Media Savvy
By John Mehno

It's April, which means the New York Yankees should just about be ready to clinch their division and start setting up their pitching rotation for the postseason.

Competitive balance is a myth in baseball, something that's well known on this end of the game's food chain. The Yankees have won the World Series in four of the last five years and critics scream that the balance of power is tilted unfairly to the richest teams.

But before you get too wistful about the good old days, recognize that this isn't the first time baseball has had this problem.

The Yankees once represented the American League in the World Series in 14 of 16 years. That streak ran from 1949 to1964, long before the evils of free agency, arbitration and cable TV.

Voting For Change

-- Just a couple of modest suggestions for the Baseball Hall of Fame:

1. Register new voters.

2. Revise the Veterans Committee's mission.

The standard voting is done by people who have spent at least 10 years as members of the Baseball Writers Association, an organization bloated with self-importance and more fossils than a natural history museum.

Some of these people haven't covered baseball since the Dodgers were in Brooklyn. Some of them never had a clue -- like the woman who turned to a colleague when a runner scored on a wild pitch and asked, "Does the batter get an RBI on that?"

She has a Hall of Fame vote. Vin Scully doesn't.

It's ridiculous that the voting bloc includes so many people detached from actually covering baseball and excludes so many who are qualified -- like broadcasters. This prejudice dates back to the days when New York had seven newspapers and play-by-play broadcasters were shills for the team that employed them.

Times have changed and any system that doesn't welcome the input of Scully, Jack Buck, Tim McCarver and Bob Costas is seriously flawed.

And now that Bill Mazeroski has been elected, it's safe to change the mandate of the Veterans Committee. Let them choose players from the 1800s, from the Negro Leagues and from that catch-all category that includes managers, executives and umpires. But don't let them select contemporary players.

Players get up to 15 years on the regular ballot. That's plenty of time for campaigns to be launched and decisions to be made. The Veterans Committee should not be a de facto court of appeals for candidates who have been rejected 15 times.

Timing Is Everything

--In answering criticism regarding Mazeroski's .260 career batting average, Veterans Committee chairman and former Pirates general manager Joe L. Brown said this: "He was a better hitter than people gave him credit for. He drove in a lot of key runs in the late innings of close games. He had so many clutch hits. Statistics don't always tell the true story and that's really true in Maz's case."

Nice sentiments. But when Mazeroski was negotiating contracts with Brown during his playing career, do you suppose he got the same slack? More likely he was told, "Gee, Bill, you only hit .260. No raise."

The McMahon Myth

-- Minnesota Governor James Janos (he never bothered to legally change his name to Jesse Ventura) said the media is to blame for the failure of the XFL.

Thanks for the compliment, but the notion is misguided.

If bad press could kill something, Vince McMahon never would have made the millions on the slimy wrestling shows that helped to bankroll the XFL.

The XFL hasn't been without some benefit. It's destroyed the myth that McMahon is some sort of marketing genius. He isn't. He never was.

When he's strayed from his core product of wrestling, he's failed with football, a bodybuilding federation and boxing promotion. The wrestling business was already successful when he took over from his father.

He turned the WWF into a national entity by ignoring long-standing territorial agreements and trampling competitors who never saw him coming. When his business sagged, he ratcheted up the sleaze factor in his shows, all the while shamelessly marketing toys to kids.

Now in his 27th year of covering Pittsburgh sports, John Mehno is a regular contributor to The Sporting News and several newspapers in the region. He is also the author of "The Chronicle of Baseball," published by Carlton.