CSN Bay Area

The first of the calendar year’s crap days in sports comes Tuesday, when the new MLB Hall of Fame class is announced. No matter who wins, you lose, and it only starts with the voting.

You see, the Hall of Fame has reached its tipping point, where there are so many more qualified inductees than the will to vote for them that the very act of voting is the equivalent of smearing oneself with catsick and complaining that something smells off.

This runs counter to those who bloviate incessantly about the glory of voting as though they were high priests at a pagan ritual that ends with some very unhappy goats. The sanctity of the ballot has become a science experiment in which the students are asked to push a banana through a strainer while maintaining the integrity of the peel.

In other words, though the benefits of false piety, hypocrisy disguised as moral rectitude, a bizarre need to defend the purity of a business one covers as a journalist, and the hilarious world view of those who wish the Hall of Fame could actually be made smaller and vote accordingly, the Hall of Fame is now pretty close to becoming a festival of Get Off My Lawn You Damned Kids.

Yes, the voting is a Balkan bazaar, the voting rules are doubling down on stupid, and many of the voters themselves are stuck in a Never-Never-Land between rethinking how they approach their duty and going down with the ship upon which they embarked years ago because tradition, damn it.

But the reaction to the voting is far worse than the dismal results, with the tortured breast-beating, self-interest-powered sniveling, snobbery and conflict-of-interest combining to make right-thinking people across the nation hate both the voters and non-voters with equal STFU-powered fervor.

Be they the Moralists, the Journalists Who Would Rather Be Defenders Of The Game, the Old Fuds, the Math Creeps, the Perpetual Gasbags or the Non-Voters Who Wish Death Upon Them All Until They Get Votes Too, the debaters have crushed most of the fun out of what should be a relatively enjoyable process.

For one, they are all unified in the notion that they should never shut up, unless of course they need time before the next thing they need to expel from their faces. For two, in never shutting up, they say the same things endlessly, only modifying their decibel count higher in lieu of actually providing a supporting argument. For three, they wallow gleefully in being part of a process they have watched ossify. For four, if they don’t have a vote, they persistently advocate for their plan to reinvent the Hall so that they and their friends get the votes instead, which isn’t progressive reform as much as it is walking up to the other kid in the ball pit and punching him in the throat.

And for five, they don’t seem to realize that the new commissioner, Glowerin’ Rob Manfred, might circumvent everything and insist that the voters be chucked out and be replaced by a gigantic Internet marketing campaign because –- well, because the Hall of Fame voting is one of the two things about the game that haven’t been thoroughly monetized, with the other being groin muscle tears.

Not that Internet voting would be better. It would actually be worse, but the folks who run baseball are not strangers to whoring themselves for the last quarter in the sink trap. All it would take is some enterprising marketer (read: representative of Mephistopheles) to convince baseball fans that 1,000 votes at $3.99 a vote is a bargain at $8,000. Yes, we know that’s twice the rate, but the same logic has given us the new era of television rights.

Can this nightmare be averted? Can the cascade of tiresome shrieking be stopped? Can the process be repaired for the good of all?

No. Not even close.

But I would start with a few modest proposals that, while seemingly antithetical to the philosophies of honesty, transparency and peaceful coexistence, would spare us the annual tedio-fest.

One, no voter may release his or her vote without a petition requesting that information from 5,000 ordinary citizens. That ought to still your desire to share your thinking with the rest of us until our ears stop bleeding.

Two, no non-voter may complain about his or her status unless he or she is willing to write a 300,000-word footnoted essay explaining why they are better suited to the task than any of the current voters. The non-voter in question must then tie the essay to a refrigerator strapped to his or her back and jump off the deck of an ocean liner.

While we grant you neither of these ideas actually solves the problem of Hall of Fame exhaustion, it does have the one advantage of being deliciously satisfying. And when it comes to the Hall of Fame, that’s all we really want.