Baseball Nation - Crowded 2013 Hall Of Fame ballot produces no Hall of Famers

No, Tom Glavine is not a lock for the Coop next year

2013-01-16T15:30:04Z

Earlier this week, Tom Glavine was on the radio talking about the Hall of Fame -- he'll debut on next year's ballot, you know -- and Talking Chop's gondeee did some good transcribing. Here's a snippet from Glavine:

Yeah, well, it feels good but, look, if they can keep a guy with 3,000 hits out of the Hall of Fame for a year just because they want to there's no saying that they can't with me or Frank Thomas. I think Greg [Maddux] is pretty much a lock, I don't think there's any question about that.

But you don't ever know. This whole notion that, well, we're going to keep a guy out for a year and then he'll get in eventually, that's one thing I have a little bit of a problem with. I know there's been a lot of talk this last week or so about the voting procedures and whether or not it needs to be changed and how it could be changed and all that stuff, and people having problems with writers who didn't vote for anybody.

I get all that stuff, but at the end of the day I don't understand this notion that maybe we shouldn't let this guy in on the first ballot, and maybe make him wait a little. What are you making him wait for? Either he has Hall of Fame stats or he doesn't. So that's why I think I look at my situation next year and whenever anybody says anything to me my standard answer is, ‘Well, I hope so.'

Yeah, I hope so too. Glavine's combination of wins and winning percentage is really hard to beat. That said, Don Sutton was roughly as good as Glavine and didn't get elected until his fifth year on the ballot. Gaylord Perry was probably better than Glavine, and needed three years. Both of those guys won more games than Glavine. The voters in recent decades have just been incredibly tough on starting pitchers, at least the first few times around. So nobody should be shocked if Glavine doesn't make it next year. Annoyed, yes. Shocked, no.

Anyway, gondeee closes with this: "If Glavine doesn't make it in next year, there will be some serious conversations about the validity of the process."

Well, yes. But I think there's a "more" missing from that sentence, because I don't know if the conversations will ever be more serious than they've been this year. And I'm not at all sure that Glavine not making it would come anywhere near to being the BBWAA voters' worst crime against the institution. I mean, this is a group of voters, broadly speaking, that ... Well, let me tell you a little story.

In 1980, Ron Santo appeared on the BBWAA ballot for the first time. Santo got 15 votes. Among the 23 players ahead of him: Roy Face, Elston Howard, Don Larsen, Alvin Dark, Ted Kluszewski, Don Newcombe, Lew Burdette, Harvey Kuenn, Mickey Vernon, Roger Maris, Maury Wills, and Gil Hodges. All those guys have something in common: since then, none have been elected to the Hall of Fame. They have something else in common: None of them should be in the Hall of Fame.

Somehow, the BBWAA convinced the Hall of Fame to restore three candidates -- Santo, Ken Boyer, and Curt Flood -- to the ballot in 1985. Fat lot of good it did any of them. Boyer topped out at 26 percent in 1988, Flood at 15 percent in '96, and Santo at 43 percent in 1998. Santo finally got elected by the Veterans Committee last year, not long after he died. It seems highly possible that if the BBWAA had just left him alone, hadn't strung him along for almost 20 years, the Veterans Committee would have gotten around to electing Santo before he passed on. So good job, BBWAA, good effort.

You know, I hate to keep beating up on the BBWAA -- after all, just a few weeks ago I would have been beating up on myself! -- but there are just so many things ... Like, many of the voters who can't bring themselves to vote for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens -- not to mention Rafael Palmeiro and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa -- just love to lean on the voting rules, which include that amorphous and little-used-until-now "integrity clause". It's a funny thing, though ... There's absolutely nothing in the rules about some bifurcation between first-ballot guys and everyone else. There's nothing in the rules that says you can't vote for anybody the first year unless they were Mickey Mantle, or played in a dozen All-Star Games or something. I'm pretty sure the rules just say you're supposed to vote for a guy if you think he belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Anyway, my point is that there have been, over the years, many serious conversations about the validity, or perhaps the efficacy, of the process. The rules governing the BBWAA's election were changed a number of times through the 1960s, and of course the Veterans Committee procedures have been changed five or six times in the last decade or so. If the process doesn't deliver the desired result, eventually it will be changed. Which is why I do think the BBWAA procedures will be changed within the next few years.

It's not that nobody will be elected in upcoming elections. There are too many incredible pitchers and Ken Griffeys for that. But the enshrinees won't keep pace with the arrival of outstanding candidates, and it won't be long before almost everyone -- the Hall of Fame's board of directors for sure, and maybe even some of the voters -- realize that it's patently ridiculous for the ballot to contain 15 or 20 qualified candidates every year.

So if and when changes are made, what might they be?

I've seen a couple of suggestions lately. One -- and I mentioned this yesterday -- is to expand the number of candidates the BBWAA voters may support. Right now the number is 10; some want to push that to 12, and some want to just let them vote for as many candidates as they like. It's the Wild West! Anything goes! But as we've already seen, that probably wouldn't make a significant difference in the results, giving candidates just a small bump. That almost certainly would have gotten Roberto Alomar in, his first year on the ballot; but not Craig Biggio, this year.

Another is to strip voting privileges from voters who fail to vote for certain candidates. Last week on MLB Network, the subject of Greg Maddux's impending candidacy came up, and Jon Heyman said anybody who doesn't vote for Maddux should have his vote taken away. And I saw another pundit -- I'm sorry that I can't remember who -- suggest something similar: If you don't vote for a candidate who receives at least 95-percent support, you lose your vote. Presumably, this would go a long way toward weeding out a) cranks like Howard Bryant, b) voters who don't think anybody should get in the first year, and c) voters who really, really just don't give enough of a tinker's damn to notice that Greg Maddux was Greg Maddux.

