Ramblin' with Roger

However, there is, as lawyers are wont to say, another bite of the apple: the Veterans’ Committee. Currently comprised of living Hall of Fame members, and award-winning writers and broadcasters, the committee votes every two years. The vote in 2003 selected no one; Gil Hodges, the manager of the 1969 World Series champion New York Mets, and umpire Doug Harvey came the closest to the 75% threshold. The vote in 2005 also selected no one, with Hodges and long-time Chicago Cubs third baseman Ron Santo each coming up short.
(The person in third place in 2005, Tony Oliva of the Minnesota Twins, was one of my favorite players in the day, an eight-time All Star, who led the league five times in hits, four times in doubles, thrice in batting average, once in slugging percentage. He and Willie Mays both batted .211 in their last seasons according to one source; I’m not saying he’s Willie Mays – who is my favorite player – just noting it.)

Here’s the 2007 Veterans Committee ballot. A lot of familiar names from my childhood. Here are some stats on the players, and mini-bios on the non-players.

The one name I had never heard: Cecil Travis. “His career batting average of .314 is a record for AL shortstops, and ranks third among all shortstops behind Honus Wagner (.327) and Arky Vaughan (.318).” Cecil Travis, who played 12 years for the lowly Washington Senators, 10 before World War II, then after suffering frostbite at the Battle of the Bulge, two unremarkable post-war seasons.

Here’s the weird thing, though: on the HoF web page, it appears that you can look up every player who was voted upon by the BBWAA – we’ll call it the traditional way. Even those folks with zero votes show up. But there’s nothing indicating voting for Cecil Travis.

What’s a librarian to do but to contact the Hall of Fame directly.
I looked back at the voting rules and did not see anything that would have kept him off a ballot. If you go back to the voting results of the late 1940’s, there is no player listed that received zero votes. If he would have received one vote, he would be listed.

If you have further questions, let us know. Thank you for contacting the Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

Late 1940s? Shouldn’t it be the early 1950s, after the five year wait? I wrote back and asked.

The five-year waiting rule did not come into effect until 1954. No specific guidelines were set as to who was eligible for consideration nor to which committee would consider whom. The 75% majority was necessary for election by either committee, which continues today. A one-year wait had been in effect from 1946-1953 and no wait was specified before then due to WWII.

So, Cecil Travis’ name presumably came up in the late 1940s and he received no votes? As a guy I know wrote me: “They were still catching up to all the old-timers. Not surprised he didn’t get votes.” Yeah, but ZERO votes?

General: Now, Field Marshal Hague has formulated a brilliant new tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field.

Captain Blackadder: Well, his resignation and suicide would seem the obvious.

I didn’t know the source, though I’ve subsequently figured out – I am a librarian, after all – that it’s a bit from the fourth series of the popular BBC sitcom Blackadder, with Captain Blackadder played by Rowan Atkinson.

There was no ambiguity WHY he sent it, however.
So, my questions:

The downside is that I simply cannot tell you the names of Brad and Angelina’s kids, or who Lindsey Lohan’s feuding with now. The good news is that I don’t know the names of Brad and Angelina’s kids… The other good thing is when I’m in the doctor’s or dentist’s office, I always go for the People magazine, just to find out how culturally out of touch I am.

The one I last caught was the People Extra, 30 Exclusive Celebrity Excerpts from December 2006, with Teri Hatcher, Anderson Cooper (yes, GP!), Vanessa Williams, and the ubiquitous Rachael Ray on the cover. Some of it was actually rather interesting: Cooper on his brother’s suicide, Bob Newhart on becoming a dad, Larry David on “My Seinfeld Life”.

Then I read “The Son We Lost” by Elizabeth Edwards. She’s the wife of 2008 Presidential candidate John Edwards, and was writing about Wade, their 16-year-old, who was killed when the Jeep he was driving flipped off a highway in North Carolina on April 4, 1996. I knew it would be painful, but then I read this:
The grocery store was hard. How many times could I pass his favorite food, his choice of soda? Once he came crashing in on me, and I was thrown to the floor. I sat in the soda aisle and cried. Although the store was crowded, no one walked down the aisle in which I sat, flattened by Cherry Coke.
It was that paragraph that really got to me.

The person I was rooting for was a guy named John O’Hara. He was convicted in 1997 of felony voter fraud for voting using his girlfriend’s address, which he claimed (unsuccessfully) was his primary address. He was running against the Democratic machine candidates, most recently against Assemblyman James Brennan in a 1996 primary.

Those of you from New York State are likely aware of the selective persecution, I mean prosecution, that was going on. O’Hara lost his law license, was fined $20,000, and served 1500 hours of community service.

Recently, I was reading an article about how fuzzy the concept of “primary residence” is, with what was the “summer home” or “winter home” now as equipped as the traditional primary residence.

I relate to this situation because I’ve been there. I went to college in New Paltz, NY in 1971, but continued to vote from my hometown of Binghamton, NY. However, when my family moved to Charlotte, NC in 1974, I decided that I’d register in New Paltz. There were two county registrars, a Democrat and a Republican. The latter, fearing a horde of students taking over the town, wanted me to register where my parents lived. (The state law at that time had a clause that one could “neither gain nor lose residency by being a student”, but I didn’t HAVE another residence. I argued that I hadn’t, at that point, even BEEN to Charlotte, and that I would be ill-equipped to be conversant with the issues. The Rep ultimately relented.

So, did John O’Hara move his residence 14 blocks fraudulently? I don’t know, but the arcane registration laws in this state, which technically require one to re-register if one moves from one apartment to another in the same building, makes me sympathetic to his cause. I know folks who’ve moved and voted from their old address because they had not had a chance to re-register. (Note: I did not turn them in.)

In fact, let me admit my own culpability. I moved from Jackson Heights, Queens, NY to sleeping on my friend’s sofa in New Paltz, NY in September 1977. I remember this clearly because NYC was having a Democratic mayoral primary between Ed Koch (who won) and Mario Cuomo on the second Tuesday of that month. Where was my residence? Well, technically, I didn’t have one, but I was registered in Queens. My options were to be disenfranchised – I didn’t have anything that would show I lived in New Paltz – or vote in Queens; I voted in Queens. (Incidentally, Koch and Cuomo had a rematch in the 1982 Democratic gubernatorial primary. Who won? Ever heard of Governor Koch? I didn’t think so.)

Recently, I received Still the Same…Great Rock Classics Of Our Time. Here’s the songlist.
1. Have You Ever Seen The Rain
2. Fooled Around And Fell In Love
3. I’ll Stand By You
4. Still The Same
5. It’s A Heartache
6. Day After Day
7. Missing You
8. Father & Son
9. The Best Of My Love
10. If Not For You
11. Love Hurts
12. Everything I Own
13. Crazy Love

These songs are 20, 30, 40 years newer than the tunes of his popular The Great American Songbook series, none of which I own, of course. The tunes came out primarily in the 1970s at a point when Rod Stewart’s greatest music was produced.

For the most part, I like the SONGS on the album, and on most of them, he did (just) OK, but it would have been just as well – or better – if someone put together a compilation album of those songs by the original artists – I’m sure someone has, somewhere.

As a friend put it: “It was almost like he was doing karaoke – all fine and good, but adding little to the originals. And this was the guy who, early on, did dynamite versions, reworking Street Fighting Man, Country Comforts, Reason To Believe, I’m Losing You, Twisting the Night Away, and Pinball Wizard, making them his own. This just sounded like he came in, they gave him some lyric sheets, and he sang what was there–no real passion to put his stamp on it.”