Baseball's Hall of Fame is officially a joke now

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy for David "Big Papi" Ortiz. He was a very gifted player; his stats are very good. A career WAR of 55.3 puts him 29th on the list of all-time great first basemen (which is where he played on the field, when he played on the field, which was not all that often). Behind many all-time greats, ahead of a few.

But Big Papi's career WAR of 55.3 pales besides the career WAR of 162.7 put up by Barry Bonds. Big Papi finished in the top 10 of MVP voting seven times; Bonds won the MVP award seven times. Big Papi finished with 541 career home runs, good for 17th place on the all-time list. Bonds, of course, is the all time home run leader, with 762.

David Ortiz got elected to the Hall of Fame yesterday -- the first time he was on the ballot. But Barry Bonds did not get elected to the Hall of Fame yesterday, on his 10th, and last, year of eligibility.

This makes no sense to me. None.

Also denied entry into the Hall of Fame yesterday, on his 10th and final time on the writers' ballot, was 354-game winner and seven-time Cy Young Award-winner Roger Clemens, the most dominant pitcher of his generation. Perhaps any generation. In 1986 he won the Cy Young and the MVP.

Oh, sure, you say. You know how to explain the difference between Ortiz, on the one hand, and Bonds and Clemens on the other: In a word, Steroids.

Except... David Ortiz tested positive for steroids in 2003. In a clear HIPAA violation, which to my knowledge was never investigated or prosecuted, the results of confidential steroid tests taken voluntarily by several players in 2003 (including Ortiz and his current Fox Sports studio partner Alex Rodriguez) were leaked to the press in 2009.

And, again, I'm not raining on Big Papi's parade. I'm happy he's in. In a piece this morning on Yahoo!sports, Hannah Keyser writes (and I agree),

None of this is to cast aspersions on Ortiz’s election. He played well into the current era of regular standardized drug testing and, after that survey testing in 2003, “I never failed a test,” as he said. “So what does that tell you?”

Bill Madden, in today's New York Daily News, does rain on Big Papi's parade:

In his 2018 book “Baseball Cop”, Eddie Dominguez, a high ranking Boston police detective and former FBI and DEA task member who was part of MLB’s since-abolished internal investigation unit, chronicled his three-year investigation of Big Papi and the Red Sox’s DH’s close association with an alleged Dominican drug dealer called “Monga,” who was in the U.S. illegally.

As part of the investigation of “Monga” and his involvement with PEDs, it was discovered that he was a frequent visitor to a Dominican barbershop in Boston with a gambling parlor in the basement, where witnesses said, he was placing large bets on Red Sox games in 2005. Just after Ortiz was presented with this information by MLB investigators, the barbershop abruptly closed. Dominguez reported that he was finally able to get “Monga” banned from the Red Sox clubhouse (where he’d been Ortiz’s constant companion), only to see him on TV, on the field at the 2006 All-Star Game Home Run Derby in Pittsburgh, toweling off Big Papi and the other Dominican players. When Dominguez voiced his outrage to his superiors at MLB, he was informed that Ortiz had told then-Commissioner Bud Selig and his deputy, [current Commissioner Rob] Manfred, that if “Monga” and his posse were not allowed on the field, he would not participate in the Home Run Derby. Not long after, “Monga” was arrested at Ortiz’s house, where he was staying, and deported for immigration violations.

But so what? People in New York are always hating on Boston players.

Besides, that's not the point.

The point, if you read Madden's linked column, is that he eliminated all the "PED cheats" from his ballot before making any selections.

Just like a significant number of his sportswriting brothers and sisters.

Sanctimonious hypocrites all.

Look, I lived through the Steroid Era. I remember. I remember the hype when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire both went for 60 home runs in a season. Baseball officially promoted the heck out of this. I remember the ad campaigns -- like "chicks dig the long ball." I remember Sosa showing up to Spring Training one year looking more like the Michelin Man than a baseball player and the sportswriters asking him where he got his new muscles. "Flinstones Vitamins," he said, and all the sportswriters guffawed.

