The Unhallowed Baseball Hall of Fame
For those of you unfamiliar with the Baseball Hall of Fame, players become eligible for induction five years after retirement and must receive at least 5% of the BBWAA vote to remain subsequently eligible. If one fails to receive 75% of the vote by their 15th year on the ballot, he is removed permanently.
Every year there are players who are controversially elected or not elected because they approach the BBWAA-imposed deadline to be elected. So what happens? Well, as the years pass, certain players who have been retired for 5, 10, 15, or even 20 years with the same set of statistics continue to garner a higher percentage of the vote.
Let’s take a look at two of the most recent controversies: Goose Gossage and Jim Rice.
% of vote received during each year of eligibility, Gossage:
1 – 33.3
2 – 44.3
3 – 43.0
4 – 42.1
5 – 40.7
6 – 55.2
7 – 64.6
8 – 71.2
9 – 85.8 (elected)
% of vote received during each year of eligibility, Rice:
1 – 29.4
2 – 51.2
3 – 57.9
4 – 55.1
5 – 55.2
6 – 54.5
7 – 59.4
8 – 64.8
9 – 63.5
10 – 71.2
11 – will likely be elected in 2009
In sum, from their first year of eligibility to 2008, these men picked up 42 – 52% votes of the entire BBWAA.
The likely causes of this volatility would probably be explained by the BBWAA as some mix of the following arguments:
1) There are different voters from one year to the next, certainly between the initial year and the ninth year.
Certainly, I’ll give you 5-15% room for error based on that fact alone. No doubt every BBWAA member takes their responsibility seriously and performs due diligence every year before voting. What else?
2) It is difficult to judge a player’s accomplishments in an historical context after their retirement. More time allows for greater understanding of the player’s impact on the game.
Not buying. They’re not even eligible for voting until five years after retirement. A voter has had sufficient time to judge the merits of the player’s achievements. No one has proclaimed a voter must wait a certain length of time to see how a player will be viewed against players of future eras. Judge him based on what he did and the era he played, that’s all you really have to judge him on.
3) More useful statistics are becoming available that allow the BBWAA to compare eligible players against other eras. Therefore, some will get more votes over time.
Touche. There are more sophisticated statistics.
Are you sure that your writers are intelligent or diligent enough to use them? I give you the following writing samples: Mike Celizic, Murray Chass, Joe Cowley, Bill Conlin, Jerry Green, Richard Justice, Woody Paige, Bill Plaschke, Dan Shaughnessy, and Dave Van Dyck. And this is only a handful that Fire Joe Morgan has gleefully sliced and diced. Let’s just say I don’t have a lot of faith in the BBWAA. Please also read these posts as to why certain writers voted the way they did in 2008.
Also, if the premise of the availability of more useful statistics is viable, some players voting percentage should systematically drop. Maybe this is happening, but I’m too lazy to do that much additional work.
Here are my reasons for this ridiculous voting attrition:
1) The BBWAA is an egocentric, gatekeeping mess of an organization.
The sports writing media has been given too much power and has too little accountability (a topic for another day). There is a huge percentage of BBWAA members who have written it is a privilege to be voted into the HOF on the first eligible vote. Why is being elected to the Hall of Fame you deserve to be in more of a privilege in one year or another; in the first year of the fifteenth? Sure, there are only a select few who have been elected on the first ballot, but that fact does not give any writer the subjective authority to say “this guy isn’t first ballot-worthy because I say so.” He either deserves election in the first year or not at all, with few exceptions.
2 ) Players can actually gain momentum in the voting over the years.
This should not be happening. It does happen. As mentioned above, BBWAA adhering to the principles of Hall-worthiness who perform their due diligence should rarely, if ever, change their vote from year to year. The BBWAA website says the following regarding voting:
“Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.”
Granted, the wording is uncommonly vague. There are no markers or milestones that grant eligibility. Throw in four intangibles and you’ve got yourself a mess. Regardless, if the voting is taken seriously by the writers there should not be this much attrition, certainly not 40-50+% of the electorate. Each writer should have an idea of what this criterion means personally, vote in that fashion and stick to it, again, with few exceptions. Decide what does or does not display “integrity, sportsmanship, character, contribution” and vote your conscience. Be a big boy or girl. Otherwise, set up statistical markers for election based upon field performance (which should be the 99% focus, IMO) and take the subjectivity out of the process.
To boot, there is certainly a sympathy vote factor that occurs when a player begins approaching his (gulp) 15th year of eligibility. Sympathy votes? Seriously? This is the Hall of Fame.
In sum, a player can literally receive 35% of the vote in his initial eligibility, get another 30% in attrition, and then an added 10% sympathy attrition and be elected to the Hall of Fame.
3) The ambiguity of the criterion encourages attrition.
People think about things differently over time. The heroes of our youth do not seem as great when we mature and are able to objectively compare them to other people of their era or any other. Integrity and Character are judged on a continuum subject to the one putting it in place. It is also subject to the time the scale is put in place. So if it is a writer’s duty to judge morality, that judgment is certainly going to ebb and/or flow over time. This is not a sophisticated way of determining Hall-worthiness.
Election to our Baseball Hall of Fame is a tremendously flawed and subjective process. There are people who belong there and there are people who do not. Because the voting process has little credibility the institution itself is compromised. It is a shame and not worthy of obsessive amounts of discussion. That is why you will never see me write about it again in this space.
Tags: baseball hall of fame, sports
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