Before I begin griping, congratulations are in order for Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven on their recent enshrinement to Cooperstown. While I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of Blyleven, who was before my time, I saw plenty of Alomar. He was the best second baseman in baseball from the time I started watching baseball (1992) until an ill-fated trade to the Mets in 2002. In between, Robby went to 12 All-Star Games and five postseasons as he starred at the plate and in the field for the Blue Jays, Orioles, and Indians.

(Side note: Has anyone heard anything to the rumor that Alomar contracted AIDS? This little nugget was either extremely false or swept under the rug faster than you can say “Brett Favre sex scandal”.)

Pete Rose, though a jerk, was a Diamond King and deserves a bust with the other all-time greats in Cooperstown.

The problem is that Alomar, in spite of his greatness, doesn’t hold a candle to Pete Rose.

As you already know, Rose’s 4,256 hits rank first all-time, but he also scored 2,165 runs, and finished with a career .303 average in 24 big league seasons. Mind-boggling statistics for a sport that runs on statistics. But Rose was always worth more than an item on the stat-sheet. Nicknamed Charlie Hustle for what people would refer to now as a non-stop motor on the baseball field, Rose was a major cog in the Big Red Machine, which steamrolled the National League and later all of baseball in the 1970s, before helping Mike Schmidt and the bride’s maid Phillies of the ’70s finally win it all in 1980. (Phillies fans never forget, Pete. Even if we weren’t alive yet.)

Of course Rose wasn’t just a hustler on the baseball diamond. This is a guy that seems to be hustling people each and every day. In fact, it isn’t a reach to say that Rose might be a jerk to everyday people. He lied about betting on baseball for nearly 20 years and only came clean when, coincidentally, he was about to release a book which disclosed that fact. One could maybe overlook that correlation if he didn’t charge an arm and a leg at autograph shows across the country. If there’s a dollar to be made, Rose has no boundaries. (Imagine how much it cost some poor baseball junkie to get Rose to sign that awesome Donruss card to the right.)

I could understand the argument against Rose for his “crimes against the game” or that Hall of Fame voting should take morals into account if a certain Tyrus (Ty) Raymond Cobb, one of the true villains of baseball history and the original Hits King, weren’t a charter member of the club. Let me repeat, the Lex Luthor of the Dead-Ball Era himself was one of the first elected members into the Baseball Hall of Fame. And not only that but he also received the most votes in baseball’s inaugural class!

This is not an argument against Ty Cobb’s enshrinement but rather an argument against baseball’s high moral standard. Let’s not forget that morals tend to change over time. It was morally correct to dispute Roger Maris’ 61 home runs with a belittling asterisk next to it in the record book, it was morally correct to root on Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa as they ‘roided their way past Maris in the record books 37 years later, and it was morally correct to ban Shoeless Joe Jackson for life after the Black Sox Scandal.

When the White Sox allegedly threw the 1919 World Series, the baseball commissioner at the time made an public example out of Jackson and his accused teammates. Nevermind that a grand jury acquitted those players of any criminal charges, a “moral stand” needed to be made. Forget that Jackson was probably the best player statistically in that World Series — anyone that’s watched Field of Dreams knows that — a “moral stand” needed to be taken. Jackson died heartbroken away from the game in shame. He still cannot be elected in the Hall of Fame. Is this justice? Should the man who holds the third greatest batting average in baseball history (.356) be ignored by the great baseball historians in Cooperstown? I say no.

As much of a jerk as I’m making Rose out to be, he doesn’t deserve to be publicly humiliated anymore. The Hall of Fame is not some sterile baseball heaven; Cooperstown is a museum that honors the greatest of the game. That’s it. St. Peter is not waiting at the town gates to determine baseball players’ fates, so can we please stop pretending that he is?

I say we give an old man a reprieve so that our children (and children’s children) can remember old Charlie Hustle, one of the greatest baseball players of all time. After all, that is what Cooperstown is supposed to be about.

Baseball Writers Brace for the End.

