THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Hall of Fame, please hold… and hold

Joe Sheehan, in a well-reasoned piece on changing the waiting period for eligibility:

I’d like to suggest that the 15-year window for eligibility has long outgrown its usefulness. With all of the information available about modern players --information accessible in a heartbeat—you can cut that by two-thirds and still get solid evaluations of players’ careers.

Right, good point.

Imagine that the HOF never existed, and you get to start it, would you do it the way they are doing it now?  I don’t think so.

First off, I would make eligibility start at the person’s 45th birthday.  How does it make sense that Kirby Puckett is eligible for the HOF 8 years before Rickey Henderson, even though Rickey is older?  Rickey’s comparison group is shifted, as the guys he competed against is not representative on the ballot.  When a player turns 45, he’s eligible.  If that means you have a playing legend, like Nolan Ryan, all the better.  Gordie Howe, Mario Lemieux, Guy Lafleur were all retirees who unretired as Hall of Famers.  Sweet.

And when he turns 50, he’s off the ballot.  As Joe said, we’ve got enough information now.  Do we need to prolong the agony for the few, when such a huge number get voted in so early anyway?  Why does Paul Molitor and Robin Yount and Tony Gwynn get something written about them just one year, but Jim Rice and Bert Blyleven and Jack Morris get something every single year for what will be 15 years? 

As Joe noted, with such a small window, no need to knock players off the ballot if they don’t get enough votes.  If you have to, I’d ask the voters to vote “yes, no, ask me next year”.  It’s a darn shame that a borderline candidate like Lou Whitaker is an afterthought after one year, while a borderline candidate like Kirby Puckett is voted in, the same year, on the same first-time ballot.  Out of the 516 ballots cast, 423 said “yes” to Kirby and only 15 said “yes” to Lou.  Isn’t it possible that there were some 408 of them that were thinking “ask me next year”, and were really saying “ask me next year, but I really hope that at least 26 other voters said yes, because that’s the only way I’m going to get asked next year”.

The Hall of Merit forces an “elect x” number of players.  You can make it an elect-2 or elect-3 or whatever.  But, why bother having the chance that no one gets voted in, when really you want to vote players in.  Just because there might be a year in which no one stands out as MVP, are you not going to give out the MVP award that year?  It seems to have worked out well for HoM, and we can learn from their process if there were players that might have skated in because of a weak ballot.  I doubt it, but I’d like to hear from them.

Finally, why not a tiered Hall of Fame?  Every 5 or 10 years, you vote players up a rung.  It would be a fixed number, so you know you’ll have a celebration.  No surprises like no one gets enough votes, or too many do.  Wouldn’t it be nice for Ruth and Mays and Hank to stand at the top of the heap, which they richly deserve, instead of being on par with Kirby and Bruce Sutter?  You can have an elect-4 for the regular Hall of Fame, so that you can have alot of celebration for the players who impacted the game.

At least it’s not in as bad shape as basketball, where more coaches are voted in than players.  It’s true.  I think the ratio should be 10:1 in terms of player to nonplayer ratio.  It’s the players that count.