But they knew. They knew then. José Canseco did not have to write his book for the sportswriters to know. Anybody with eyes could see how enormous Sosa had become, and Bonds, and others.

The writers didn't care. The owners didn't care. The sponsors didn't care. They celebrated home runs and the man-mountains that hit them. Because these behemoths brought the fans back to the National Pastime after the 1994 strike.

Look: I am not saying steroids are good. Or that they should be legal for players to take. Or that taking steroids wasn't cheating, even during the Steroid Era.

Obviously, taking steroids is bad. When not medically necessary, steroids are bad for the persons taking them. Looking the other way at steroid users was not fair to the persons who didn't take them, and who were forced out of baseball by walking chemistry experiments. It was, in fact, cheating.

So is throwing a spitball. And, yet, the most successful spitball pitcher of the modern era, Gaylord Perry is in the Hall of Fame. He never got caught -- nudge, nudge, wink, wink -- and, yet, somehow, everybody knew.

Baseball was never a gentleman's game. There has always been a notion in many sports, and in baseball in particular, that if you ain't cheatin' you ain't tryin'. Eventually, some things may be ruled beyond the pale. As has happened now with steroids. And that's all well and good.

But sportswriters should not pretend to be shocked or appalled or outraged or even a teensy bit upset about players accused of juicing during the Steroid Era, not when they were celebrated and admired and lauded and applauded even as they looked less and less like standard-issue humans. You might contend that some of the sportswriters having ballots now were not sportswriters then and this is undoubtedly so. But they should know, better than most, that their predecessors ignored or at least winked at steroid usage until MLB finally decided to clamp down for real.

The bottom line is this: You have this museum supposedly honoring the greatest players ever to play baseball -- and then you deny entry to baseball's greatest players because maybe they juiced. Oh... and maybe they were jerks, too, especially to the writers. If this is the standard, let's change the name from Hall of Fame to Hall of Sportswriters' Favorites.

And one more thing. What with FanDuel and DraftKings and every casino and sportsbook in the nation having official sponsorship deals with MLB or MLB teams... does it make any sense to still keep Pete Rose out? How about Joe Jackson?

No... it doesn't.

Today, the Hall of Fame is a farce, now more than ever. That doesn't mean Big Papi isn't a Hall of Famer. He is. And was, before yesterday's votes were announced. But so is Barry Bonds. And Roger Clemens. And Joe Jackson (who, even if his share of the gamblers' money was left on his hotel bed, never did one thing to hurt the White Sox in the 1919 World Series). And even Pete Rose, who bet on baseball before it was permitted. Put 'em all in the Hall. Put asterisks on their plaques if you must. But tell the whole story. Or close the Hall down.

The removal of content from Nexis threatens us all

It was just another email, one among hundreds, many of them survey requests of one sort or another.

At least this one was from a company with whom I do business.

I was probably never going to answer it. I know the Millennials and Zoomers respond to surveys as a matter of reflex. When no one thinks to ask their opinions, Millennials and Zoomers write reviews anyway. But this is not how I was brought up.

I imprinted on Mike Royko's position (paraphrasing here): If trapped into answering a survey (or poll), lie. But better by far not to get trapped.

I will admit that I have read online reviews from time to time. There are so many gizmos I know nothing about; sometimes I think that maybe, just this once, reading reviews will help me decide if I want to buy this product or that one. But then I read the reviews: About half seem as if they were written by the seller's mother; the other half appear to have been written by the seller's competitors. Or worst enemy from junior high.

Not helpful.

I looked at the first question on the survey:

As a valued Lexis customer, your feedback is very important to us and will help us prioritize improvements to our products and services.

Please begin our short survey by answering the first question below:

How likely are you to recommend Lexis to a colleague, associate or friend?