Would any of this really improve the process measurably, though? And that's assuming that it would work. Which it wouldn't. Most Hall of Fame voters treasure the privilege dearly; I'm fairly certain that if they were being judged in this way, nearly every voter would do whatever it took to retain that privilege. Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect that Howard Bryant would have voted for Greg Maddux, had he been on the ballot this year and had the 95-percent Rule been in effect.

Also, shouldn't voters be allowed to vote their conscience? If you suspected that a superstar had actually lost a game on purpose, wouldn't you want the freedom to withhold your Hall of Fame vote, even if you didn't have enough evidence to actually make a public accusation? I would.

That said, here are three reforms that might help some:

1. Rewrite, slightly, the voting rules.
No, I wouldn't remove the so-called "integrity clause". What I would do is expressly discourage this ridiculous distinction between first-ballot and non-first-ballot Hall of Famers. Maybe then voters like Heyman wouldn't use the current semi-ambiguity to justify leaving off guys like Biggio.

2. Cut the period of eligibility from 15 years to 10.
Really, 15 years is just a ridiculously long time. As Joe Sheehan pointed out last week, since 1980 only three players have been elected after their 10th year on the ballot: Bruce Sutter, Jim Rice, and Bert Blyleven. A .333 batting average in the majors is pretty good; .333 for the BBWAA is really lousy. Frankly, the Hall of Fame would have been better served if all these guys were cut loose after 10 seasons; eventually, Blyleven would have been elected by someone. Yes, maybe the other guys too, but we're talking about the BBWAA now. If the ballots were smaller, it would be easier to elect the most deserving players, and they would be smaller if so many hopeless candidates weren't kept on the ballot for so many years.

3. Replace unqualified voters with qualified voters.
If you're not a full-time baseball writer, or weren't a full-time baseball writer for 25 years, you don't get to vote. I mean, that's really easy; I would certainly allow longtime broadcasters to vote, and we could come up with some other obvious groups as well. But at a bare minimum, regularly covering baseball should be your job, or have been your job for a long time. Things like this just shouldn't happen, and wouldn't if the people who run the BBWAA had their act together.

Which they don't. Or maybe do have their act together, but that doesn't include maintaining a basic level of competence and integrity with regard to the Hall of Fame balloting. The BBWAA exists to serve the interests of a majority of its members, just like any other good union or trade organization. Fortunately, the BBWAA doesn't control the process; the Hall of Fame itself does (with some input/pressure from Major League Baseball). We really should stop tweeting and message-boarding BBWAA members, and start writing letters to Cooperstown. If there are changes, for better or worse, that's where they'll come from.

Poll

Should the BBWAA's voting procedures be reformed?

Yes, if only for the sake of credibility

225 votes

No, everything seems fine to me

17 votes

242 votes | Poll has closed

What's next for Biggio, Schilling, Bonds, and Clemens?

2013-01-15T15:46:00Z

Yesterday, I "reviewed" some things that Ken Rosenthal and Jon Heyman made on MLB Network last week, in the wake of the BBWAA's Hall of Fame balloting results. Today, it's some other guys' turns. Here's Harold Reynolds, same show but different desk:

Craig Biggio ... stands out to me, because the first ballot was big with Biggio. Larkin had 51.6 his first time, all right? Sandberg was 49.2, and Robbie Alomar was 73.7. That's a high number for Craig Biggio. He's gettin' in next year.

No, he's not. Well, probably not. Yes, in a normal year, Biggio would easily move from his 68 percent this year to 75+ next year. This is not a normal year. Not with all the steroid guys still on the ballot and the introductions of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas (and everybody also mentions Mike Mussina, but he'll be just an afterthought for most of the voters).

I do think Biggio will do well next year. Maybe he'll do better than this year because of the voters who simply won't vote for anybody except IMMORTALS (like Maddux) in their first year of eligibility. But everyone seems to think Maddux will automatically be elected, and that Glavine and Thomas will join him. I think it's just as likely that Maddux makes it, alone. Which would leave Glavine and Thomas and Biggio on the next ballot ... with Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez coming aboard. Plus all the rest of the guys with Hall of Fame numbers.

Later in the show, the subject of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds came up. Here's Bob Costas, on those megastars' future prospects:

Are there a substantial number of voters who want these guys to twist in the wind for a while, but eventually, recognizing their overwhelming excellence, pre-steroids, will elect them? That's why their 37 or 38 percent is different than the same number for Tim Raines. But we don't know yet how it will play out. I think it will be significant what the difference is between the first and the second; how big is the jump, if any, for Clemens and Bonds between years one and two. Then you might be able to see the possibility of a progression.

It's not like we don't have some guide to the future. When Mark McGwire retired, I think it's fairly safe to say, a majority of Hall of Fame voters considered him an excellent candidate. Six years later, he got 24 percent in his first appearance on the ballot. Were the voters just letting McGwire twist in the wind? One year later, he got 24 percent again. Then it was 22 percent, and 24 percent. That's one hell of a wind-twisting.

Anyway, shortly after he got 24 percent in his fourth try, McGwire went on TV with Bob Costas and admitted, for the very first time, that he'd used anabolic steroids during his career. You might recall that a number of voters said they would reëvaluate McGwire's candidacy if he would just admit that he'd cheated. The voters wanted to forgive McGwire, but first he would have to come clean.

