from Amazon
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
The Tiered Hall of Fame Plaque Room
Patriot highlights something that we’ve discussed in the past (I think back at Fanhome) about a tiered (Pyramidial) Hall of Fame (Plaque Room). I don’t remember who originated the idea, but I like it. The good thing is that if every you think that there are too many players in the Plaque Room, you add another tier to the Pyramid, and adjust all the numbers. Say we want an Inner Circle Top of Pyramid Plaque Room of 25 players. And you want a Penultimate Level of say 50 players. And then a third from the top of 100 players. And a bottom level of 200 players. You can vote Tim Raines into the first level (everyone starts at the first level), and as Patriot noted, leave that for the writers to do. You can even lower the acceptance level to 50%. Or, as I like to do, ask the writers to vote “Yes, No, Ask me next year”, so that a Dwight Evans can continue to be on the ballot. Once he’s in, you can have another committee decide if in one year the player can go to the second level. And in 3 years if they can go to the third level. And 5 years later if he can reach the pinnacle. And if the pinnacle gets too big (say now pushing 30 players), create a fifth level, and move players up as appropriate.
As Patriot noted, whatever we do or so is irrelevant since we will never affect change here. That position is not important for our purposes for discussion purposes. Discussion as in discuss, not as in “this s-cks because...”. You can take those posts elsewhere. This thread is for classroom discussion purposes.
Of course one can slice players into an infinite number of tiers—at every point you create a distinction between those above the line and those below the line, and at each and every line there will always be gray areas. With a 25 man tier there will probably be consensus that ten to twenty specific guys belong in and endless argument about which ones of the more marginal group are in or out.
The real problem that drives us sabermetric types most crazy is that there was clearly a period in the institutional history of the Hall of Fame when the Veterans Committee was not taking the mandate to induct only the greatest players ever very seriously, and treated the institution as more of a social club inducting some long-time friends and colleagues. Creating an “Inner Circle” tier would help solve this left over Veterans Committee problem as diplomatically as possible—without having to actually evict a group of guys who clearly don’t belong with the rest of the inductees. I’m not sure what value tiering would have other than to solve that very specific problem.
A tier as small as 25 seems unlikely to adequately represent the variety of skills and historical contexts that is inherent to the charm of baseball. I think one would want an “Inner Circle” tier to include representatives of all positions and all eras, power hitters and OBP guys and those whose contribution on defense was good enough to qualify them as all-time greats. You want some utterly dominant-prime guys and some long brilliant career guys. You want deadball guys and lively ball guys and 1960s deadball 2.0 guys, etc. Otherwise one ends up caricaturing baseball rather than expressing its richness and historical variety.
It seems to me that by selecting just about an average of one player per year for the historical era the BBWAA voters were assumed to be covering (the 19th century was pretty much left to the Veterans Committee to worry about), putting them at just over 100 players elected, the BBWAA has done a good job balancing exclusivity with variety. You can argue with a few of the BBWAA inductees over the years, but there are really very few truly egregious inclusions. It seems to me an Inner Circle tier roughly reproducing the number of players that the writers have inducted—about 100 players representing the period 1901-current —and adding 10 to twenty more spots for the pre-20th century period, and then adding one aditional spot every year going forward, would serve quite nicely. Most likely there would be broad consensus that 90 or so of the BBWAA inductees would fit in such an Inner Circle uncontroversially, and argument about the remaining Inner Circle group would be inevitable.