I've heard some half-assed ideas in my time, but this one ranks as one of the stupidest: Pete Rose is permanently banned from Baseball's Hall of Fame, but Shrub is among 60 non-players being considered inclusion on the Hall of Fame's veterans' ballot. This is the man who traded Sammy Sosa. This is the man used used his name and connections to buy a piece of the Texas Rangers for a song and then sell it for what amounted to a windfall profit.
The lists were compiled by 10 veteran baseball writers and historians whom I know and respect. Determining which people I will choose from their lists is intimidating enough; I can't imagine what it was like putting the list together.
But the committee dropped the ball with Bush. He belongs in the Hall of Fame as much as Pete Rose belongs in the White House.
Bush simply doesn't have the most remote qualifications for Cooperstown. His only official association with the game was as a partial owner of the Rangers from 1989-98, when, as he likes to admit, Texas traded Sosa. He also helped arrange taxpayer financing for a new stadium that helped him parlay an approximate $600,000 investment into a $13 million profit when he and his partners sold the team. That's not a qualification for Cooperstown, it's a scandal.
Clearly, Bush is on the list not for what he did in baseball but because he is a popular president. And if the intent is to honor Bush for his contributions to the country, I would say that electing him president was a pretty damn good honor. And if we want to honor him further, we can vote for him in 2004.
But we shouldn't put him in Cooperstown. Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, whether you admire Bush and support his policies or not, we can all agree that the Hall of Fame is supposed to be a shrine for baseball, not politics.
Shrub deserves to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame about as much as I deserve to be Queen of England. What were these morons thinking??