I was supposed to respond on a scale of 0 to 9 where 0 means "not if you put a gun to my head" and 9 means "with me around you'll never need to pay for advertising."

If I answered that question, the survey would continue online.

But I wondered whether completing the survey would give me a real opportunity to express my serious issues with Lexis/Nexis -- and, if I did, whether anyone in authority would read and address my concerns.

After I stopped laughing at myself for having such a ridiculous thought, even for a nanosecond, I concluded that I would have a better chance of reaching the decision makers at RELX, Inc. (the current corporate overlords of Lexis/Nexis) if went into my backyard and screamed my concerns into an indifferent wind or if I wrote about it here. Writing about it here seems less likely to trigger the involvement of the police, so here we are.

I pay several hundred dollars a month for the privilege of access to Lexis and Nexis. There are far more economical ways to keep track of Illinois case law. But, from time to time, when I have had insurance coverage work (as I used to, anyway, before the Pandemic) I have discovered that, while the reviewing courts of Illinois might not yet have had an opportunity to weigh in on the meaning of a particular policy provision or endorsement -- some court in Oregon or Florida or Montana has. If you promise to pay Lexis enough money each month, Lexis will grant you search capabilities for all federal courts and the reviewing courts of all 50 states.

I promised to pay.

To get the best possible (i.e., lowest) price for this access, I had to agree to a term of years.

But, to overcome my resistance, I recieved access to Nexis as well.

At one time, Nexis had a comprehensive library of every major newspaper in the world, and most of the minor ones. Maybe I couldn't read today's Washington Post or New York Times on Nexis -- but everyting would become available in a day or two.

Having access to the Tribune and Sun-Times archives was particularly helpful for me when researching judicial candidates. Lawyers in private practice routinely put all sorts of stuff on line hoping to snag a unicorn, such as a client with a good case and the means and willingness to pay for it -- but career prosecutors or PDs don't have those concerns. And, at one time, though our newspapers very seldom covered a civil case, they published all sorts of stuff about doings in the Criminal Court.

But that was then.

As newspapers have erected paywalls around their content, they have also stopped sending content to Nexis and, in many cases, removed their content entirely. The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin was one of the first to disappear. I may still have been on Westlaw when that happened. Not only did I lose an invaluable resource for keeping track of judicial candidates, a decade's worth of columns I wrote for that paper disappeared as well. Vanished down the memory hole. But I had my original (unedited) articles. So my work was not entirely lost. Also, I still had a subscription to that paper (though it has since lapsed) and, while I missed the ability to conduct proper searches on judicial wannabes, I coped.

Recently I had a story idea that required me to search past issues of major newspapers in an effort to confirm my recollection of events a year or two past. But Nexis was the online equivalent of a ghost town. I could find nothing.

Sure, sure, you say. If I weren't such a cheapskate, I'd have bought subscriptions to all these 'papers of record' and then I'd have access to the information that I sought. Granted, I've made no secret of my disdain for digital subscriptions and the random pricing thereof. And because I don't have separate subscriptions to each of these publications, I can't say with certainty that they are less searchable than was Nexis. But, the truth is, I was already paying for subscriptions to all these papers, via Nexis.

And now Nexis has been effectively emptied. Though the price Lexis/Nexis (or RELX, Inc.) charges me has not decreased by a penny.

If you've stayed with me to this point, you may be experiencing pangs of regret: Why should you have to put up with my whining about paying for services not received? You have problems of your own.

And I'm sure you do. But, I humbly submit, whether you know it yet or not, this problem with Nexis is another problem for you. How can a newspaper be a 'paper of record' if there's no independent record of what it said on any given day? Libraries will have pre-Nexis microfilms; we've all used these at one time or another in our pasts. But did libraries continue to microfilm newspapers that were available on Nexis?

I've never been entirely comfortable with putting our official reports -- our Illinois case law -- online only. I'm sure the court system has the best possible security. But computer security evolves, action and reaction, strike and countermeasure. But this much remains certain: No hacker can ever change a book.

