Double standards in the Hall of Fame

Although nomination to various sporting Halls of Fame might be the secular equivalent of sainthood, the qualifications aren't quite the same, a fact which seems frequently lost on those charged with conferring immortality.

The name of Pete Rose, for instance, does not even appear on the ballot distributed to the Baseball Hall of Fame electors each December, and the retired New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame two months ago only after a rancorous morning-long debate when at least a couple of the selectors nearly came to blows.

Rose, who collected more base hits than any baseball player who ever lived, was rendered a non-person when he was suspended long after his playing career had ended. The specifics charged him with betting on baseball games during his tenure as manager of the Cincinnati Reds although it was never proven that he actually gambled on games in which his team was involved.

Taylor, generally acknowledged to have been the greatest linebacker in the history of his sport, has flirted with drug addiction throughout his adult life. He has acknowledged a cocaine dependency during his playing days, has been in and out of drug rehabilitation programs without a great deal of success, and has been arrested twice on drug-related charges since his retirement. When the Hall of Fame voters met in Miami the morning before Super Bowl XXXIII this past January, it appeared that Taylor's chances for election might be diminished by his off-field activities.

Although I do not personally vote in the Football Hall of Fame balloting, I did my level best to strike a blow for justice that morning when I met with an outspoken member of the anti-Taylor faction and reminded him that O J Simpson was and continued to be a member in good standing of the Professional Football Hall of Fame.

For all his faults, Lawrence Taylor never hurt anyone but himself.

To overlook the realities of l'affaire Simpson while condemning Taylor for his personal shortcomings seemed to me the height of hypocrisy. This view apparently won out in the end. Lawrence Taylor sneaked in by the narrowest of margins. Those who insist on invoking the moral yardstick might also do well to remember that America's greatest sporting hero, George Herman (Babe) Ruth, was a notorious boozer who consumed prodigious quantities right through Prohibition - an era in which alcohol was every bit as illegal in America as, say, cocaine is today.

All of this seems somehow pertinent this morning because two days ago in Tampa, Florida, a special Veterans' Committee met and corrected another egregious omission by electing Orlando Perucho ("Cha-Cha") Cepeda to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

In a 17-year major league career that ended in 1974, Cepeda hit 379 home runs, had 1,365 runs batted in, and a lifetime batting average of .297, statistics that should have qualified him for the Hall of Fame years ago. A nine-time All-Star, Cepeda was the National League's Rookie of the Year with San Francisco in 1958, and in 1967 with St Louis had been the first unanimously-elected Most Valuable Player.

"Cha-Cha," incidentally, was but one of the happy-go-lucky Cepeda's nicknames. Back in his native Puerto Rico, he was known as El Torito - the baby bull - and by the time he got to Boston in 1973 people were calling him "Wounded Knee," a sobriquet conferred upon him by yours truly. Ravaged by the scars of half a dozen knee operations in that pre-arthroscopy era, Cepeda had long since been deprived of his speed, but he was still as feared as any hitter in the game.

His acquisition by the Red Sox coincided with the American League's adoption of the Designated Hitter rule, and he served admirably in that function during the 1973 season. Cepeda and I spent a lot of time together that season, visiting jazz clubs in nearly every city in the League. The next spring, 25 years ago this month, we were together at spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, when the team's new manager, Darrell Johnson, announced that the team had given Cepeda his unconditional release.

Cepeda and I had planned to drive to the nearest big city that night, along with the Dominican pitcher Juan Marichal, to watch the closed circuit telecast of the George Foreman-Ken Norton fight from Caracas. By the time I got to his hotel room after receiving the news, the place was jammed with morose young men conversing softly in Spanish.

Feeling like an interloper, I wondered if our trip for that evening were still on.

"Of course we're going to see the fight!", said Cepeda, and so, on what must have at the time been the saddest night of his life, he and Marichal and I drove over to Orlando and watched Foreman beat Norton senseless, and the following morning he was gone.

Cepeda hooked on with Kansas City and struggled through one more season, but by then he could barely walk, much less run. And then a year after that came the episode which would cloud the rest of his life.

Although the circumstances smacked of entrapment, there is no denying that ChaCha was apprehended in the airport at San Juan with the key to a locker that indisputably contained 160 pounds of marijuana. He was duly convicted and served 10 months of a five-year drug-trafficking sentence.

Baseball eventually forgave him - following his release, he worked as a batting instructor for several teams, and for the past several years he has served as the Giants' Director of Community Relations - but the baseball writers, who select the Hall of Fame inductees, did not.

His name first appeared on the ballot five years after his retirement, and stayed there for 15 years, but he was never able to command the necessary three-quarters majority from the Baseball Writers Association of America.

The Veterans Committee was appointed precisely to attend to oversights such as this, and while it passed Cepeda over last year, this spring it fulfilled his lifelong desire.

Certain old-timers among my profession will no doubt interpret Cepeda's election as a sign of the coming apocalypse and complain that the Hall of Fame has been sullied by the selection of a man of some disrepute.

To them I offer but two words - or is it three?

O J Simpson.