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:
“Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceiling one afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson’s Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“We are told it will be of no use for us to ask this measure of justice—that the ballot be given to the women of our new possessions upon the same terms as to the men—because we shall not get it. It is not our business whether we are going to get it; our business is to make the demand.... Ask for the whole loaf and take what you can get.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)