This guy called me names a few years ago.” If they can’t, they’re out…for good.

So since we cut the sports writers down to just 1/3 of the vote, who get’s the other 2/3’s? So glad you asked!

1/3 goes to the veterans committee. Nice and simple there. Not much explanation required except that it strips some of the older blow-hards of that “holier than thou” attitude.

The final third? Give it to the fans. We’re the one’s that care about these players when they play; we’re the ones that care about them afterwards and we’re the one’s that go to visit them at that Hall of Fame. Doesn’t it stand to reason that we should have some say in who is in there? Fans would have to register for voting at MLB.com and only 1,000 fans would be selected to vote at random every year. Call it the “a person is incredibly smart, but people are rather stupid” rule. In other words, it keeps large masses of fans from rising up and voting popular but ultimately undeserving players from getting in.

All three parties will have their votes tallied separately. The three different percentages must average 75%. If it doesn’t, said player has four more years. That’s it. Four. Fifteen is just too long and unfair to the players waiting for that call.

And there ya have it:

So far I’ve fixed college football and the Baseball Hall of Fame voting process. I’m getting good at this!

What’s next?

I don’t know, really. Global warming?

Nah, I’m thinking I’ll just go after the whole ”one and done” thing going on with college basketball these days…  

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