Integrity and Character. Those two words carry tremendous weight. They’re the traits you’d most want to associate with your sports heroes, your members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Integrity and character, however, are the most difficult qualities to truly judge when filling out the Hall of Fame ballot because in many ways we see only a small window into these players’ true character.
I must confess that I’ve taken the easy route over the previous 11 years that I’ve voted for the Hall of Fame. Believing that it’s naive to know who did or didn’t take performance-enhancement drugs, I’ve decided to vote strictly on how the players compared to their contemporaries.