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Monday, December 07, 2009
Marvin Miller, follow-up
Last month I said:
What happens if you are given 30 names, and are asked to select 0 to 10 of them? Can you get 75% of the voters to put the same name down? Now, what happens if they chop those 30 names down to 10. Can you get 75%? Maybe the odds go up a bit, but not much. It’s not like the borderline cases (the 11th best candidate being chopped out) somehow is getting in the way of the top candidates, right?
But, what happens if now you only have FOUR spots to vote? Marvin Miller is one of the ten names, and there are 12 voters. That means there’s a total of (up to) 48 votes to be split among the ten candidates. You need 9 votes to get elected. If all ten candidates are all reasonable, they’ll split the vote, and no one gets in (they each get 4 or 5 votes). You have to have an outstanding candidate or incredible voting bias, in order to get 9 votes.
Yet another example of a silly broken system. It’s like they don’t even work through the issue of everything that’s wrong with it.
And what actually did happen? There were between 28 and 40 votes cast. For whatever reason, the HOF does not disclose the actual vote totals if someone earned 2 or less votes. They just say “less than 3”. The top 4 got 8, 7, 7, and 6 votes, out of 12 voters. Embarrassingly, at least 8 of the voters did not go 4-deep.
It’s a stupid f-cked up system. I’m glad bullsh!t like this happens, so that someone will have the temerity to fix it. Someone like Marvin Miller.
Every time this comes up I just wonder who could conceivably think Marvin Miller wasn’t one of, say, the top five people who had an impact on baseball in the twentieth century. And why anyone who didn’t think so should be in a position to decide who gets into the Hall of Fame.