The church bell will ring one last time for Gordon Lightfoot, "the Canadian musical institution," as critic Bart Testa once termed him. That reference is of course to the last verse of the singer-guitarist-songwriter's signature song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," in which "in a musty old hall in Detroit" "the church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald," an ore carrier that sank in Lake Superior during a heavy storm in November 1975.

That bell chimes now for Gordon, who died of natural causes at age 84 in Toronto, Ontario, on May 1. Lightfoot had to cancel a tour just three weeks prior to his death, citing health issues as the reason. A bell tolling for him is sadly fitting, for it was Lightfoot's song, a Number Two US hit in 1976, that demonstrated evocatively how folk music, which might have seemed quaint and out-of-date amidst the mid-Seventies disco, glam-rock, and arena-rock, with hints of burgeoning punk-rock beginning to scratch and claw forth, still had the essence to capture the moment.

Is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame still relevant? Was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ever relevant? Does anyone still care about the Rock Hall except as a punching bag because his or her favorite artist has yet to be inducted? And just what kind of honorific is it to be labeled as a "Hall of Fame artist," anyway? Does it make their music more legitimate? Less legitimate?

Make no mistake: The notion of memorializing the music of the "Rock and Roll Era," popular music dating primarily from the mid-1950s and made almost exclusively in Western, English-speaking countries, is a worthwhile and even noble one. There is no disputing the enormous impact popular music has made in the last several decades, not just on popular culture but on the society that bred it, and establishing an institution, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (located in Cleveland, Ohio), to showcase its legacy would seem both logical and inevitable.

Days from the January 24, 2023, announcement by the National Baseball Hall of Fame of candidates who may have been elected by the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA), the burning question is not who those candidates, if any, will be. Instead, the burning question is: What morality are BBWAA voters going to legislate for the Hall of Saints this year?

For more than a decade, the controversy over performance-enhancing drugs (PED) has consumed discussion about who should or should not be elected to the Hall, capped by the late Hall of Famer Joe Morgan's now-infamous 2017 missive to voters about keeping the PED Penitents out of Cooperstown. But although the PED predicament remains—among the returning candidates on the 2023 BBWAA ballot are Manny Ramirez and Álex Rodriguez—voters are now finding other performance flaws in candidates to deny them entrance to the Hallowed Hall.

By paring the number of candidates to be considered by the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee to a lean-and-mean eight, and if trends by recent iterations of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Veterans Committee continue, the odds look very good for Fred McGriff to be making an induction speech in Cooperstown, New York, in July 2023 when the committee announces its results during the baseball winter meetings to be held on December 4, 2022.

Why should McGriff start preparing his induction speech? Because the Screening Committee that selected the eight players whose careers began after 1980 to be considered by the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee of the Hall of Saints—sorry, make that the Hall of Fame—have gamed the ballot to, in essence, eliminate half of its candidates right off the bat, leaving the slugging first baseman as the most viable candidate for consideration ahead of, in order of descending likelihood, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, and Albert Belle.