Baseball Hall of Fame and the Academy Awards.

Now that Glavine, Maddux and Thomas have been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame it is time to ask the question:  what is the point of this particular institution?  It seems to me that its main value is as a modern Valhalla or Pantheon, but is it good to worship baseball players as gods and saints and go to visit their artifacts --gloves, bats, etc.-- as though they were relics of saints or pieces of the true cross?  When I was a kid baseball players were indeed gods and the baseball establishment protected them as such (remember the uproar when Jim Bouton in Ball Four --still one of the best books about baseball --described Mickey Mantle's "beaver-shooting?") but I think it's okay to find out that baseball players, with their extraordinary skills, are still human beings.  The current controversy over who should be in the Hall of Fame and who should be excluded shows the rampant hypocrisy and conflict-of-interest that goes into the whole process.  The rules say that players should be selected on the basis of their "record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which they played."  Now that we know more about drug use, etc. and are going to not elect people because of that, don't we also have to remove some people who are already in there? Also, as Robert Lipsyte as written; "Why are sportswriters giving out awards to people they cover as subjects on behalf of institutions they cover?"

Why do people take the Academy Awards seriously?  Do they have any idea who the 6000 voters are, voting for people and studios to whom they owe their jobs?  There certainly are some good films that have won Academy Awards --Casablanca, Going My Way, How Green Was My Valley--but the awards have gone more often than not to heavily-promoted, bloated epics such as Gone with The Wind.  Take 1956 as a random example:  this was a year that produced such great films as Ford's The Searchers, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, Boetticher's Seven Men From Now, Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, et al. and the Oscar goes to: Around the World in 80 Days! At least the Academy has something of a veteran's committee, giving honorary Oscars to those who never won --Chaplin, Hitchcock, Ennio Morricone, etc.