Now our courts have every reason to ensure the veracity and accuracy of our case law. In a profession that celebrates the doctrine of stare decisis (if sometimes only in the breach) we need to know what was said, and by whom, and how, before we can follow or abandon the principles espoused in the cases.

A "media" company is under no such obligation, legal or moral. Without a Nexis to preserve it, if a past story becomes embarrassing, it, too, can be pushed down the memory hole. Times change. Opinions change. Opinions that were mainstream a century ago, or even a decade, or maybe even a year ago, may now be inconvenient or worse. An old article may be jettisoned. Or rewritten to suit current fashions. And who will be able to contradict it without Nexis or some comparable national archive? New ownership may wish to 'sanitize' the unsavory opinions expressed in the property just acquired. If the Murdochs ever fade away, their successors may be mighty tempted....

We celebrate newspapers as the 'first draft of history.' But if we are to understand our history, and learn and grow from it, we need convenient access to those unedited first drafts.

Chicago Christmas Tree recycling available until January 22

Here are the locations (click on the image to expand or clarify). At six of these parks you can take some mulch home with you:

And, yes, I know the graphic refers to "Holiday" trees, not Christmas trees. But I doubt that anyone who has actually put one up has ever referred to their tree as a "Holiday tree." And, if you don't put one up, you presumably don't care what the thing you don't have may be called.

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Related: Where to recycle broken holiday lights

Ephemera on Facebook triggers a memory

The late Avy Meyers, of blessed memory, used to suggest that this blog (he was talking about page one, not this adjunct, though it has the same name) was named for the Buffalo Springfield song.

Of course, I never contradicted him -- though, truth to tell, the real reason for the name was more lawyerly. Particularly in a bench trial, when a judge receives a piece of contested evidence, perhaps of dubious provenance or relevance, usually over the vociferous objection of opposing counsel, and to just get on with it already, the learned jurist will say (often with some exasperation) that the evidence will be admitted "for what its worth." Often signalling that its worth may not be much at all.

Still, when I saw this on Facebook this morning, I couldn't help but think that Avy would have liked it:

Testing our patience, but not testing potential patients

I think the virus is mocking us. It is surely testing our collective patience.

I'm fully vaxxed and boostered and so, now, as of yesterday, I can go to any restaurant or gin mill in the City of Chicago and/or the County of Cook and eat and drink to my heart's desire. Which I have absolutely no desire to do.

Near as I can tell, most people in my shoes (in my quivering boots, some may say) are reluctant to venture out in the world lest the virus follow us home. It has to be tough to own a bar or a beanery right now.

Part of the timidity of so many among our fully-vaccinated is the deliberately frightening tone of the media coverage. (If you have an extra 4:23 or so, you may wish to watch the video embedded in the linked Substack article by Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea -- very dark, but humorous.)

I do not take lightly a disease that has killed more than 820,000 of my fellow Americans (according to figures published by the CDC) since it first came to our shores in early 2020... or maybe late 2019.

But things have changed since COVID-19 first imposed itself on our collective consciousness, right?

We have a vaccine now -- several vaccines, actually, and more in the pipeline -- which, while not always preventing Covid infection entirely, seem very effective at protecting vaccinated persons from the worst consequences of Covid -- like death, for example, or even hospitalization.

Of course, hospitalizations are rising -- soaring, actually, in many places, including right here in Illinois: An IDPH press release dated December 30 states that, as of the evening of December 29, "5,689 individuals in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 1,010 patients were in the ICU and 565 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators."

But, we are told, repeatedly, that the overwhelming majority of those hospitalized for Covid have not been vaccinated. They are the scoffers. The deniers. The quoted IDPH press release ends with a familiar mantra: "Vaccination is the key to ending this pandemic."

That's right... isn't it?