So he talked to Bob Costas, and there were tears. Maybe they were crocodile tears and maybe they weren't; the fact is that McGwire did what so many Hall of Fame voters said he must do. And so the next time around? Twenty percent. McGwire's support has only decreased since Bob Costas made him cry.

Anyway, my point is that while Bonds and Clemens might fare better in the near future, history suggests that they won't, any more than McGwire and Palmeiro have fared better in succeeding elections. We could speculate about why these guys don't gain support, as so many non-Steroid Era players have. But I think that's too much to wrap my brain around, today. I think it's just safe to assume that both Bonds and Clemens will remain on the ballot for many years, but will struggle to clear even 50 percent in the coming elections. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of more, but it certainly won't happen anytime soon. And I think what's most likely is that they have to wait another 20 or more years, for some future manifestation of the Veterans Committee. The voters have made up their minds on this, and enough of them won't be changing 'em.

Next up: the burning subject of Curt Schilling, who despite being a fantastic candidate got just 39 percent on this, his first try. From the desk:

Al Leiter: There's also an issue of how likeable was he? The biased nature of writers, you know, we saw it with others in the past, with Ted Williams and others, where maybe some people left them off because of personality reasons. Not fair, not fair. You view him as what he's done.

--snip--

Harold Reynolds: Personality has something to do with this; it really does. You can argue any way you want, but writers [vote] for people they like. And Schilling's on TV, he's got a chance to show some personality. Bert Blyleven had personality. And people got to know him better after he got through playing, than they did when he played.

There's no reason to think that Schilling's personality hurt him at all. In fact, I would have expected the opposite. Sure, Schilling's taken a public-relations hit lately. But he was generally quite happy to talk to reporters, and that's all they really care about. Personality-wise.

Ted Williams received 282 of 302 possible votes when he first appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot. Some of those 20 non-voters might have been voting against his personality, but I suspect most simply wouldn't vote for anyone on the first ballot. Thirteen years later, 23 idiots didn't vote for Willie Mays. Nobody was nastier to the writers than Steve Carlton; on his first try, he got 96 percent of the vote. Jim Rice bedeviled the Boston writers; all they did was spearhead a campaign that ultimate got him elected, after beginning with support from only 30 percent of the voters.

Say what you like about the BBWAA -- and lordy I've said a lot over the years -- but it's very difficult to detect personal or racial bias in their voting patterns, whether for the Hall of Fame or the annual awards. And that goes back to 1947, when Jackie Robinson was the first Rookie of the Year.

Schilling didn't get elected because he didn't win 300 games or pitch like Sandy Koufax or have a really cool nickname (like "Catfish") and because the ballot was so ridiculously loaded. He did get 39 percent, which is actually pretty good for a first-timer. You might like his chances, except for the bizarreness of this current situation. I do believe that Schilling will be elected some day, but it will take at least 10 years and probably more than 20. Unless the voting rules are changed.

Which some of the voters would like to see. Oh, they don't want to give up any of their power over the process. There have not been, nor will there be, any serious discussions about adding qualified voters or subtracting unqualified voters. But there is some sentiment for allowing the voters to vote for more than 10 candidates. Monday, Nate Silver addressed this possibility in the Times and doesn't seem particularly convinced it would make a difference.

Did the 10-vote limit keep Biggio and Morris out of the Hall of Fame, perhaps along with other players?

Actually, it was almost certainly not responsible all by itself. Of the 24 percent of writers who used all 10 ballot slots, 90 percent did name Biggio, meaning 10 percent did not. At best, therefore, if all writers who exhausted their ballots would also have named Biggio if they had unlimited votes, he would have gotten only 10 percent of the 24 percent, adding only 2.4 percentage points to his overall vote total.

Frankly, you don't need more than 10 slots if you're not going to vote for the steroids dudes. And if you are going to vote for those dudes -- this means you, most of the ESPN crew -- then Job #1 should be convincing your colleagues to get off their high horses and do the same. Elect Bonds and Clemens and Bagwell and Piazza and the other obvious guys (but not Sammy Sosa please!) and there will be room for all of your pets on the ballot, eventually.

What's more interesting to me in Nate's post? He's finally done something I should have done a long time ago: He's quantified the bizarre-to-me jumps in support that so many candidates enjoy. On average, a candidate who begins with 10 percent reaches almost 30 percent in his last year on the ballot. And candidates who begin with 30 percent generally wind up getting elected! How does this happen? I've always thought it must be really complicated, but now I think it's just sorta complicated. Here's Silver again:

There is even something to be said for the so-called "paradox of choice": that when presented with too many options, we may be overwhelmed with information and have trouble making any decisions at all.

Hall of Fame voting is ultimately designed to be a consensus process. One reason that players tend to gain votes over time is because the writers are looking at what their peers are doing and value the endorsements of their colleagues. Moreover, because they have as many as 15 chances to elect a player, many writers tend toward conservatism initially. There is no way to remove a player from the Hall of Fame once he has been elected, but you can change your mind to include him later. When a writer initially votes "no" on a player, it really means "wait and see" in many cases.

Frankly, and I don't mean to pick on particular voters because I don't really know which ones to pick on and most of the really foolish ones don't advertise, but a large percentage of the voters are not conscientious and don't do a great deal of homework and are easily led to slaughter. I mean, there simply isn't any other way to explain the MASSIVE jumps in support over the years for so many candidates.

