Visiting Column #35 -- I Was the Vote that Kept Jeter from Being Unanimous

OK, I wasn't.  I write, but I don't get a vote for who gets into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  I'm not a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America at all, let alone for ten years.

But had I been, the voter who actually did leave Derek Jeter off his Hall of Fame ballot would not have been alone.  I would have left his name off my ballot as well.  And here is why.

While I don't usually believe in blaming someone else for something I do, or would do, in this case it is extremely relevant.  Because there are two completely different issues at hand here -- whether a player belongs in the Hall of Fame, and whether he should be elected unanimously.

And where I will blame someone else for my decision not to vote for Jeter in 2020 is in pointing to about 85 years of precedent.

Back in the mid-1930s, when the Hall of Fame was created, there was voting by 226 members of the BBWAA to determine the first inductees.  The five all-time greats who received the necessary 75% of all the ballots were Ty Cobb at 222 votes, Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth at 215, Christy Mathewson at 205, and Walter Johnson at 189.

Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner.  Three players on anyone's top ten list of the greatest position players ever, and I'm talking now, more than 80 years later.  Not one of them was elected with all the votes, and from that time until last year, writers have taken that as a precedent and given not a single player a unanimous election until Mariano Rivera last year.

The writers have done this, and it is their legacy that we now have to deal with.

By that I mean that while there is, and has always been, a question as to whether this or that player actually belongs in the Hall of Fame, there is a second question as to whether a player deserves a unanimous election.

The writers have done this to themselves.  They did it by not unanimously electing Cobb in the first ballot; they did it by not unanimously electing Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial and others over the years; and they did it again by actually electing Rivera unanimously and thus setting a standard.

With that standard in place -- Mariano Rivera was legitimately the greatest reliever of all time and a fantastic human being -- his unanimous vote and the lack of unanimity for any other player ever before plants a flag that subsequent votes must honor.

Derek Jeter simply was not that guy.  He was a Hall of Famer for sure.  I'd have voted twice for him on his second year eligible if I could have.  But would you ever have traded Mays, Mantle, Williams or Musial for Jeter straight up?  Of course not!

So while I'd have voted for him every year after the first, in these days, where more than half the voters release their ballots to the public long before the results are made public, I would not have this year.  I would have known that 100% of the open ballots would have had Jeter's name on it, and that he was already "in", and my vote would not have cost him an extra year.

And he was not near that standard of unanimity.  He was certainly not the best at his position.  As I've written here before, it is a fallacy to call him a great-hitting shortstop, because his excellent hitting masked the fact that he should not have been playing shortstop at all for at least the last dozen years of his career.

He was a .310 hitter for his career, with well over 3,000 hits and a Hall of Fame resume at bat -- plus essentially a full season worth of post-season at-bats, in which he hit as well as he did during the season, only in pressure situations against better opponents.

What he didn't have was a position in the field.  Derek Jeter is the classic case of where the fan simply cannot recognize defensive quality, or lack thereof.

Adam Dunn, the powerful but stone-gloved first baseman who was not elected to the Hall this time, was the third-worst defensive player of all time (by Defensive Runs Saved).  And everyone knew it.  Dunn was a terrible fielder, born to be a DH but stuck for a while in the National League where he actually had to play in the field.  He missed plays, dropped throws and couldn't move.  Had he stayed in the NL longer, he'd have moved up to second-worst all time.

Derek Jeter was the mirror image.  He made the plays he got to, committed few errors and was seen as an athletic player.  So everyone thought he was a wonderful fielder, even winning five Gold Gloves, which then were voted on a combination of perception, reputation and hitting.

What the fans, writers and Gold Glove voters couldn't figure out was that while he made the plays he got to, he got to far, far fewer than any other shortstop.  His range compared unfavorably to league-average shortstops, let alone to the great gloves at the position.  And yet, the Yankees (who, in fairness, probably didn't realize how much of a liability he was until later in his career when the metrics got better) left him out there for two decades.

It was as if as a rookie, the Yankees were so vested in Jeter being their shortstop of the future that it became a Yankee gospel thing.  "Oh, we can't try him somewhere else; he is The Yankee Shortstop^TM." 

When Alex Rodriguez was traded to the Yankees in 2004, the team didn't even ask Jeter to move to third or second to accommodate the much better-fielding A-Rod, according to Joe Torre -- and Jeter didn't offer.

He stayed there at short until he retired in 2014, accumulating enough poor defense to retire with -243.3 Defensive Runs Saved, incredibly about 80 DRS worse than Dunn, and far and away the single worst defensive career in the history of the game, distinguished from the rest by playing a position for 20 years that he could not play well at a major-league level.

So -- Hall of Fame and unanimity.

All of the rest of Jeter's game and his career were Hall of Fame.  He defined "fame" as it applied to baseball players -- played in a big market for a team that made the postseason a lot.  Played a bunch of World Series and was on five teams that won.  Lots of PR.  No scandal.  Fine hitter with a long career that allowed him to compile big hitting numbers.

But we have a difference now between a unanimous choice and a Hall of Famer.  You had better be far and away the greatest ever at your position to be unanimous.  You'd better have no scandal and not tick off the leftist writers (do you think the voters last year didn't know that Rivera was a Trump supporter?).

Derek Jeter was a sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famer.  But he would not have gotten my vote unless I knew already that another voter was leaving him off this year.  The writers over the years have set standards, and we now have them as guidance.  There is Hall of Famer, and now there is unanimously-elected Hall of Famer, and they aren't the same thing.

Honus Wagner was the greatest shortstop in the history of the game.  If he was not a unanimous pick, then Derek Jeter sure was not.  And I'd have been OK with being the only voter leaving him off in his first eligible year, had it come to that.

I wasn't that one voter.  But I'd have had the guts to explain why if I were.  I just did.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton