2008 Baseball Hall of Fame Ballot Controversy
In January 2008, Telander caused waves by refusing to submit a 2008 baseball Hall of Fame ballot, citing frustration with steroid issues troubling baseball. He mentioned in his January 9, 2008 Chicago Sun-Times column how he can't trust anyone on the ballot, and as such can't vote for any of them. Telander used Andre Dawson as an example of someone he doesn't believe ever used steroids, but also said he (Telander) could never completely know for certain. Of note is the fact that Telander voted for two known steroid users, José Canseco and Ken Caminiti in the previous year's Hall of Fame ballot. He did this, as he wrote in his Sun-Times column, as a protest, arguing that the shame of steroid users and the``Steroid Era should be preserved this way for all generations to witness.
The fury erupted very publicly after Chicago sports-talk radio show host Mike North took Telander to task while interviewing Andre Dawson on January 9, 2008. Telander eventually called Dawson personally, read his column to the former star, and the issue was laid to rest.
Read more about this topic: Rick Telander
Famous quotes containing the words baseball, hall, fame, ballot and/or controversy:
“The salary cap ... will be accepted about the time the 13 original states restore the monarchy.”
—Tom Reich, U.S. baseball agent. New York Times, p. 16B (August 11, 1994)
“A cell for prayer, a hall for joy,—
They treated nature as they would.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“but as an Eagle
His cloudless thunderbolted on thir heads.
So vertue giv’n for lost,
Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d,
Like that self-begott’n bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay e’re while a Holocaust,
From out her ashie womb now teem’d
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deem’d,
And though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird ages of lives.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Perhaps the fact that I am not a Radical or a believer in the all powerful ballot for women to right her wrongs and that I do not scorn womanly duties, but claim it as a privilege to clean up and sort of supervise the room and sew things, etc., is winning me stronger allies than anything else.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)