I don't mean to suggest that only a foolish voter changes his mind. I'm absolutely sure that if I were a voter, very occasionally I would change my mind about a borderline candidate. But just very occasionally, for the simple reason that my initial decision -- remember, this is five years after the player's career has ended -- would have been preceded by a great deal of study, including a great number of facts. I will guess that if your opinion is based largely on facts (say, me and Bert Blyleven) or largely on emotion (say, 62.4 percent of the electorate and Roger Clemens), you're probably not real likely to change your mind. But if you have neither facts nor emotion, then you're highly susceptible to persuasion, logrolling, etc. There really is no other explanation, because Jack Morris's credentials are exactly the same in 2013 as they were in 2000, when he got 22 percent of the vote and finished behind Steve Garvey and Tommy John.

This is why I had to laugh when Jon Heyman suggested that maybe someone should start a Jack Morris for the Hall of Fame campaign; the damned thing's been going for 14 years and it's been incredibly successful. What's funny -- as someone pointed out elsewhere -- is that while The Internet might have helped Bert Blyleven get elected, he's obviously an incredibly deserving candidate. And if the voters hadn't taken 14 years to elect Blyleven, there would have been a little more room for Morris to build his support, and he might well have been elected a year ago.

Or not. These things are tricky. It's hard to criticize a particular voter for his ballot, because it's almost impossible to find a voter whose ballot mirrors yours exactly. What we can and should continue to do is make our cases for and against serious candidates with as many facts as we can muster. Usually the truth, as we see it, will carry the day. Sometimes it won't. That's frustrating as hell, but then why should the Hall of Fame be any different than the rest of the world?

Jack Morris, the Tea Party, and WOW THE INTERNET

2013-01-14T21:05:41Z

Here's Jon Heyman on MLB Network last week, shortly after the results were announced:

It's really a shame and I think it really has hurt, as Dale Murphy told us it might, it's hurt some of the clean guys, and one of them is Jack Morris. Because you can't put in more than 10, and some people lean toward the steroid guys, and I think Jack Morris went up nothing in his second-to-last year, and I've never seen that before. This is a guy who was terrific in the postseason, and I don't want to rehash his whole career but I think this is a real shame that he's got one year to go. You've got more great guys coming on the ballot and he may never get it. And it seems like to me, he's been mistreated by being the only guy, he's the DH [sic], nobody's got in, AL-only DH pitchers, and now he's got the steroid guys working against him, and I think it's unfair to Jack Morris.

Later, Heyman sent this out into the world:

Time to start pro Jack Morris hall campaign. Guy can't get break. All-AL SP in dh era hurt by roid guys and 'net negativity
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) January 9, 2013

I don't want to rehash Jack Morris's whole career, either, and in fact I'll rehash it even less than Heyman rehashed it. Instead I'll just mention in passing that Heyman considers Morris a slam dunk for the Hall of Fame, but didn't vote for Craig Biggio. No, what really caught my eye was that reference to 'net negativity. Now, I'm not exactly sure what that means ... but I think I can make a decent guess.

Later in the show, Tom Verducci previewed next year's ballot, which will include first-timers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas. What will happen, Verducci asked Ken Rosenthal, next time? Here's Rosenthal's response:

I think those three get in, and Morris is going to be awfully close. And I will say this about Morris: I don't vote for him, but the level of discourse against him, by certain segments of the sabermetric community right now, is over the top. It's almost a crusade, and it's ridiculous. One thing that has bothered me, at times, not among many of us, but some of us, is the almost polarized view of the world now, that has come to pass. It's as if the Tea Party is taking over one part of baseball discussion, and that's not right.

Heyman, of course, weighed in there: "And the internet campaign against Jack Morris has really hurt him. I think it was the opposite with Blyleven, the internet campaign got him in."

Here's a question for Ken Rosenthal (who I like, and who generally does great work) ... How, exactly, should certain segments of the sabermetric community best present their case that Jack Morris was not, for example, as good as Bert Blyleven or Curt Schilling?

Basically, in Rosenthal's world-view, it seems that it's okay to mention in passing that a candidate isn't quite good enough for the Hall of Fame. But if you truly engage the question, and do some ACTUAL RESEARCH, then you're engaging in some ridiculous ill-spirited crusade.

The internet campaign has really hurt Morris? Perhaps a tiny bit. What I wanna know is, what's really been helping Morris? Because something sure has been helping him. Here were his vote percentages, his first four years on the ballot: 22-20-21-23. In his fourth year on the ballot, he finished 13th. Granted, eight of the guys ahead of him are now in the Hall of Fame. But four are not: Lee Smith, Steve Garvey, Jim Kaat, and Tommy John. In fact, none of those four have come close to Morris's 68-percent support on this year's ballot.

On the same ballot that saw Morris get 23 percent (in 2003), Alan Trammel got 14 percent. Morris has since jumped from 23 percent to 68 percent; Trammell's gone from 14 percent to 34 percent.

Last time I checked, THE INTERNET was higher on Trammell than Morris.

Is THE INTERNET a part of the story? Sure. Everything counts. I suspect that THE INTERNET did help Blyleven, if only because the internet -- and by that I mean the medium, not basement-pajama guys like me -- makes it a lot easier to publish facts (and lies, too, but most of the stuff about Blyleven was actually true). How badly has THE INTERNET hurt Morris, though? He was 42 votes short this time. It's certainly possible that THE INTERNET cost him 42 votes. It's also possible that the internet got him a few votes. And I don't mean just because guys like Heyman and most of the ESPN.com crew were able to use the internet to pump his candidacy. There were probably a few reactionaries who actually voted for Morris simply because they knew it would piss off THE INTERNET.

