"Basement-dwelling number crunchers"

It's really not very hard. Baseball statistics -- one of the things that sets the team sport/individual play apart from pretty much every other sport -- are extremely useful things. We may never really be able to settle the argument, who was better, Mays or Mantle, but we can, using their statistics get a sense of where they stood relative to their contemporaries.

Then there's Dan Shaughnessy.

In the slugger's early years of eligibility, there was a popular notion that scribes were punishing Rice for his lack of cooperation in his playing days. More recently, as he snared more votes, there was a backlash among new-age, basement-dwelling number crunchers who found flaws in Rice's résumé (always borderline by Cooperstown's lofty standards). The stat geeks sniffed at Rice's pedestrian on-base percentage (.352) and charged that his numbers were skewed because half his games were in hitter-friendly Fenway Park.

Bejeebus.

Rice has done all he can in recent years to play nice to the sportswriters he shunned back in the day. But his numbers didn't change, and outside from a few years and only in Fenway Park, he was decidedly mediocre. DS can repeat, "the most feared hitter in baseball" for-evah, but it remains untrue.

Look, I don't want to be unfair to Rice. His numbers aren't bad, just not great in a very short career. I've never been to Cooperstown, though I hear it's a nice museum. And I don't really care who gets in. What bothers me is that more than 5% of the voters didn't vote for Rickey Henderson, and that Rice was probably honored as a way to once again pass judgment on Mark McGwire. I never much cared for McGwire (or Sammy Sosa, with whom he'll always be joined at the hip). But he is number eight on the all-time HR list (now that was a dude who struck fear...), and until an embarrassing performance before a bunch of grandstanding congressmen he was assumed to be a lock for the Hall. For the same sportswriters who bought in to the Paul Bunyon act at the time he was playing to now punish him for using a substance that he bought over the counter and that MLB permitted at the time, is ridiculous.

You may argue that what he's really being punished for was his awkward non-taking of the 5th during a congressional hearing. And, yeah, he could have been more upfront and at least admitted to using androstenedione, an FDA-approved "dietary supplement" that was banned by the NFL and IOC, but not MLB. He could have repeated what he said when a reporter first noticed it in his locker -- that he stopped using it to set an example for the children. It's still ridiculous to punish him for that.

More from Steve Goldman.