Major League Baseball Is Determined To Rain On Its Own Parade

Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones are not in and of themselves exemplary Hall of Famers, but as of Tuesday evening they are duly elected Hall of Famers and are being celebrated as such. They may also end up being the last two Hall of Famers to be elected to applause and admiration until we remember why baseball pisses us off as often as it does.

The 2027 Hall of Fame ballots will be mailed out in 10 months, and the assumption at this point is that Buster Posey will be the likeliest candidate to sail into Cooperstown, and good on him for that. The problem for him is that he will be announced as such a month and a half after the owners vote—or are expected to vote, as they are already desperately signaling that they plan to vote—for a lockout over a salary cap. The result will be renewed hatred of the business of the game over its greatest and longest-running rivalry: labor v. management. Nobody is going to cheer for Posey at his moment of career-capping triumph, because everybody is going to be too busy screaming at whichever party in the industry they blame for shutting things down as part of a dispute over who gets how much of a slice of a still gigantic money pie.

Timing, as they say, is a vicious old bastard, which Posey will learn through experience in a way that hiring a mystery manager to run his San Francisco Giants never could teach. Posey is quite possibly the most popular Giant of the post-Willie Mays era, and his hiring as the Giants' new president of baseball operations in October of 2024 was hailed as a public relations triumph by even the most jaded of fans. Posey built up a great deal of goodwill over the playing career that will earn him that Cooperstown invite, and has no apparent natural enemies—at least, not until the manager he hired guides his team to three straight 79-83 seasons.