I has a Heisman Trophy vote once, several newspaper stops ago. I thought it would be a good idea during one especially non-inspiring campaign to ask the readers of my column to do the voting for me. They did. They suggested I vote for Steve McNair. I did. He finished third, behind Rashaan Salaam and Ki-Jana Carter, not bad for a kid from Alcorn State. I figured that was a win for the people.
The next year, I did not receive a Heisman Trophy ballot. I have not received one since. Maybe that’s a coincidence. But like Vito Corleone, I do not much believe in coincidences. I was later scolded, told I should have taken my vote seriously. When I said I did take it seriously, what’s more serious than taking a vote to the people, I was greeted with dial tone.
Ah, well.
I have voted for the baseball MVP award, and for the Cy Young Award, and every time I did, I happened to vote for the winner, which I take pride in because I pondered those votes seriously, almost exhaustingly. I have voted for the Wooden Award in basketball, and also for the Haggerty Trophy, named for a fellow Chaminade Flyer, which goes to the best college player in the Metro Area. I take those votes seriously, too.
I’ve been handed ballots before to vote for the stars of a hockey game. As I need Larry Brooks by my side at all times to interpret like a UN translator what I’m watching on the ice, I have declined every time. Because I think those votes should be taken seriously, too, and thus rendered by someone with trained eyes.
All of that is prelude to this:
The one vote I make sure to cast every year is the one my status as a “veteran baseball writer” affords me: the Hall of Fame. I don’t only take that seriously, I take it obsessively. There are a lot of indescribable privileges that go along with this job. By far the one I treasure most — and it isn’t close — is this vote.
Lately, there has been noise made about taking the vote away from the writers, or expanding the voting pool to include a constituency that isn’t restricted to those of us who type for a living. I have no problem with that debate. And I don’t take personally the argument that we who never have faced a filthy slider cannot properly adjudicate such matters. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it.
And look, there are some quirky things about those of us who vote. We change our minds. We vote for a guy one year, don’t vote the next, go back and forth across his entire 15-year eligibility, and that does beg an honest question: How can a guy become more or less of an immortal the deeper he goes into retirement? Some voters have refused to vote for every single player ultimately inducted. No one has ever gotten even 99 percent of the vote, let alone 100. Not DiMaggio. Not Mays. Not Seaver.
Sometimes, you shake your head when you see the players who get votes. Those votes scream: Take my vote away. And I confess: I’ve made a vote or two like that, for reasons that made perfect sense at the time.
I would welcome more voters: veteran broadcasters, knowledgeable bloggers, former players who remain involved and active in the sport. And it’s hard for me to kill what Deadspin did, acquiring a voter’s ballot, as someone who once played a similar trick with my Heisman vote.
But I’ll say this: I want this vote. I want to keep this vote. I sweat and bleed and agonize over the vote, every year. It really is a privilege. I take it seriously. Maybe my vote isn’t sacrosanct (whose is?). But I can assure you it isn’t done lightly. This year’s ballot, for better or worse:
Bagwell-Bonds-Clemens-Glavine-Maddux.
Morris-Mussina-Piazza-Schilling-Thomas.
Whack Back at Vac
Bob Leise: A mental error by J.R. Smith? Next thing you know it’ll be cold in January.
Vac: I actually had worked up an argument that Smith’s shot Friday wasn’t as egregious as Bargnani’s in Milwaukee … and then he admitted he didn’t know the score. I am officially out of the business of giving J.R. the benefit of the doubt.
Bill Dancosse: The only reason the NBA hasn’t had a shirts/skins game is because they haven’t figured a way to charge $89.95 for skin. God help us all if they do.
Vac: Give it time, Bill. Give it time.
@dArefin: Everyone knows God hates the Jets. But a SIXTH year of ultra-conservative, ground/pound, play-not-to-lose, putrid football?
@MikeVacc: It turns out the bring-back-Rex movement was not, in fact, unanimous.
Alan Swartz: James Dolan’s statement last week that “no coaching changes or trades are needed” for the Knicks to compete is akin to Chicken Little saying “it’s a beautiful sky today …”
Vac: We are slowly heading to the point where you wonder if there’s anything Mike Woodson can do to be in serious peril.
Vac’s Whacks
I’m not saying there was dancing in the streets from coast to coast when Nick Saban and Urban Meyer lost bowl games on consecutive days but … oh, wait, no, that’s wrong.
There absolutely was dancing in the streets when that happened.
I thought the Jets’ players’ reaction to Woody Johnson announcing Rex Ryan’s return was a pretty nice moment.
Still, that bro-hug between Rex and John Idzik falls on the Sliding Scale of Awkward somewhere between Rocky & Apollo and Zuko & Kenickie.
He’s not everybody’s cup of tea, I get that.
But when Gus Johnson calls a bowl game the way he called the Cotton Bowl, he almost can make you forget every other post-season college football game besides the BCS game simply is a fancied-up version of the NIT.
I thought it was wonderfully apropos that in my hotel room the other night I had the Knicks meltdown in Houston cued up on my Slingbox and “All Is Lost” playing on the TV simultaneously.