Well, that was fun, wasn’t it?
Thank goodness we had the annual Baseball Hall of Fame election to detract from the ongoing lockout. I was getting tired of essays on every single coaching hire or minor league signing.
Even worse? Those regurgitated trade rumour or free-agent stories. Newsflash – Freddie Freeman is still sought after. The Toronto Blue Jays need more balance. Carlos Correa could help several teams. Those that were interested in him before the lockout are, according to people in the industry, still interested.
Nothing like trying to fire up the Hot Stove with ashes.
So, David Ortiz, who is kind of/sort of linked to baseball’s steroid scandal – the New York Times reported he was one of 100 players to turn in a positive test in 2003, when baseball was doing logistical testing of its drug program, although the substance was never identified and baseball admitted in 2016 that the 2003 tests were a little janky – will be inducted into Cooperstown this summer. Nobody else made it on the writers’ ballot; and two players with more pronounced ties to steroids – Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens – are off the ballot for good. So is Curt Schilling, after testing positive for being a MAGA-jackass. Alex Rodriguez had the type of lukewarm support that suggests his televised rehabilitation tour is going to flop.
I think it’s ridiculous that Bonds and Clemens weren’t first-ballot Hall of Famers – I’ve voted for them every year – let alone that writers have snubbed them for 10 consecutive years. But I’d rather be debating why someone isn’t in the Hall than why they’re in the Hall, and I think the results of the writers’ ballot usually achieves that end.
Keep in my mind that the Baseball Writers Association of America has been charged with voting for the Hall since 1936. The process has remained largely static for decades, but for its first three or four decades, it shape-shifted between being an annual vote or a vote held every other year; from requiring voters to select 10 players to having run-off ballots to the current format of a maximum 10 votes per ballot. From 1956-65, writers voted only in even-numbered years. Odd-numbered elections were conducted by a committee process, a process that ended when the 1965 Veterans Committee met and chose Pud Galvin – who’d been dead for more than 63 years – as its only inductee.
Suddenly, the writers didn’t look so bad.
It was in 1947 that a stipulation was added requiring a minimum of 10 consecutive years on the beat for BBWAA members to earn a Hall of Fame vote, with a 10-year grace period for writers who moved off the beat after 10 years. And that’s pretty much the way it’s been, although BBWAA membership criteria has changed to accommodate the changing media landscape.
As for the four “era” committees set up by the Hall? They often get criticized for a lack of transparency and cronyism – Harold Baines got in in 2019 thanks to getting a minimum of 12 votes from the Today’s Game committee, with heavy politicking from members Tony La Russa (his former manager) and Jerry Reinsdorf (his former owner). Bud Selig was selected, even though steroids happened on his watch. That he was put into the Hall of Fame before Marvin Miller was the process’ biggest crime, in my mind, until this week’s ballot.
And yet, there have been other examples of the committee system acting as a safety net. Committees were an effective means of re-dressing the game’s shameful treatment of Negro Leaguers, and I would argue that most of the players that have been elected through the committee process make the Hall a better place. Gil Hodges? Ted Simmons? At some point, Dick Allen? They make the Hall a better place, frankly. You won’t hear any writers complaining even though they didn’t get in on the writers’ ballot. In fact … you ever notice how most voters never complain about who gets in, whether or not they voted for that person?
Bonds is the best player of his generation and Clemens the closest thing we’ve seen to Nolan Ryan. They are lightning rods for fans and players and media, hurt irreparably by a decision the Hall took in 2014 to drop the years of eligibility on the ballot from 15 to 10 – coincidence, surely – and now relying on the committee process. That’s no slam dunk, given how their peers viewed them while they were playing and in subsequent years.
This isn’t Pete Rose or Shoeless Joe Jackson: remember, they are permanently banned from baseball. Nothing to do with the writers. With that in mind, let’s toss around some talking points and see if we can come up with a better process:
ELIGIBILITY
Move the eligibility back to 15 years from 10. Or make it a dozen. Sure – let’s make it even more obvious that the rules were changed to screw the “steroid guys” … or, at least the guys we don’t like and know dabbled in it at some point, compared to the guys we like we put in that we don’t know about.
THE BALLOT
Ten votes per ballot is too many. Sorry. I know baseball people and, believe me, if a class of 10 were ever elected by writers, the carping and whining and crying about cheapening the Hall and turning it into an all-comers club like the Pro Football or Hockey Hall of Fame would be over the top. And those speeches on long, hot, summer days. Geezus.
Yet, here’s the thing: In allowing voters to mark down “as many as 10” players on each ballot, doesn’t that at least theoretically raise that possibility? I understand the odds are long: 394 ballots were cast this year. Hell, I don’t even know if that math works out. David Schoenfeld of ESPN broke this year’s ballot down and revealed that the average ballot contained seven names, and that 66 per cent of voters did not use the allowable 10.
