THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: Just judge baseball players by how they did on the field

Hall of Fame voting needs to be fixed.

Or…

Perhaps the whole process should simply be blown up.

Like so many things around baseball, the Hall is a mess – strangling on its own rules while voters and fans try to figure out what they mean.

It’s ironic that we saw black smoke from the Cooperstown chimney this week, as members of the Baseball Writers Association of America found no one worthy of electing to the Hall.

See, the crazy thing is that in a year when no player was named on the necessary 75 percent of submitted ballots, one player jump-started the arguments concerning who should be eligible for the Hall.

This current blizzard of words isn’t about baseball, either.

At least, not about PLAYING baseball.

The dispute now (and going forward) is about character, and whether or not a player should be left off ballots for reasons other than his performance on the field.

THE MAN in the spotlight at the moment is Curt Schilling, an otherwise obvious candidate for the Hall who essentially has talked his way out of contention.

So far, at least.

Schilling, who got 71 percent of the necessary votes this time around, will appear again on next year’s ballot – before being handed to the Veterans Committee after the mandatory 10 years.

There’s no question Schilling would be in the Hall by now if he hadn’t publicly insulted Muslims, made racist remarks during a TV gig (from which he was fired), endorsed a meme that supported lynching journalists and, just for good measure…

Loudly supported the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Voters from the BBWAA apparently have decided Schilling is just too controversial – or socially unacceptable – for baseball’s ultimate honor.

The problem, of course, is that whether you find Schilling’s words offensive or not, he has done nothing more than exercise free speech.

At the same time Schilling apparently is falling foul of the Hall’s “character clause,” former players have made it to

Cooperstown despite domestic abuse, drunk driving convictions and all sorts of wretched behavior.

Roger Clemens stands accused of an inappropriate relationship with a 15-year-old girl.

Then there is the massive issue of players who took performance enhancing drugs (PEDS).

To quote longtime sports journalist Tony Kornheiser…

“If baseball threw out all the cheats and cads, you could fit the Hall of Fame in a broom closet.”

ALL THIS hoo-hah has brought us to a place where baseball writers are being asked to look past athletic achievements and judge human character.

That’s a mandate beyond the ability of someone hired to spot a slick-fielding third baseman.

In fact, many of the game’s best-known reporters understand the absurdity of voting under these circumstances.

Nationally recognized voices like Buster Olney, Jeff Passan and Dan Le Betard have given up — and simply quit voting for the Hall of Fame.

The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal could be joining them soon.

Rosenthal submitted a ballot this year, but wrote that it was a miserable experience.

This widespread navel-gazing among BBWAA voters began, of course, with the steroid era – basically with Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

THAT LED eventually to yearly squabbles over the candidacy of Barry Bonds, the all-time home run leader and one of the best all-around players in baseball history.

Rosenthal has been voting for Bonds and Clemens, reasoning that they’d be Hall of Fame players even without PED help.

Sosa, though, he suspects was just a creation of the drug era.

But these judgment calls are just getting too far out of hard.

Rosenthal wrote that he is “frustrated with the inconsistencies we cannot avoid, the false equivalencies we create, the rationalizations that require leaps in logic.”

By the way…

In case you’re wondering, the Pro Football Hall of Fame has no “character clause.”

The only issue is what a player accomplished on the field.

Wouldn’t it make sense for baseball to borrow that idea – and eliminate the character clause that it adopted in 1944.

Imagine how many scoundrels were inducted prior to that, in an entirely racist industry?

If they want to put a sentence on Bonds’ plaque that says he was accused of using PEDS late in his career, so be it.

At least the whole thing would make sense.

Email: [email protected]

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The

Press on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. “Moments,

Memories and Madness,” his reminiscences from several

decades as a sports journalist, runs each Sunday.

Steve also writes Zags Tracker, a commentary on

Gonzaga basketball which is published each Tuesday.