As long as Gelf is on the subject of non-news sports stories that get far too much coverage, let me add this: All-Star voting for any sport is incredibly stupid and unimportant. Hall of Fame balloting is even dumber. Great players deserve recognition, and if that means they should get a special game, or even a shrine in a building in a remote location, fine. But tired debates about who should be in and who should be out of these things are a disservice to readers who crave and deserve real analysis about real stories.

Every time a sport has one of these idiotic celebrations of retrospective self-love (which appears to be every other week, what with veteran committees and whatnot), thousands of reporters and columnists seem to think they have license to ignore their jobs and instead opine about the chances of their favorite player of today or yore. If you love Goose Gossage, great. Tell me something interesting about him; not that he was a slightly-above average pitcher with a silly name whose stats may or may not be better than those of other pitchers who are already in the Hall of Fame.

Like teams on the bubble for the NCAA tourney, would-be All Stars and Hall-of-Famers get outsize and undeserved media attention because they're good enough to merit consideration but not quite great enough to be shoo-ins. The only people who should care about the enshrinement fate of these pseudo-celebrities are the players and their families. Winning a yearly or lifetime achievement award is wonderful, but it doesn't change anything about the actual performance.

Let's take the collective brain power that is wasted on these oft-repeated exercises of mental masturbation and put it towards something that—if not more useful—is at least less boring. How about we start with a little more enlightenment about how these athletes racked up their impressive stats to begin with?