baseball-reference.com has a far more precise explanation of the election process than I can offer:
- “1967-present: Votes are cast annually by BBWAA members with 10 or more years of membership. Each qualified BBWAA member may select no more than 10 names from a pre-screened ballot of players who played in MLB for at least 10 seasons and had been retired for at least 5; players whose names are cast on at least 75% of the ballots are elected to the HoF, while players named on fewer than 5% of ballots are dropped from future ballots. In addition, if a player has been on the ballot 15 times without being elected, he is also dropped from future ballots.”1
First, the parties who are eligible needs to be adjusted. Once a person is a card-carrying member of the BBWAA for a decade, they get a vote. If they are promoted to being the editor-in-chief of their newspaper, or transfer to covering curling, or drop out of writing entirely and move to the Himalayas, descending once a year to find out who played the right way and farting out a ballot consisting of ten David Eckstein votes, their vote remains valid. This is insane. Baseball is already considered old and boring, when it’s actually on the cutting edge of sports analytics and has one of the better give-and-take stories with regards to finding talent. Nobody made a book and a movie about the NFL salary cap. Sabermetrics (named after the Society of American Baseball Research, or SABR) destroyed the player evaluation mold. New stats are born every year, advanced stats, that can isolate a player’s contribution to the game. The problem is these guys aren’t the ones deciding who are the important players in history. A dynamic vetting process needs to be implemented, wherein one can lose their vote for idiocy or apathy towards the process. This includes being booted from the process for submitting a blank ballot.
I won’t get into a rant about how conventional baseball wisdom and statistics are garbage when it comes to measuring the success of an individual player. That is literally a task for another day.
The second issue with the process is that the ballots are limited to ten players. I call this the Issue of Jon Heyman and Jack Morris. Jack Morris hits the end of his 15-year eligibility window next year. Jon Heyman of CBS Sports is a massive Jack Morris fan, despite Jack Morris not being all that great. Next year is Morris’s last year of eligibility, and Heyman has already announced that he will be casting a vote for Jack Morris. This removes a vote from a more deserving player than Morris, ticking his ballot down to nine names. Multiply this by each beat writer’s pet bad-player-on-a-good-team, you’re removing dozens of votes from deserving players. Some years there will be more than ten players who deserve to be in the Hall. Without doing research, and off the top of my head, I can name Greg Maddux, John Glavine, Frank Thomas, Mike Piazza, Barry Bonds, Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio. These are all players who are eligible and deserving to be in the hall next year. All these players were eligible this year and next year. Eight names, and this doesn’t even scratch the surface of players who have been around but just haven’t gotten the 75% of votes yet. Eight names that must be on ballots next year, plus each person’s “pet” player, leaves one vote at large for the players for which the clock is ticking.
Of course, there’s the mystique of the ~~first ballot Hall of Famer~~ that causes people to leave a deserving player off in lieu of someone who has been eligible for 4 or 5 years, whose clock is ticking. These players then get elected, but, in the process, they start a new round of ticking clocks. In perpetuity.
Third, there needs to be accountability for the ballots submitted. They are currently anonymous and a majority of the old guard only release who they have voted for in order to make a point. If everybody’s ballot was made public, there would be accountability to the public for these men who are entrusted with ensuring future baseball fans know the past. Luckily, many of the new guard publish their ballots as a matter of course. They are about creating discourse, not about trying to be the definitive source of information.
The overarching issue with the balloting process is one that nobody is really willing to point out: the voters. There are too many voters with too many pet players, random beefs and hunches about who should or should not be in the hall. They reward players who were nice to them and hold pointless, lengthy grudges for the others. They have turned the process on its head. Too many of the voters have made it about themselves, about stirring up controversy so they can sit back and look at what they have wrought. This is the easiest problem to fix, as the new voters have been forged in the SABR fire. They are about finding answers, not about making a decision then defending said position.
The Hall of Fame is a joke, and there will be players for whom the process will end up costing them an entry (hello, Dale Murphy). However, the future is bright. The writers getting their voting cards in the next few years are of the new mold. They will look at the numbers, not their hunches, not their gut, not their feelings about the players. It will be cold and methodical. It will be mostly robotic.
It will be, at least, about the players. Not about the process or the voters, which is the problem right now.
- JK
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1. http://www.baseball-reference.com/about/hof_voting.shtml (hey look I cited a source; take note, ESPN).
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