It’s been pretty gloomy around these parts, what with that icky NFC Championship Game on Sunday coming in the middle of a cold snap that makes me long for some global warming, or at least local warming.
  
   Once the disappointment of the Packers’ defeat started to ebb a little bit, I started thinking about finding someone or something to blame for the whole debacle, and fairly quickly came up with Sports Illustrated magazine.
  
   The infamous “Sports Illustrated Jinx” struck again, and this time it was a double whammy, since the Big Guy, Brett Favre, wound up gracing their cover twice in the range of about two months. The first one was for the “Sportsman of the Year” designation; the second was that neat image of his pitching in the snow against Seattle.
  
   I’m not bitter, but if appearing on the cover is enough to send somebody to the showers, what happens when it’s twice in such a short span?
  
   And just for the record, I fully understand that attaching a significance to something like that is yet another example of “selective perception” that human beings employ as a means of trying to make sense of a confusing and often forbidding universe. Essentially, we remember those things that support our underlying hypothesis – in this case a Sports Illustrated “jinx” – and simply ignore all of the other instances when they don’t.


   In the course of surfing around the TV dial during NFC Championship huddles, timeouts and commercial breaks, etc., I ran across something that at first blush appeared to be billiards on ESPN, but upon closer examination turned out to be a grotesque abomination of my favorite “sport.”
  
   “Speed Pool” involves players running around the table trying to sink balls as fast as they can, a putrid contrivance that has nothing whatsoever to do with what is still a grand and elegant game when played in some fashion remotely in accordance with normal rules. Comparable mutations in other beloved sports might be something like “Tackle Golf,” or adding a Karaoke round in the final two minutes of each quarter of an NFL game. Thinking those last two whimsical suggestions are any more ridiculous than “Speed Pool” amounts to little more than a distinction without a difference.
  
   I can’t blame Sports Illustrated for this one, or even ESPN, for that matter. The cable TV behemoth has to feed a voracious monster that requires ever-greater mountains of programming, but there are still villains to be fingered in this sad affair.
  
   Atop that list is the world of professional pool, which has never been able to figure out how to market a sport/game that is played by millions of Americans every year. We’re not talking about curling here, though we might as well be given the various professional associations’ tepid abilities in marketing their product. Despite a couple of significant bumps every time Paul Newman makes a movie showcasing “Fast Eddie” Felson, pool has languished for all of my lifetime, never able to even create an effective professional circuit, to say nothing of its inability to solve the riddle of bringing the game to television viewers.
  
   And for those who like irony – and who doesn’t? – it gives me a chuckle that the women’s professional tour has done a far better job at these things. I suspect that if you asked people in a poll to name their favorite professional pool player, the winning name might be “Minnesota Fats,” or slightly more encouraging, maybe Willie Mosconi. There are a number of wonderful players on the men’s circuit these days, but they play at a level of obscurity that is nothing short of embarrassing.
  
   And there has been nothing that has taken place over the last 40 years that would provide any reason to hope that this forlorn situation will improve in my lifetime.

   The Hall of Fame has some fascinating controversies on the horizon directly related to the steroid questions that have hounded MLB now and figure to for years to come, despite what will certainly be strenuous efforts to get it all put behind them.
  
   Mark McGwire’s rather pronounced punishment of two years of paltry vote totals is going to have to be re-examined in coming years as it becomes more and more evident that the use of “performance enhancing” substances – legal or not at the time of use – was probably so widespread for the better part of a decade that the public’s initial outrage is going to have to be tempered a bit.
  
   Think about it. Let’s say in five years we’ve learned that the use of steroids or HGH or virtually anything else they could get their hands on was essentially endemic in Major League Baseball until public relations pressures (and the lunkheads in Congress) forced all concerned to suddenly look – and act – concerned.
  
   If, as it seems likely, the number of players involved was so enormous that singling out any individuals for condemnation (i.e. Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire) would be preposterously unfair, then the current climate of outrage will have to be rethought.
  
   Of the three players mentioned in the previous paragraph, I am convinced that Bonds and Clemens will both ultimately be admitted to the Hall of Fame. Bonds is so thoroughly despised by so many in the fourth estate that his election could very well take several years, but eventually he’ll have to be voted in. Though it frosts my grommet to say it, he was the best player of his generation.
  
   Many of the same arguments apply to Clemens, regardless of what takes place in the coming months. If his indignation of recent weeks represents the genuine emotion of an honorable man who has had his reputation sullied, then I would even applaud some kind of vindication, however unlikely. He is left having to prove a negative, to prove that he didn’t do something, a Herculean challenge that seems as impossible as the broader challenge of trying to restore a good name and reputation after they have come under disrepute.
  
   Ultimately, one suspects that such individuals are left needing to content themselves with some Zen-like realization that their self-knowledge of their professed innocence (and the support of family and genuine friends) will have to suffice. I am a little rusty with my Buddhism, but that’s my best advice to Roger and the Bare Man.
  
