Ron Santo = Dumb

I've never been a Ron Santo fan. It has little to do with his efforts as a player and everything to do with homerism in baseball beginning and ending with him and his beloved Cubbies. I know, the guy has diabetes. He's missing parts of his body. He had a good career. Not great, but good. Not a Hall of Fame career. In Santo's mind, it was great though, clearly meriting HOF induction. After being denied by the Veterans' Committee, again, Santo spoke out against the process (really, their failure to elect him):

"It's a travesty,'' Santo said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. ''When I saw nobody got in again, I go, 'Whoa, this is wrong.' They can't keep going the way they're going. They've got to put a [different] committee out there.''

''Getting in or not getting in is not going to change my life at all. I'm going to be me, and that's it," Santo said, according to the Sun-Times. "But I feel I deserve this. I put up Hall of Fame numbers during the greatest era of baseball for pitchers, and I played with diabetes. Only diabetics can know what I went through. It would have just been satisfying [to be elected].''

This is wrong on more than one level. Let's be clear that Santo has no concern for who else should have gotten in. His focus is squarely on Ron Santo. And why the idea that someone has to get into the Hall every year? Failing to do that is a "travesty"? Fucking talk about dilluted. Apparently no one has been elected to the Hall by the VC in eight years. That's eight years of borderline-to-undeserving players making it in if the Santo Doctrine is adopted, and way less significance with each induction. Baseball's Hall is already an all-inclusive joke, especially next to football's, and anything that can be done to diminish the rate of admission, is a positive.

My biggest issue with Santo's argument though is the diabetes angle. "I put up Hall of Fame numbers during the greatest era of baseball for pitchers, and I played with diabetes. Only diabetics can know what I went through." Ugh. Really? Because you put up less than HOF numbers, and did it with diabetes, you deserve to be in? I have a disease. It's called not being good enough. I did a lot within the abilities allowed by my disease, and by God despite being a barely functional .200 hitter in college, I deserve to be recognized. Fuck, seriously. Maybe, probably, Santo belongs in the National Diabetics Hall of Fame, but simply competing while affected by a disease, disability or other, I don't know, malady does not mean you're evaluated by a different set of standards.