Deadspin purchases MLB HOF vote - will let readers decide

[Moranis]

http://deadspin.com/deadspin-buys-hall-of-fame-vote-will-turn-it-over-to-d-1467003665

[Moranis]

Dan Le Batard from ESPN as a protest gave his vote to Deadspin readers.  He accepted no money and approved of all 10 names that were submitted.

[kozlodoev]

Dan Le Batard from ESPN as a protest gave his vote to Deadspin readers.  He accepted no money and approved of all 10 names that were submitted.

In related news, LeBatard got suspended for a year and lost his voting privileges permanently.

[D.o.s.]

When we started in on our project of making a farce and mockery of baseball's annual Hall of Fame election by buying a vote from a veteran baseball writer and then turning it over to the public, we had two principal aims. One was to draw attention to the way an increasingly ridiculous election process has diminished the Hall of Fame's ability to honor great ballplayers; the other was to turn a small but symbolically resonant amount of power over to the public.

As we figured they would, the veteran baseball writers whose process we were criticizing generally played to type in their responses to our stunt. Rather than addressing the substance of the critique, they chastised us for seeking attention—as if there's something wrong with wanting to bring attention to a point you'd like to make—and complained about the whole thing not being right, because QED. It was classic smarm, with a lot of ad hominem grouching about how we're not a respectable shop for reasons no one really bothered to spell out and very little explanation of what either we or Dan Le Batard, the voter who gave us his ballot, had actually done wrong.


To make this plain for anyone just catching up, Le Batard refused to accept anything at all in exchange for his vote. (Originally, we arranged to buy a vote in exchange for a contribution to charity, but that fell through; Le Batard was our backstop.) He didn't, so far as we can tell, violate any rule relating to how the Baseball Writers' Association of America elects ballplayers to the Hall of Fame. He also didn't, in giving his vote over to the public, do anything many other writers hadn't done before. All he did was crowdsource his vote and then write us an email about the problems he has with the Hall of Fame election process—the sanctimony of a significant bloc of voters, the foolishness of not allowing voters to vote for as many players as they'd like, and the issues inherent in restricting voting to veteran writers.

For this, Le Batard has been permanently stripped of his Hall of Fame vote and suspended from the BBWAA for a year. If we and Le Batard had paid the BBWAA and veteran baseball writers to enact a script we'd written, they couldn't possibly have done a better job of making our point for us.