Alex Rodriguez calls out ‘hypocrisy’ over Bud Selig’s Hall of Fame induction

Alex Rodriguez is on the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot again this year. It’s his fifth time on the ballot, and he has yet to get to 40% of the vote in his previous four tries. The threshold for induction is 75%, so it doesn’t look like he’ll make it. Like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds before him, A-Rod is statistically one of the greatest players in MLB history. But his ties to PEDs are keeping him out of Cooperstown. 

This week, A-Rod joined Stephen A. Smith’s radio show and pointed out some hypocrisy that he sees on display with the Baseball Hall of Fame. Coming on the heels of a comment about Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, A-Rod replied with the following (via Awful Announcing): 

“All of this stuff you’re talking about was under Bud Selig’s watch,” Rodriguez said. “And the fact that those two guys are not in, but somehow, Bud Selig is in the Hall of Fame, that to me feels like there’s a little bit, some hypocrisy around that.”

Unfortunately, the voting body that put Selig in the Hall of Fame isn’t the same one that passed on Bonds and Clemens (and  Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire) and is passing on A-Rod. Selig was inducted into the Hall of Fame after getting enough votes from the 16-person Today’s Game Era Committee. 

The vote most fans pay heavy attention to each year is the BBWAA vote, which only considers players and never includes executives. 

It’s still difficult to argue with A-Rod here. If we don’t have Bonds and Clemens in the Hall of Fame, why should Selig be in it? He took over as acting commissioner in 1992 and was finally made full-time commissioner in 1998, serving through the 2015 season. MLB embraced all the attention from the home run chase between McGwire and Sosa in 1998 and celebrated Bonds’ 73 home runs in 2001. The league was actively looking the other way on PEDs until putting together the Joint Drug Agreement in time for the 2004 season. 

We could also point out Selig was involved in the owner collusion scandal in the 1980s, which resulted in the involved owners having to pay $280 million in damages to players. 

The game certainly grew under Selig’s watch, but he was part of the administration that reaped the rewards from the extra attention gained during the steroid era and then also an administration that made PED offenders pariahs once there was a testing system in place. 

He should not be a Hall of Famer. 

There are some voters, such as myself, who won’t vote for players who tested positive and/or were suspended for PEDs once there was a system in place, but if not, everyone is fair game to vote in. That means I would have been a yes for Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and McGwire, but I’m a no on A-Rod. I would have been a strong no on Selig, notably for the collusion case. 

The bottom line is, yes, A-Rod is correct regarding how it looks hypocritical with Selig in the Hall of Fame, it just isn’t as simple when it comes to what group deserves the blame for said hypocrisy. It wasn’t the BBWAA. It was the people who voted for Selig in 2016 for the 2017 Hall of Fame class.