What's your take on Bonds and the Hall of Fame?

“What is your take on Bonds and the Hall of Fame?”

The text arrived shortly before the results were announced of the voting this year by sports writers on who would be elected in Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Hall of Fame. Barry Bonds, a former San Francisco Giants player who certainly racked up Hall of Fame statistics over the course of his career, was in his final year of eligibility to be voted in. Looming questions about his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs to improve his abilities on the field and at the plate kept him from reaching the 75% threshold of votes he needed to gain entrance.

“Is this a trick question?” I responded.

The text came from my college mentor and friend, Larry Grimes. Larry officiated my marriage to the woman I’d eat bees for. A Hemingway scholar, he is a regular guest at our house in Boston, which is a few blocks from the Kennedy Library, where Ernest Hemingway’s papers are housed. We have been regular guests at his home in Bethany, West Virginia, and now Colorado, where he’s retired. We celebrated the publication of his latest book of poetry, Upon a Slender Stalk. But I can’t recall us ever talking baseball.

Nevertheless, I tried to respond.

“MLB makes this challenging since it has been inconsistent over the years,” I texted. “There are players in the Hall who likely used performance-enhancing drugs before their ban. My take is that sports writers who vote are acting ethically if they clearly ignore use of performance-enhancing drugs for all eligible players or consistently factor use of such drugs in to every choice.”

Larry thought this was “good wisdom,” observing that sports writers are trying to pilot a ship without a rudder since there has been no single rule on which they can all make a decision. “Whatever the conclusion, I think the rudderless ship will smash on the rocks,” he texted.

My take was that even if sports writers or ballplayers made bad decisions and were aware they’ve made bad decisions, that was a form of ethical decision-making. They weighed the right and wrong and made the choice.

Larry was quick to respond that such thinking is akin to what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” in his book “The Cost of Discipleship.” It’s a version, Larry observed of Hemingway’s shoddy definition of morality in “Death in the Afternoon,” where he writes, “…what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after…”

“It’s a code of the gut,” Larry texted. “But a code.”

I’m with Dietrich and Larry on this. Leaving the question of ethics to the sports writer without any guidance from the governing body of the sport results in inconsistencies. The right thing strikes me that if MLB doesn’t weigh in with guidelines, then the Hall of Fame or the sports writers themselves should establish guidelines for judgment rather than leaving it to each voter to make up their own.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

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