We’re not electing civic leaders here. Democracy isn’t at stake. So what about this: Make the maximum allowable, say, five. BBWAA voters have never elected that many in one year – not since the first year of voting. In fact, there have been five classes of four players … three of them in the past eight years. Or, here’s an idea … how about a ranked ballot, with points accrued as in voting for MLB’s individual awards. Think of how forensic we could become! Or maybe we could just lower the level for election from 75 per cent. But … to what?
THE VOTING POOL
Take it away from the writers. And give it to who? Club broadcasters? Huge conflict of interest … not enough members. Living Hall of Famers? I’d be cool with them having a say … although my guess is you’d be surprised how many players they’d keep out and what grudges they hold. No chance in hell they’d vote in Bonds or Clemens, and remember that talk about how some were considering boycotting Derek Jeter’s ceremony because one of the first things he did when his group purchased the Miami Marlins was fire Hall of Famers Tony Perez and Andre Dawson from jobs with the Marlins? Current players? Right … and detract from the time they spend on NFL Fantasy teams? Not happening.
HOW ABOUT A COMMITTEE?
Oof. One of my old bosses in the newspaper business had a cartoon of a guy with his head up his own butt – you’ve seen them – and underneath it was the caption: “Want to waste time? Form a committee!”
Yet, as I mentioned earlier, the Hall’s four era committees have done some really good work. So here’s a back-of-the-napkin proposal from someone who wouldn’t have a vote if it was accepted: cut the pool of voters down dramatically. Pick a number. One hundred is a nice, round one. Make it a revolving group of representatives from current BBWAA membership, former BBWAA members, living Hall of Famers, broadcasters and executives, with one caveat: every ballot is public. Every one of them. If you work for the Yankees and roll into Boston and didn’t vote for a Red Sox player who missed out by one or two votes, get ready to be answer questions. Logistically? The phrase “it would be like herding cats” springs to mind.
And so it has passed. The Bonds/Clemens Hall of Fame ballot era is done and now it’s down to A-Rod to carry the steroid cross. We’re almost out of the moral wilderness and into the bright light of –
Wait.
Geezus!
I forgot that Carlos Beltran is on next year’s ballot. From steroids to garbage cans. We’ve moved on from Neil Young and seeing “the needle and the damage done,” to, I don’t know, The Stone Roses and She Bangs the Drum or something by Garbage.
All right, I’ll stop.
Beltran, of course, was heavily implicated in the Houston Astros cheating scandal (it likely cost him a managing job with the New York Mets) and … well … that’s another slippery slope for the moralists, because it gets into a whole deeper discussion about the game and may have directly influenced a World Series in the way that Bonds’ steroid use never did.
I know what you’re thinking: Beltran will get the same brownie points for being a “good guy” as Ortiz did this time around. I don’t know, I think that’s one aspect of Hall voting that is really overstated, because the fact of the matter is very few of the 394 or so voters ever spent a great deal of time around Ortiz – I’ll bet you a chunk of them have never been in the same ballpark as him – and even reporters who practically lived in clubhouses back in the day put Eddie Murray in on the first ballot despite the unease he created with reporters.
Whether or not a player is a good dude is less of a factor on the ballot, frankly, than a voter’s preference for a big or small ballot. I’m in the latter camp. Quite comfortably, in fact. I know this pains people who think everybody’s a good guy and that if it takes 15 minutes to come up with one dominant statistic, well, that’s enough for your name to be on the same ballot as somebody with four or five, but at its root, the Hall of Fame is about exclusivity. And if you make your living writing and talking about who is good and who is not so good at playing the game of baseball on a daily basis – of picking apart athletes, who even on their worst day, could accidentally do stuff you’ve never been able to contemplate – then surely it shouldn’t rip your soul to shreds to decide, “This player is really great. This player is not as great.”
Truth is, I’ve never really thought about an alternative to the process until this year. This was a seismic event for those who spend time thinking about baseball – more than any other Hall of Fame ballot.
I’m talking about in a baseball sense: not real-world stuff. And, I don’t know: At a time when baseball owners and players are talking about using WAR (Wins Above Replacement) as a means of determining pre-arbitration pay, maybe it’s time to do a deep dive on something that pre-dates World War II. Or, we could just leave it as it is: a process that angers and mystifies and is waited upon eagerly, that attracts the type of attention no other Hall of Fame can even pretend to garner. Embrace the chaos … and the jealousy.
The Hall of Fame remains the one thing baseball does demonstrably better than anyone else. Maybe that’s still enough.
Jeff Blair hosts Blair & Barker The Podcast. When the CBA gets done, he and Barker will be live on Sportsnet 590/The Fan from 10 a.m.-noon ET and in the summer from 5-7 p.m. ET. They will also host Blue Jays Talk post-game.
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