The scoffers should be a self-correcting problem. Please understand: I am not some ghoul, thirsting for the demise of my 'less enlightened' fellow citizens. There are such persons, as even casual reference to Facebook or Twitter will document. But I am not one of these. Nor am I referring to the several, widely reported deathbed conversions of committed anti-vaxxers.

All I'm getting at is that many scoffers who may not believe there's a serious problem -- who reflexively discount as overblown or even fabricated much of what they see or hear online or in the media (except that which agrees with their preconceived notions) -- will, according to the law of averages, and the relentless spread of the virus, eventually catch the Covid, or someone near and dear to them will. At that point, they will presumably 'get religion' and seek out their shot. It's one thing to refuse to believe in the MSM, it's quite another to deny the evidence of one's own eyes. Or lungs. However -- if the only people they know who get the virus suffer no ill effects or have only mild symptoms -- that's fine, too. It is a matter of scientific fact that some people are naturally more resistant to viruses than others. And if some scoffers possess a natural resistance to COVID-19, then, despite their refusal to be vaccinated, these persons will not clog up the healthcare system. The point is, the pool of susceptible scoffers will continue to diminish and, eventually, dry up.

And, maybe, sooner rather than later.

Because the virus seems to have changed, too.

Several sources -- including, tentatively, provisionally, even Dr. Fauci himself -- are suggesting that the new omicron variant of the Covid bug is more contagious... it will spread around like wildfire, just as current figures would indicate... but it is also less likely to result in death or serious illness.

That's good news. Not that I want another cold virus running through the population each winter -- but I'll take that any day over a potentially lethal virus, especially one with lingering consequences for many of those who ostensibly 'recover.' As Covid first presented.

We've learned a lot about how to deal with Covid... haven't we?

It's not just vaccines: The benefits of mask-wearing -- once controversial even among scientists -- are widely accepted now. It turns out the Japanese, among others, were way ahead of the game on this. I may never ride the subway again without a mask.

And I would like to think we always knew about the benefits of hand-washing. Certainly our mothers did.

Modest measures make a difference.

So why aren't things back to "normal" yet?

Besides the fact that there are so many scaredy-cats like me, and the fact that media outlets get more bucks and clicks if we stay scared, there is the slight problem that COVID-19 is a master of disguise.

Unless and untill it turns serious, Covid resemmbles an ordinary cold in many cases, or a normal flu in others. The list of typical Covid symptoms is basically a list of complaints that virtually all Chicagoans have between November and April: Clogged sinuses, alternately stuffy and runny nose, sore throat. Some people have Covid and never show any symptoms at all.

How can you stay home when you're sick if you don't know you're sick?

Fever may be an indicator that one has more than a normal cold. But it may be only the flu.

Vomiting or diahhrea may indicate Covid... but may be just a norovirus.

The CDC says testing is the key to determining whether one has Covid or something else.

But existing Covid testing is not recommended, and not as reliable, until five days after potential exposure. Which prevents the early intervention of treatment strategies that may stave off the worst consequences of Covid. And one is contagious with Covid for a day or two before any symptoms appear -- if any appear at all -- so the date of exposure may be difficult, or impossible, to pinpoint. Because of the absence of timely testing, and despite the best of intentions, an infected person, even a vaxxed and boostered one, may wander about unwittingly infecting everyone around.

If there were enough tests to go around, and if these weren't as invasive as the nasal and throat variety that seems to predominate currently, maybe then we could confirm our non-Covid status every time we wish to go abroard in the world. Or perhaps to a saloon.

But the tests would have to be available for the vaxxed and unvaxxed alike. And they'd have to be reliable. And then unicorns would dance in the fairy glens and we would all have jetpacks, too.

Realistically, because reliable, prompt, ubiquitous testing is not and will not be available anytime soon, the only solution may be (a) get your shots, (b) wear masks in crowds or in public indoor spaces, and (c) hope that Covid continues to moderate.