Frankly, it should be very clear to everyone that Rob Neyer and Joe Sheehan and Jay Jaffe have an exceptionally small impact on Hall of Fame balloting. If that were not true, then Jim Rice wouldn't be in the Hall of Fame and Jack Morris wouldn't come nearly as close as he's come. If that were not true, Craig Biggio would have been elected this year, along with a number of other notables. Does THE INTERNET impact Hall of Fame voting? Probably. But not nearly as much, I suspect, as the Old Guard you see on MLB Network and ESPN every day, and on all the big-boy websites. Most of these guys have been doing their very best for a few years to get Jack Morris elected, and their failure (so far) says less about their continuing power over other old white guys (i.e. "the voters") than about the flimsiness of Morris's credentials.

Ken Rosenthal thinks THE INTERNET is like the Tea Party? Well, okay. In his defense, the fact that he does not vote for Jack Morris does give him a bit of credibility. But I don't think the anti-Morris forces are what Rosenthal thinks they are. Mostly, they're just a bunch of people who think a vote for Jack Morris is a vote against Alan Trammell or Tim Raines, and who are persistent in their frustration that, no matter how many facts they marshal in response, another voter will pop and spout a bunch of bullshit about Morris just knowing how to win.

You know, stuff like this:

He's not a Bert Blyleven type, who will suddenly get a surge of support from numbers crunchers. Quite the opposite. Morris has become the whipping boy for those who lean more on numbers, who refuse to acknowledge that as vital as stats are in examining a Hall of Famer, there also is a value to the so-called "wow factor" the player created among his peers during his playing days.

With Morris it wasn't wow. It was WOW.

That's Tracy Ringolsby, writing in Baseball America. See, if you argue the facts about Jack Morris, you're not just making a case; you're turning Morris into a whipping boy in the midst of your over-the-top crusade.

Also, you're ignoring the WOW FACTOR ... which was so WOW during his playing days that five years after he retired, only 20 percent of the Hall of Fame voters were WOWED by him. Which was so WOW during his playing days that Morris never won a Cy Young Award, or finished second for a Cy Young Award. He was so WOW during his playing days that not once in his whole career did Ringolsby's peers consider Morris even the second-best pitcher in the American League.

Those are facts, to which guys like Ringolsby can only respond with a big WOW.

The Tea Party. Taking over the discussion. From our basements. Heh. That's a good one, guys. Really it is.

P.S. I just re-read Heyman's tweet. It's time to START a pro-Morris campaign? Are you f'ing s'ing me?

Should Hall voters just ignore drugs completely?

2013-01-11T22:56:39Z

Like you, I continue to read columns written by baseball writers about the Hall of Fame. Like you, I continue to read columns written by baseball writers about the Hall of Fame and steroids. Perhaps unlike you, I feel a personal responsibility to respond to these articles, and attempt to make sense of them all. I would like to write one column, in this space, that responds to all the other columns and answers all of the outstanding questions that have been posed, in one forum or another, since this lovely issue first reared its ugly and controversial head.

Alas, I find my powers are insufficient for the task. If I did write just one (more) column, it would run 10,000 words ... and the very next day, I would read something else that deserved a response.

Just this week, I've already written a few thousand words on the subject, and yet I could easily have written a few thousand more. Joe Sheehan's been writing brilliantly about the Hall of Fame; so has Joe Posnanski and Jay Jaffe and I don't even want to think how many others. You could publish a really good book, just compiling the intelligent things that have been written about the Hall of Fame in the last five days. Easily.

And yet the subject seems to me inexhaustible, and so today's column won't be my last. The trick is to write something that one of the Joes hasn't just written, or that I didn't write last fall, or last winter, or three years ago. About that last, I can't make any guarantees. Except that I'm reborn every split-second of every moment, and I contain multitudes and all that. Which means I'm constitutionally incapable of writing exactly what I wrote last winter, or having exactly the same thoughts. I just hope everything's different enough to justify, once again, your valuable time.

So ends one of the longest preambles I've ever written. Today I want to give some space to SI.com's Jon Heyman, who (let's be honest) is often maligned as one of the BBWAA's Old Guard, devoted to defending an integrity that Major League Baseball's never actually had. But the truth is that Heyman's views are -- like those of most, but not all, of his colleagues -- a little more complicated than that.

While I do believe Bonds took steroids (whether it was knowingly or not doesn't much matter to me, though if I had to guess, I think he knows everything that goes in his body), I don't believe all steroid users should be excluded from the Hall of Fame. I'm not here to sit in moral judgment of another human being.

--snip--

Unless a voter makes a moral judgment (and I won't judge voters who do that, either), the question voters need to ask, beyond whether a candidate ever used PEDs, is whether those drugs helped transform the player into a Hall of Famer. If there's a reasonable chance that player would have fallen short of the Hall without the extra help, I won't vote yes. I vote no on Mark McGwire, who I like much better than Bonds. While I believe McGwire's achievements are clearly Hall worthy (it's a copout to say they aren't), I have strong reason to suspect the drugs helped him reach those heights.

As for Bonds, I don't think anyone could reasonably make the case that he needed drugs to be a Hall of Famer...

In the narrowest sense, I agree with Heyman about this: Bonds would have posted Hall of Fame numbers if steroids had never been invented, and McGwire probably wouldn't have.

In the larger sense ... Well, let me back away from Heyman's voting stance for a moment. Instead, let's list the various stances that we've seen espoused by actual voters, in general order of popularity:

1. I'm not voting for anyone who's been associated with steroids.

2. I'm not voting for anyone I think might have been associated with steroids.

3. I'm not voting for anyone associated with steroids if they needed drugs to become a Hall of Fame candidate.

4. I'm not going to consider steroids at all when I'm voting.

5. I'm not voting for anybody whose career was mostly during the Steroids Era.

6. I'm not voting for anybody, just because I can.

Apparently there were only five voters who submitted blank ballots, and we might simply consider those voters -- yes, including ESPN's Howard Bryant -- as the lunatic fringe, and write them off; on this issue, there's simply no use appealing to reason, and fortunately there aren't enough of them to make a real difference in the results.