Granted, I know a lot of sports fans didn’t see it, but that was the main article in Tuesday’s sports section of the Wall Street Journal. (Yes, all one page of it — seriously, their sports section is just one side of one page. Believe it.) To me, it shows that sports world is not quite ready to move on and unyielding to the coming storm.

The game is about to change. Most newspapers — save for a few stalwarts — are going to join the dinosaurs, dodo bird, and black skin on Michael Jackson as extinct species. As Darth Vadar said to Luke before he died, nothing can stop that now.

Maybe they weren’t expecting the industry to topple over on itself so quickly. Who could have predicted the immediacy of it all? We all knew that the Internet would replace most newspapers  some day, but it seems like every day brings more bad news for the industry. I guess the economy is part of it, as every business can feel the weight of the Great Recession. Or maybe it’s just me, but I wasn’t ready for it to come this soon.

(Time Out)

If I knew that the toppling of newspapers was so imminent, I would have created a sports journalism Web site a little sooner.  Just saying.

(Time In)

In hindsight, however, the reason for their demise has become plainly obvious to me. The newspaper industry — namely sports writers — was just unable to adapt quickly enough. I know that a lot of people don’t believe in evolution or Darwinism (the word ignorance comes to mind), but adaptation and natural selection are central themes to biology.

Sure newspapers are adapting now. But just as the dodo bird failed to reproduce enough to sustain its species — and how Michael Jackson kept taking his nose under the knife to the point that there was nothing left to cut — newspapers have waded too close to the waterfall. Publishers can paddle as hard as they want now, setting up blogs on newspaper Web sites for instance, but the current has gotten too strong for them. They’re about to go over the edge.

It’s a shame, too, because people don’t want them to go. There’s no public outcry for the systematic elimination of our nation’s newspapers. But everyone knows that it’s happening. It reminds me about the end of college. We didn’t usually go out partying in the last few weeks of school because more important things were happening. Instead of throwing a fraternity party, people were cramming for finals or searching for full-time jobs, and alucky few were already beginning their careers. In the newspaper world, those lucky enough to remain employed as journalists are cramming to keep their paper alive. Some recent layoffs are either looking to catch on somewhere else or are contemplating a career change, and a lucky few have already moved on to new jobs and new careers on the Internet.

Funny how things work.

But back to that Wall Street Journal article about baseball writers. That well-written article — by Russell Adams and Tim Marchman (funny how the best papers use two writers for one story; I never got that) — cuts to the heart of this whole problem: the failure to adapt in the sports journalism world. Most of the developed world now gets its news, information and entertainment instantly from across the globe on the Web. Why aren’t these press boxes filled with baseball writers from baseball Web sites?

My best guess to that question is that the numbers will only grow in the future, and I hope that Taking Back Sports is a part of that.

But there’s also a dark cloud over the entire sports journalism industry. Professionally trained sports writers are sometimes writing about the same things as Joe the Sports Fan does on his sports blog. In world where everyone’s voice is equal, anyone with a computer and internet access can play Sports Guy. Coincidentally, Bill Simmons is the sports journalist best suited for today’s world: He’s always watching sports on TV, he keeps up with current events and pop culture, and he probably is never far from his laptop.

The center of the universe in sports today is either in front of a TV or your computer. It’s no longer relevant whether or not you’re at the game live and in person.

Truth be told, I would prefer to cover an event live than to watch a whole day’s worth of sports on TV. It’s just a personal preference. I believe that part of the game gets lost over the airwaves, and the truest way to experience life is to live it, not watch it on TV.

In today’s ADD infested world — where infinite quantities of information are at your finger tips — time is of the essence. Hours wasted while waiting for the newspapers to be delivered in the morning chase potential readers to more immediate news sources, likely regardless of the quality.

That is why great sports sections everywhere have become out-of-date along with their obsolete newspapers. That isn’t to say that sports journalism is on the endangered-species list. Sports journalists need merely to adapt.

Hopefully, they’ll do so quicker than newspapers have.