For the first time in what seems like eons, the Baseball Writer’s Association of America has elected four players to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Three first-ballot pitchers; Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, and John Smotlz, were joined by longtime Astro Craig Biggio as the class of 2015. While it’s the first time since 1955 that four players have gone in at once, there is still a sour taste in the mouths of many in the baseball world.
At the root of it all is the way Baseball Hall of Fame voting is conducted. As has been widely publicized, the BBWAA limits voters to selecting a maximum of ten players. When so many impressive players are on the ballot as there was this year, it makes deciding whom to vote for difficult. And that’s only compounded by the presence of players such as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, who have been connected to performance enhancing drugs. In short, there are too many players to consider for too few slots, and with many of those players being incredibly divisive.
The fact of the matter is that out of the 34 players who were eligible for induction on Tuesday, there were reasonable arguments to be made for 23 of them. Naturally when a situation like that arises; there’s going to be some very emotional reactions from fans of players who didn’t make the cut (or writers frustrated with perceived dogmatic policy). Unfortunately, not everyone can make the Hall, nor should they.
I completely understand that fans feel that players they grew up watching deserve enshrinement, especially players like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who essentially saved baseball with their titanic home run race in 1998. Or, say, the reigning home run king. There’s also the matter of players such as Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza who many have suspicions about, or Lee Smith and Edgar Martinez, who many penalize for the positions they played.
When you combine all the different caveats that go into drawing up one’s ballot, it’s a miracle that four players got in this year. But four players did get in this year, and as I stated earlier, it’s been quite a while since that’s happened. All four players are without a doubt Hall of Fame quality, too. There was no Rabbit Maranville in this class (although Maranville gets a pass from me due to his 80-grade name).
If you listened to New York sports talk radio, you wouldn’t know that. Instead, you’d be convinced that Mike Piazza had been dragged out into the street by Jon Heyman and co., and clapped in the village stockade like the cheater he “purportedly” might be. If you scoured Twitter and any other source of such blistering hot takes, you would have been shown that the entire game of baseball has been smacked in the face by the villainous Baseball Writers Association of America for leaving out (insert player here) and all his accomplishments. The writers are to blame! The ten-player limit is to blame! The steroid users are to blame! There was a second gunman on the grassy knoll! Thanks, Obama!
Let’s all take a break from our spouting to consider what exactly is going on. The BBWAA has elected seven players in the last two years. Six of them were first-ballot players (Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Frank Thomas, and the three pitchers from this year). While Biggio has been the only one who had to wait, the Writers Association is doing an admirable job of making sure the incredibly obvious candidates get in as soon as possible so that the already clogged ballot does not get even more backlogged. Ken Griffey, Jr. is the only slam-dunk candidate gaining eligibility next year, so the writers will have an opportunity to really do some housecleaning. Piazza came in at 69.9% this year, just barely below the 75% needed to be elected. He’s almost certainly going to be canonized. Other interesting candidates emerging next year include Jim Edmonds, Jason Kendall, and closers Billy Wagner and Trevor Hoffman. While some of them (particularly Edmonds and Hoffman) could steal votes from returning candidates, in all likelihood we’ll have at least two new members of the Hall next year.
Is that enough? First, we need to decide what we mean by “enough.” In a perfect world, all of the deserving candidates would simply be put in as soon as they’re placed on the ballot. That also begs the question of what we define as “deserving.” Jay Jaffe’s JAWS system, which average’s a player’s career WAR with the WAR of their 7-year peak, is a fantastic starting point. There are other intangible things which I feel is important in evaluating a player’s candidacy, including level of stardom, overall impact on the game, postseason heroics (Bill Mazeroski is the poster boy of this particular factor), and the era they played in. I also award extra points for a player who spent their whole career (or nearly all of their career) with a single team.
Those were all factors I used when determining my ballot for the IWBAA Hall of Fame. The IWBAA, or Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, is a smaller writers association that caters to writers who primarily publish their work online. Though there are only 338 members at the moment, the membership roles range from relative newcomers such as myself to top-shelf writers like Ken Rosenthal, Dave Cameron, and Grant Brisbee. The IWBAA elected five players in their election, albeit from a slightly different group of players (Mike Piazza and Craig Biggio had been elected in previous years, while Barry Larkin has not yet been elected). My fellow IBWAA members and I elected the trio of Johnson, Martinez, and Smoltz; as well as Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines.
Part of what makes the IWBAA election process much easier is that voters can select up to fifteen different players on their ballots. This eliminates much of the hand wringing that goes into selecting the final two members of a ten-player ballot. Instead of deciding between a few deserving players, one could theoretically just vote for all of them. This eliminates a lot of vote-splitting between players of perceived similar worthiness (Jeff Kent and Fred McGriff, perhaps), and also helps good players avoid slipping below the dreaded 5% mark and falling off the ballot. This is the fate that befell Carlos Delgado this year, he of the career .280/.383/.546 line and 473 home runs. Is Delgado a surefire all-time great? Probably not, no. But he absolutely deserves to be in the conversation for more than one year.
Even if we keep players around for longer conversations, it doesn’t tell us what to do about those with steroids allegations hanging around their necks. Full disclosure: I voted for Barry Bonds. I didn’t vote for anybody else who had overwhelming evidence of use, but I did vote for Bagwell and Piazza. The PED situation isn’t an easy one for sure. In my mind, I was loath to give endorsement to anybody that was a known cheater. The problem with that is that we already have a ton of known cheaters in the Hall. Whether it was the Bambino corking his bat, or Ty Cobb spiking infielders all over the diamond, or Gaylord Perry throwing spitballs and all sorts of other illegal pitches, or even Hank Aaron using Greenies, players have always been looking for a way to get one over on the game. That’s just a natural part of any sort of competitive sport. It certainly doesn’t justify cheating, but we should not act as if cheating magically appeared out of thin air when steroids came into the game. I voted for Bonds because he was already a generational talent before he juiced, and frankly, it just feels weird to not have the all-time leader in one of baseball’s most fantastic feats (the home run) in the Hall of Fame. Bonds was simply too good to not vote for. That’s with all my reservations about voting for cheaters.
So what to do with these guys? What to do with the entire process? Well, the BBWAA isn’t exactly sitting idly by. There’s currently a proposal to the Hall of Fame (which is in fact its own separate entity and dictates all procedure, the BBWAA was simply picked at the voting body) to bump the ballot size up to 12, and current Writers Association Vice President Derrick Goold has bandied about the idea of a “binary ballot,” where writers would simply give a yes or no vote to every single name on the list. Change is something that is supposedly very hard to come by on this front, though, so don’t hold your breath. But an expansion of ballot size would certainly ease the pain of the PED players taking up space, and the logjam in general.
We’ve had seven new inductees in the past two years; let’s not lose sight of that. The current system isn’t perfect, but for better or for worse it’s working. Baseball as an institution won’t implode if the method goes unchanged, but it would certainly be nice to see.
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