There were apparently a few voters in Category 5, too: We know that Ken Gurnick and Murray Chass both voted for just one candidate: Jack Morris. Although whether those were anti-steroids or anti-sabermetrics votes is hard to say; in the case of Chass, probably both. Anyway, there were few enough Category 5 voters that we might, purely for the purposes of today's discussion, dismiss them as lunatics, too. I will say that if you simply can't bring yourself to vote for anyone from the Steroids Era, then not voting for anyone probably does make the most sense, due to this simple fact: If you vote for only players who haven't been suspected of steroid use, it's inevitable that you will actually vote for players who did, in fact, use steroids. It's just foolish to think otherwise.

Anyway, it's Categories 1 through 4 that most interest me at the moment, because it's clear that the great majority of voters fall within that range. Heyman has now placed himself within Category 3, and the first thing I'm going to say is that there are some real problems with the Category 3 argument.

Mark McGwire last played baseball in 2001. Major League Baseball's drug policy didn't say anything meaningful about steroids until 2005, just as it didn't say anything about amphetamines until 2005. One might reasonably argue that McGwire's crimes were equivalent to those committed by all the future Hall of Famers who were hopped up on greenies in the '70s and '80 ... and were less egregious than those committed by all the ball-scuffers and bat-corkers who broke actual rules designed to ensure that everyone was playing the games fairly.

I continue to wait for one of The Old Guard to explain the substantive difference between amphetamines in the 1970s and steroids in the 1990s. I'm willing to be educated, but I believe the reason I'm still waiting is simple: The Old Guard is unable to explain the difference to themselves, so they're just ignoring the question.

But while Category 3 might have some problems, I'm obviously a lot closer to Category 3 than Categories 1 and 2 ... and I'm not a big fan of Category 4, either. It seems to me that Categories 1 and 4 are all about throwing up your hands and just giving up. While they lead to vastly different outcomes -- nobody gets in, or everybody gets in -- they're both about thinking about the issue, then making a catch-all rule for all situations. And the older I get, the less I believe in rules that cover every situation.

Which is why I can't join most of my friends in Category 4. Not categorically. I believe, as Bill James once wrote about evaluating players, that everything counts. Sure, that doesn't mean everything should count equally; the voters who now behave as if the "integrity clause" counts the same as a player's statistics are misguided (at best).

Heyman says it's a "copout" to suggest McGwire's statistics aren't Hall of Fame-worthy. Looking at McGwire's Wins Above Replacement according to FanGraphs, McGwire ranks just ahead of Darrell Evans and Dick Allen, neither of whom have come close to the Hall of Fame. And he's even with Joe Torre, another non-Hall of Famer. McGwire was a brittle slugger who was, for most of his career, essentially worthless as both a fielder and runner. I'm not saying McGwire doesn't have Hall of Fame numbers; I'm saying that Jon Heyman has not voted for many pre-Steroids Era players who won just as many games as Mark McGwire.

Anyway, my point is this: If we acknowledge that McGwire is a borderline Hall of Fame candidate, better than some Hall of Famers but worse than many others, should we simply ignore the fact that his illegal drug use, at a time when most of his peers were probably not using drugs, might well have given him a statistical boost, without which we wouldn't even be having this conversation? Should we completely ignore the possibility that McGwire's drug use encouraged other players to do the same?

Maybe we should. I don't have a ballot, so my rubber hasn't hit the road. But if everything counts, I believe that scoring drugs and participating in what's an ugly sort of culture does fall under the heading of everything. Just like postseason performance, magazine covers, and how many autographs you gave to little kids.

Categories 2 and 3 are really hard. But I'll go with the hard stuff almost every time.

Alas, Jon Heyman has changed his mind. That quoted material above? That was two years ago. This time around, Heyman's gone from Category 3 to Category 2, or perhaps even Category 1. No distinction between McGwire and Bonds -- he voted for neither of them -- or between steroids and amphetamines. One size fits all. And while two years ago Heyman wrote, "I'm not here to sit in moral judgment of another human being," now he writes, "I didn't want to reward the cheats."

My invitation to Heyman and most of the rest of the Old Guard ... Join me, friends, in Category 3. It's a lot harder, but in the end, it's a lot more interesting, too. With the added benefit of being able to say, with a straight face, that you're not sitting in moral judgment.

Poll

If you were a Hall of Fame voter, in which category would you fall?

Category 1 (not voting for steroids guys)

52 votes

Category 2 (not voting for suspected steroids guys, either)

21 votes

Category 3 (consider steroids, but not a deal-breaker)

379 votes

Category 4 (don't care a whit about steroids)

215 votes

Category 5 (not voting for anybody at all)

1 votes

Category 6 (not voting for Steroids Era guys)

2 votes

670 votes | Poll has closed

Baseball Hall of Fame: Why It's Still Worth Caring

2013-01-10T17:40:46Z

"Why the hell do you even care anymore?" a colleague not unreasonably asked me the day before the votes for the 2013 Hall of Fame class were tallied. "The Hall is an arbitrary concept. I appreciate the defense of critical thinking and intellectual honesty, but as an institution, it's not worth it. "

I can see how people could stop caring about the Hall of Fame. On the one side, a portion of the public, and much of the electorate, is so bitter over PEDs that they want to tar and feather the lot of ballplayers from the so-called "Steroid Era" (if you can define both the beginning and the end of said era, please feel free) before they even let them inside the city limits of Cooperstown. On the other extreme are the rabble who are livid that the best players from an entire generation are being excluded without evidence they used or that what they used helped them play better. And then there are the unwashed masses in the middle who are just tired of all the shouting.

