There Is Simply No Need to Fret about the Baseball Hall of Fame
There has been some hand-wringing about the Hall of Fame lately. There is always hand-wringing, about this Hall of Fame and every other Hall of Fame. Oddly enough, people seem more upset about too few people getting in than they ever were about too many people getting in. Mike Piazza was selected this year, and it seems a certainty that Mike Mussina and Jeff Bagwell will get in sooner or later, so some of this angst may be misplaced.
Back in the day, players making the Hall of Fame on their first few tries was regarded the same as underclassmen winning the Heisman – it was an honor reserved for the best of the best, like Archie Griffin or Bob Feller. Perhaps the recent backlog will simply return us to those days, which may not be a bad thing.
Nobody has ever been kicked out of any Hall of Fame – not even O.J. Simpson – so a bias toward exclusivity is entirely appropriate, since mistakes in the other direction are permanent.
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The most recent cause of anxiety over being forced to wait was Bert Blyleven, who was actually quite similar to Mussina. Neither won a Cy Young, but both had a long run as one of the top ten or so pitchers in their league and averaged about 4.5 WAR per year throughout their careers. Both are probably better appreciated through modern analytics than through classic stats like wins and ERA. Both had wicked curve balls. Blyleven would have won three hundred games if he had not pitched for some lousy teams early in his career; Mussina would have won three hundred if he had chosen to pitch into his forties like other pitchers have who were much less effective than he was in his last season. Everyone seems to feel that Blyleven was done a great injustice by being forced to wait so long, but the reality is that he was sixty when he was inducted, so it’s not as though he was too old to understand what was going on.
There has always been a two-pronged aspect to Hall of Fame voting. The Baseball Writers Association of America votes for players in the first fifteen years they are eligible, then the Veterans’ Committee chooses players who have been overlooked by the writers. Now, the eligibility period for election by the writers has been reduced to ten years, which serves no purpose in my mind. Perhaps they feel that reducing the number of players on the ballot will help voters to focus on those who have a legitimate chance to gain election, or perhaps they are hoping to get the players from the steroid era off the ballot sooner so they can stop talking about whether those guys should get in.
In my mind, the only reason to have any time limit is to limit voting to players whom the writers have actually seen. If the writers who actually watched a player deem him unfit for election, that player should probably not remain on the ballot long enough for those writers to retire and then get elected by writers who never saw him. There is a flip side to that argument, though: writers who are voting on players who were essentially their peers are more prone to let personal feelings into the process, creating a bias toward players who were good interviews or helpful to the writers in other ways.
The Veterans’ Committee, or the trinity of committees that have replaced it, should be the equivalent of instant replay: only to be used when a clear mistake has occurred. The original purpose of the committee – players who slipped through the cracks in the first few decades of voting because of the sheer volume of players up for consideration – has long since passed. By now, enough statistical data exists that there is little doubt that anyone who ever appeared in a major league game has received a fair hearing.
The Veterans’ Committee has been replaced by three committees, who vote in alternating years on players from three different eras. This is similar in impact to replacing catsup with ketchup. The problem with committees such as these is that they feel obligated to select someone to justify their own existence. Anyone who played before 1960 has already been on the regular ballot for fifteen years and has been considered by the Veterans’ Committee for decades, which constitutes more than a fair hearing, but additional players from those years are certain to be chosen anyway.
It is hard to imagine how choosing any additional players from those years would do anything other than lower the bar. Gil Hodges, for example, has been evaluated and found lacking dozens of times by a multitude of electorates, but he will ultimately get in because he will stay on the ballot until he does. The committee that will vote on Hodges consists of only sixteen voters, so it will only take a change of mind or turnover of a couple of voters for him to gain election. Again, this is not about whether Hodges is deserving, but about a process that almost ensures that borderline candidates are eventually inducted.
My solution would be to do away with the Veterans’ Committees (or whatever they are called this year). I would instead allow players to remain on the regular ballot for as long as they are receiving significant support, say half of the amount needed for election, under the premise that an electorate consisting of several hundred voters is less prone to bad choices than a committee of sixteen.
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There may be an occasional case where the writers simply blow it and a remedy is needed. We could refer to this as the Tim Raines scenario if you like. This is not something that requires the addition of three or four new inductees every year; more like one or two guys every decade would be enough. There are various ways to do this, but whatever solution is arrived at must contain a strong bias toward exclusion, because the players being considered have already been rejected. It is better to have a Hall of Fame that excludes Tim Raines than one that votes in dozens of marginal players just to make sure nobody deserving is left out.