   For McGwire, I am all at once supportive and pessimistic. I am supportive because his transgression as currently outlined is seemingly even less significant than many others. He suffers essentially from poor timing, having had his initial Hall-of-Fame eligibility kind of neatly coincide with the unfolding of this “scandal.”
  
   Until his admittedly ill-advised appearance in front of that congressional committee three years ago, McGwire had a largely solid reputation, though his inaccessability in our hobby for autograph purposes certainly hurt a bit. But even that always seemed like little more than a bit of personal eccentricity that the public was more than happy to make allowances for, at least until his tortured testimony.
  
   What I wonder about more is what the long-term impact will be on his Hall-of-Fame prospects? Both Bonds and Clemens were first-ballot Hall of Famers even before the dawning of the steroid era, but McGwire was a different case. He socked 300 home runs in his final six seasons, and averaged 61 homers per year from 1996-99.
  
   Plus, it almost seems like people got madder at McGwire than at Bonds, for example, seemingly because they were more disappointed by McGwire’s inclusion in the steroid debacle. I am not as certain that he will eventually be inducted as I am about Bonds and Clemens.
   
   As for others, including some “magic number” guys, it’s going to be even more interesting. Rafael Palmiero, a member in good standing of both prestiguous clubs – 500 homers and 3,000 hits – is likely to be subjected to a McGwire-like penalty for his Clintonian denial of steroid use and later failed drug test. Like McGwire, it’s even possible that he may never get in, or at least not by the baseball writer’s hand, which encompasses two decades (five-year waiting period; 15 years on the ballot).
  
   Ultimately though, I don’t think players from that “tainted” era gave hardly a second thought to using some substance that might make a difference between being put on waivers or an $8-million contract. I don’t think they even thought of it as cheating.
  
   I guess it will take the passage of time to get the final word on how fans feel about it. I would be amazed if it looks as disgraceful 10 years from now as it does today. In the meantime, it’s going to make for a lively and often overheated Hall-of-Fame debate.  

   

   It used to be a tradition back in the 1970s and 1980s, more with the Veterans Committee voting but still, to a lesser degree, with the Hall-of-Fame vote from the baseball writers (BBWAA). Just before the vote totals would be announced, a well-placed article would run on the wire services noting the solid chances of a particular candidate, and, more often than not, the guy would be announced as a new HOFer a few days later.
  
   It wasn’t an exact science, and as MLB itself and the Hall of Fame grew in recent decades, the voting would come under increased scrutiny all year long, rather than just surrounding the announcements.
  
   So it was with some amusement – and a bit of amazement – that I saw stories in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times proclaiming: 1) “Hall voters may look Rice’s way”; and 2) “Raines could slide safely into the Hall on first try.”
  
   I was pleased with the first story, since I believe Jim Rice is among a number of great players from the 1970s and 1980s who belong in Cooperstown, but the second one had me scratching my head.
  
   But Tim Raines? First ballot? Without getting bogged down in the debate about Raines’ numbers, it seems incomprehensible that anybody would think he would be elected on a first ballot. Hell, it’s hardly a sure thing that he will be elected on any ballot, to say nothing of his first time out of the box.
  
   Turns out, the actual bylined article by Dan Rosenheck doesn’t really make the first-ballot argument even indirectly, but does talk about Raines as worthy of enshrinement, all the while crunching his numbers in general and his base running stats in particular. In fairness to the guy who wrote the story, the overheated headline almost surely came from an editor who got a bit carried away. Tim  Raines could slide safely into the Hall on his first try, and Pete Rose might be appointed as ambassador to Luxembourg.
  
   With the vote announcement slated for tomorrow afternoon, I’d love to see Jim Rice get the nod, but I’d really like to see Andre Dawson in there alongside him. Bear in mind, when I talk about voting possibilities, I restrict myself to things I consider at least a possibility, rather than lament about things I’d like to see. While I’d like to see, among others, Dave Parker, Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy voted in, their vote totals thus far have been so miniscule that such conjecture is little more than fantasy.
  
   I always wanted to see Harold Baines get to the 3,000-hit mark just to put to the test the voters’ fascination with magic numbers. Baines is on the ballot for the first time, but I don’t think most voters think of him as a Hall of Famer.
  
   Conventional wisdom would suggest that Goose Gossage, the highest unelected vote getter last year (71 percent), will make it this time, but it’s also possible that he might have hit his peak just shy of election. Gossage did some major grumbling about his recent near-miss vote totals, even getting a major feature in Time magazine last year. One suspects that the ham sandwich brigade (BBWAA) doesn’t care for that kind of kibitzing, but it isn’t clear that they can make that kind of indignation a major factor in the final ballot.
  
   Anyway, my guess of what will happen is (opposed to what I would hope would happen): Gossage and Rice.
  
   I include Gossage just to show how fair minded I can be, my annoyance with relief pitchers notwithstanding. If relievers are going to be considered based largely on lifetime save totals, where is there even a tiny semblance of fairness to the dozens of other relievers who just happened to labor for teams where there was no chance for even a remotely close number of save chances?
  
   What good is an individual statistic when only a handful of pitchers in each league have the opportunity to lead the league every year? It’s a rhetorical question.