Nobody has more regard for Buck than I do. We're old friends. So I'm disappointed he wasn't elected. Yet, the ballots were secret. I have no idea who voted, and it's impossible to know what their reasons were. |
One of the first things to do is talk to Bonds. Will he cooperate? If he doesn't, I think that leads to disaster for Bonds. The union would make a big mistake by being too defensive here. Congress could step in. |
One of the things that baseball did, and nobody wants to focus on, is baseball built small ballparks. They made it easy to hit home runs. Look at Houston; their left field is a joke. Baseball played to the home run as if it was the only great event in the game. |
Recent indications are up to 50 percent of the players in the 90s were using steroids. It puts a real cloud over that period in baseball. |
Records set now have to have some sort of a cloud and might be tainted by what [the players] have been taking, if they've in fact been taking it. But we don't know what they're taking. We still need a lot more facts. |
So his choices are he can do nothing and sort of fudge it -- but you can't get away with that. The public and Congress are going to want something done. ... I've said this about Bud, and I think I'm right, his first instinct is always wrong. The second is almost always right. |
The committee's focus is on what we positively know about Buck, and that is he was a very important part of our baseball history, not just Negro League history, and he was honored by being a very strong candidate for election. |
The final ballots represent players, managers, executives and builders who are top-tier candidates and worthy of review for consideration for election to the Hall of Fame. |
The players are protected under the federal statutes. That's a mistake a lot of people have made, thinking the commissioner can do whatever he wants. His powers over the players are very limited. |
The reason we care is these are games we play, and the defining part of a game is the rules. And if you don't follow rules, you don't have a game. Then you have a movie or professional wrestling. |
The Scouting Report - Professional Athletics |
The thing that makes this different from the Rose investigation is the scope. This could take (Mitchell) into all sorts of nooks and crannies. This will be a nightmare for everybody, but baseball has to get the moral high ground back. |
The whole history of this issue of race in our society is a topic that involves very bad timing. These people who were candidates were greatly honored by being candidates, I'm sure, but it would have been so much nicer had we been able to do this 30 or 40 years ago and have so many more alive. |
There were death threats on Bart and then on me, |
There's nothing legally [Selig] can do, but if I were him I'd go out and see Bonds, and I would try to get him to tell me exactly what the truth is. Depending on what he tells me, I'd try to get him to go public and tell the public what the truth is. |