In light of all the bickering, it's incredibly tempting to throw up one's hands and say, "Screw it." After all, we're talking about building in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York that most baseball fans are never going to visit. But to dismiss the Hall as merely a museum with a fancy club inside it is to deny the power that the label "Hall of Famer" has to shape baseball culture and history. Those words become shorthand to signal that certain careers are particularly worth remembering. Thus is the Hall not just the keeper of baseball's history, but a framer of how people will see the game they loved and how it will be perceived in the future.

It's through the lens of the Hall of Fame that the 1960s become the era of Frank Robinson, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson, and not of Norm Cash, Ken Boyer, Larry Jackson or Jim Maloney. The 1980s are about Ozzie, Brett, Schmidt, and Ripken, not Lou Whitaker, Buddy Bell, Darrell Evans, and Willie Randolph. Players like Kirby Puckett get immortalized, while Chet Lemon gets relegated to the historical dustbin. Bill Dahlen has just a single biography on sale on Amazon, while Honus Wagner has at least seven that I can count. Everyone and their father can tell you about Joe DiMaggio, but what do even diehard fans know about his brother Dominic these days? Jim Rice is "TEH MOST FEARED HITTER OF HIS ERA!!!!!111!!!1" while Dwight Evans is "he had a nice arm." We can go on and on and play that game forever, but what it ultimately boils down to time after time is, becoming a Hall of Famer immortalizes a player and solidifies his place in the game's history.

You may not see making the Hall of Fame as an achievement, but hundreds of thousands of others do. While I could care less if Jack Morris, Dale Murphy, or Lee Smith eventually gets in, I'm sad Craig Biggio, Tim Raines, Alan Trammell, and especially Kenny Lofton (who fell off the ballot) aren't getting the recognition they deserve for what they did on the field, and royally pissed at how Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza's accomplishments are diminished when they're lumped in with PEDs users despite the fact that there's no evidence implicating either of them. In defiance of my increasingly thin cynical shell, I want to believe that accomplishments are rewarded. That we get what we deserve.

The Hall is about the legacies that these players are leaving behind, and the legacies I'm passing along to my kids. That's silly and overly dramatic; believe me, I know. If I were you I would be rolling my eyes and groaning too. But a long time ago I fell for a game that I came to love, that I decided to try and understand as best I could. I bet a lot of you did too. In addition to Little League, Babe Ruth, and High School ball, I bet a lot of you read box scores, and followed batting races, and bought baseball cards, and sorted those cards into piles and albums, made teams out of them, and memorized their backs. I bet a bunch of you read Pete Palmer and Bill James and Rob Neyer and Michael Lewis and began to fundamentally question what you thought you knew.

Why does the Hall of Fame matter to me? It matters because I want all that effort to be for more than just my own enjoyment, even though that's a great end in and of itself. I want to give credit where it's due. I want to reward the just and punish the guilty. I want all of us to better understand the past so that the future is not so bleak and disappointing as yesterday's announcement that no one was elected despite there being several deserving candidates. I can't make you care about the same things I do, but if you're a baseball fan, I sure as hell think you should care about the Hall of Fame.

Michael Bates is one of SBN's Designated Columnists and one of the minds behind The Platoon Advantage. Follow him at @commnman.

The forgotten man of the 2013 Hall of Fame vote

2013-01-10T14:00:09Z

I get the Bonds and Clemens stuff. I really do. I don't like it, but I understand why they're not going into the Hall of Fame in July.

I kind of get the Bagwell and Piazza stuff, too. As in, if the performance-enhancing-drug hysteria is at a certain point, I can understand why rumors and innuendo might be enough for a body of voters who never pretended to be in a court of law. I despise the rationale behind it, but it's not like it was conjured out of thin air.

I can even understand Tim Raines and Alan Trammell not getting the proper amount of respect. They each played in the shadow of a clear first-ballot, inner-circle player throughout their entire careers, and they didn't rack up the counting stats or awards to overcome that.

I don't get the lack of respect for Curt Schilling.

As a Hall of Fame candidate, I mean. As a person, well, sure. He's a true 80 on the "I hope I don't sit next to that guy on an airplane" scale. As a pitcher, though, he was everything that we're supposed to believe Jack Morris was. Schilling is one of those rare cases for whom you can make an airtight statistical case (Roger Clemens is the only eligible pitcher with more wins above replacement who isn't in the Hall), while simultaneously constructing a case based on his intangibles (the bloody sock, a 2.33 postseason ERA in 133 innings).

Schilling was the archetype of the plus-control, high-strikeout pitcher, which makes him something of a snapshot in time. If you wanted to be successful in the '90s and '00s, you pitched like Curt Schilling, missing bats and limiting walks. Few did it better. Or, rather, no one did it better. He pitched long enough to win more than 200 games, and he dominated in a high-offense era. He pitched in four World Series, and he literally pitched with his tendon shooting blood out of his ankle like something out of a Sam Peckinpah movie to help the Red Sox win their first championship in a millennium. Literally!

And he did his best work, his stretch of truly superior pitching, during the peak of the steroids era. If the voters are going to penalize everyone on the list of 205 names the Senator from Wisconsin had in his hand, why wouldn't they give extra credit to the players who excelled against those stacked odds? Considering there's no smoke around Schilling and PEDs, why wouldn't he get a boost?

