Hall of Fame Logjam? Bosh!

Buster Olney is a baseball writer who writes, unfortunately, for ESPN as opposed to a medium I'm not sick of.  But Olney is certainly informed and a good writer, worth reading almost all the time.  I mean, he's almost as good as I am, in his own way, and certainly more modest.

But I digress, slightly.

This week, Olney did a piece on the Baseball Hall of Fame, which is timely in that we are about six weeks away from the announcement of the voting for the 2018 class of inductees.  There are several very worthy candidates in their first and second year of eligibility (Chipper Jones, Jim Thome, Trevor Hoffman), and Olney's premise was that their presence would make it difficult for some others to be elected.

Now, let's explain the process briefly.  A player becomes eligible if he has played a certain number of years, and is also five years removed from his last appearance in the league.  The voting is done by eligible members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, and in order to be voted in, a player must receive 75.0% of the votes cast, or more.  If a player does not get inducted, but is named on at least 5% of the votes cast, he can appear on the subsequent year's ballot, until he has appeared ten years (it used to be 15 years).

And -- a given writer can only vote for ten players on any one ballot.  That's serious plot material.

Olney's point was intertwined with the good old steroid issue.  There are several candidate players -- Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, of course, along with Manny Ramirez, Sammy Sosa and a few others -- who were heavily linked to steroid use, although I'm not here to suggest who did and who did not "use."  That's not the point.

The point is that a lot of BBWAA voters are conflicted about whether Bonds, et al., should be in the Hall of Fame at all.  They have been receiving 40-50% of the vote the past few years, which means that (A) they don't get in, and (B) they will take spots on at least half the ballots the subsequent year.

The ten-player-per-ballot rule should not be a problem, after all.  We all know that there are nowhere near as many as ten players of Hall of Fame caliber who become eligible each year.  The problem is that there are marginal candidates -- Mike Mussina, for example -- who are not overwhelmingly thought to be deserving; many vote for him but others don't see him as quite at that level.

The "steroid players" -- particularly Bonds and Clemens, but also Ramirez and possibly Sosa as well -- were all of Hall of Fame-level careers without question.  So those writers who don't believe that suspected steroid use should matter, well, they keep taking up half their ballot with those guys, year after year, and that's perfectly sound thinking.

Of course, if their ballot is full of steroid suspects, there is only enough room for the obvious new candidates -- this year Jones, Thome and then guys like Hoffman, Omar Vizquel and maybe one or two who they decide really should be in.  Bang, ten votes taken up and no room for some people Olney deems worthy, like perhaps a Curt Schilling.

Olney's solution is to increase the number of players per year that someone can vote for, but I don't really agree with that.  I'm for a smaller Hall of Fame; there are already guys in there who really don't belong in my opinion.  Then you have voters saying that, well, "if Luis Aparicio is in, then I have to vote for Vizquel because he was a better player", which is using a "better than the worst" logic I can't stand.  If you increase the number of players you can vote for, it is likely to lower the standard and increase the amount of "better than the worst" voting -- we need to decrease that.

My solution is, of course, better.  I would keep the ten-player-ballot rule and do two things.  First, I would shrink the number of years on the ballot further, so that there are only five years of eligibility.  If you are a Hall of Famer, the writers should know that, and 75% of them ought to be voting for you -- or you don't belong.  Then second, I would drastically increase the percentage required to stay on the ballot, from 5% to 50%.

These actions would serve to force the voting writers to make up their minds quicker.  When a player comes up for his first ballot after five years from his playing days, if half the voters don't think he belonged then, well, his numbers aren't going to get any better.  But if he is a legitimate candidate, he'll get the votes needed to stay on -- and it's 50%, not 5%.  It would also serve to remove the whole distinction between first-ballot Hall of Famers and others, a distinction that never made sense.

So implement my guidance and see what happens.  The clogging of the ballot that Olney decries goes away, because only newly-eligible players and those with 50% from the previous ballot are on it.  Historically, you might have 4-5 players, at most, who get 50% but are not voted in with 75%.  The past six years, it has averaged just over four in that range.

And to elaborate further, yes, last year (2017 class) there were six players who got 50% but not 75%.  However, four of them wouldn't even have been on the ballot with my rules, because in a previous year they had not reached 50%.  You see what I'm saying?  If we make the rules push us toward an early determination as to whether a player deserves to be in, not only do we eliminate the clogged-ballot problem, but we raise the standard of who belongs in, to a reasonable appraisal of a player's worth.

I think we may have a pretty crowded class this year; there are several worthy candidates who should be inducted.  The steroid guys are getting higher vote tallies each year, though they're not quite close to 75% yet (Clemens and Bonds were both at about 54%, for both, their first year over 50%).  Really, I believe my approach would be widely appreciated and even the writers would grudgingly approve, at least after a few pointed articles.

I've been to the Hall of Fame a couple times in my life.  I don't expect to get there again, but I highly recommend visiting it if you have not been there and to its companion Baseball Museum, both in Cooperstown, NY.  It's a pilgrimage.

We just need to have the right people in there.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.