Changes to baseball Hall of Fame voting

I'd bet there was some urging by the existing HOFers to shorten the writers' voting window and get the unenshrined into their realm more quickly. And yeah, that might have been driven by the PED guys, whom the most outspoken of ex-players continue to resent and vow to give thumbs-down votes.

Might also want to have players evaluated more by the writers who covered them than by a crop of voters who might have only caught the tail end of a candidate's career, if that.

To me, anytime you shorten something like this, you don't slice off the final five years. You basically slice off the middle five years. The urgency of someone nearing the end of his eligibility will remain, just sooner now. But it might be less aggravating to someone like Jack Morris to be picked at and publicly dissected for 10 years rather than 15, and speed along the time when he can be evaluated by his peers rather than the writers. Heck, it might be an effort to give guys who do get in via Veterans Committee more time to enjoy the honor, rather than five years closer to death.

 

Excuse my naivety, but someone is a Hall of Famer or they're not. Everyone should be on the ballot once, that limits it to the very best and avoids players getting in on weaker ballots or through campaigns as the 15-year mark nears.

 

Did they change the minimum required to stay on the ballot? It would be interesting if McGwire and Sosa both fell off the ballot at the same time.

I will also be curious if Mattingly, Trammell and Lee Smith get a surge in votes as they head toward the end of their voting eligibility. I'd be pretty surprised if any of them get in.

I forgot that Morris is now off the ballot.

 

I think there are enough players who are questionable that just one year wouldn't be the right way to do it. But voters deciding in someone's 15th year of eligibility that they're now worthy to go in is just fucking stupid. I think five years is fine, but you let voters vote for as many people as they deem worthy. I think that would prevent people from omitting someone like Biggio from their ballot so they can make sure to vote for people to either keep them on the ballot or try to put them in during one of their final years of eligibility.

 

Different people have different standards as to what constitutes a Hall of Fame player, and the voters are no exception. There are cases which fall between those standards, and those players deserve to have their hard cases decided over more than one year. Ten might not be enough. Has Duke Snider's election tarnished the Hall? No.

 

Wow, Snider got 17 percent his first year of eligibility. That's insane. Obviously, he was before my time, but he had 400 HR when that actually meant something.

 

Snider was almost criminally underrated.

 

I wouldn't say underrated so much as to have had the unique misfortune to spend the salad days of his career being compared to Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. Anybody this side of Cobb or Ruth suffers in that comparison.

 

The pool of voters casting ballots in a player's 15th year of eligibility can be significantly different from those casting ballots in his first year. In many cases, it's not that the player's resume changes (obviously it does not, except in context). But the people voting change, either in their opinion of a player or -- which gets back to my first point -- the actual people change.

You can join the BBWAA after someone already is on the ballot, having never covered MLB in your life, and be voting on the guy before he drops off. Or you could have covered his entire career and you could drop dead after his first year of eligibility, having voted for him once.

 

The only outcome this change leads to is that PED suspects (along with everyone else) have less of an opportunity to build a consensus among the voters over time. It's not going to widen the bottleneck at all. But, I agree, Della, you were correct about that clause. My bad.

Of course, in spite of its protestations to the contrary, it's quite obvious that the actual outcome will, in fact, be the Board of Directors' intended outcome. The very vocal split in the electorate on PED suspects between two angry, vocal camps is no doubt embarassing to the institution and I find it very telling that the announcement came at the commencement of Induction Weekend when a record number of living Hall of Famers were in attendance. Perhaps a handful of those inductees refused to attend if something wasn't done to bar consideration of McGwire, Bonds, etc.?

 

It's not totally excuse but Snider was also on a ballot where 13 of the 19 in front of him ended up getting into the Hall and another was the closest percentage without ever getting in. You want a logjam -- Lou Boudreau got in at 77 percent and the next 17 holdovers all got between 55 and 20 percent. Slots 1-9 were all between 55-30 percent. Everyone saw Hall of Famers in the batch, they just couldn't agree on the same ones.

And to be fair, you are talking about an electorate at the time the following year !971) that didn't elect Yogi Berra on the first ballot, leaving him 28 votes shy, and had a 300-game winner in Early Wynn on the ballot for the third time and didn't elect him for an empty class.

You go back and look at those ballots and you wonder how guys like Marty Marion and George Kell were getting more votes than Snider year after year.