Instead, he got 38.8 percent of the vote. Now, that's not a death knell for Schilling's chances. Consider Goose Gossage, who picked up an even lower total on his first try, but would be elected on his ninth. Except the tail end of Gossage's candidacy coincided with a host of players who didn't excite the voters, even if they should have. It was easy for Gossage to be something of a cause célèbre in 2008.

But check out the pitchers Schilling has to contend with in the next two years:

Tom Glavine
Greg Maddux
Randy Johnson
Pedro Martinez
Mike Mussina
John Smoltz

Remember that note up there about Clemens being the only eligible pitcher ahead of Schilling in career WAR? Here are the rest. Maddux, Johnson, and Martinez were obvious guesses, but Mussina also sneaks ahead. Glavine and Smoltz are a little behind, but Glavine has the 300 wins, and Smoltz has the odd (and somewhat dubious) distinction of excelling as a top-flight closer for a couple of years. That, plus his long-time association with Maddux and Glavine, separates him from the herd.

Against that competition, Schilling doesn't stand out. He almost seems second-tier -- like Mussina, he's a pitcher without a Cy Young to help his argument. Of note: I'm prepared to recycle just about everything in this column next year for one on Mussina, because everything will still apply except the postseason heroics

Those are just the pitchers, too. There's more to the backlog than that. It's not like voters get five slots for pitchers and five for hitters. The Barry Bonds faction will still be vocal, as will the Craig Biggio voters. Frank Thomas comes on the ballot with Jeff Kent, and Junior Griffey follows shortly. Mike Piazza isn't going anywhere, and neither is Jeff Bagwell, and hopefully more and more voters will start to come around. There's a subset of voters who will never stop voting for guys like Trammell, Fred McGriff, and Lee Smith.

New guys will show up on the ballot. Chipper Jones and Omar Vizquel, who will join whomever up there didn't get the golden chalice, or whatever it is you need to make it to the final round of this stupid reality show. Jim Thome might retire this year. And on. And on.

So here's a prediction: Schilling is going to be someone we're still arguing about in 2020, a Bert Blyleven for a new generation. There will be arguments and counter-arguments, and the counter-arguments will make you twitch, but that's the point of Hall of Fame debates, I suppose. And, after a decade, give or take a couple of years, our long national slight annoyance will be over, and Schilling will get in.

I just don't get why it was Schilling who got caught up and forgotten in this backlog of superlative candidates. He has a great case from the stats side. He has a great case from the feels side. I can understand most of the names below 50 percent on the 2013 BBWAA ballot. But I can't understand Schilling's.

A short history of the no-inductee Hall of Fame ballots from the BBWAA

2013-01-09T22:02:38Z

Fast forward to Cooperstown in July. One man with a sno-cone stand, syrup dripping down his outstretched hand like a blue tear. A family huddling together, wishing they had brought a blanket. The great-grandson of Deacon White, playing harmonica on state. A cold wind blows. A wolf howls.

Alright, maybe it's not quite that dramatic. But it is kind of a big deal, the Baseball Writers Association of America not inducting a player into the Hall of Fame. You'll hear or read that this isn't unprecedented, that it's happened seven times before. And that's true. But there is a big difference between the two eras of zero-inductee elections from the BBWAA. Here's a quick look at the two different eras:

Overcrowded ballots and baseball writers are weird

This is the post-WWII era, when the writers didn't induct anyone in five different elections. Those years, along with the number of eventual Hall of Famers on the ballots in those years:

1945 (56 eventual Hall of Famers)
1946 (46)
1950 (50)
1958 (42)
1960 (40)

Loaded ballots, all of them. There are a lot of footnotes. Some of those eventual Hall of Famers were guys like Branch Rickey and Casey Stengel, who weren't close to qualifying because of their playing careers. And there are more than a couple who were eventual Veteran's Committee mistakes, so perhaps they shouldn't count toward a "loaded ballot" claim. And in '45 and '46, there were a total of 20 players inducted by the Old Timers Committee, with five of those players still living.

But in 1945, the writers of the BBWAA could have submitted a ballot with Rube Waddell, Mickey Cochrane, Kid Nichols, Lefty Grove, Charlie Gehringer, Sam Crawford, Carl Hubbell, Eddie Plank, Home Run Baker, and Amos Rusie, and you'd have to leave off Harry Heilmann, Ed Delahanty, Ted Lyons, Dazzy Vance, Bill Dickey, Bill Terry … the list goes on. And I wouldn't have argued vehemently that Rusie needed to go in before Dickey, or vice versa. There were just too many good options, too many directions in which to run with your ballot.

That's one reason for the no-induction BBWAA ballots back then. But another one is that the writers back then were weird. Do you know who was on the ballot in '45? Well, I just mentioned him, but it's worth singling him out. Lefty Grove was on that ballot. Take a spin around Lefty Grove's Baseball Reference page. He led his league in ERA nine times. He led his league in strikeouts the first six years he was in the league. He had 300 wins and a 30-win season. In the fan-based MLB EloRater, he is currently the fourth-best pitcher of all time.

In 1945, he was named on 11.3 percent of the ballots.

What kind of sniff test are you using for the Hall of Fame that makes it okay to not vote for Lefty Grove? Which criteria, what impossible set of standards would your Hall of Fame have to not put Lefty Grove in? No idea. I can't conceive it.

In 1960, Grove received 2.2 percent of the vote. He had been in the Hall of Fame for 13 years. He was on a ballot with Lefty Gomez and Lefty O'Doul, so maybe a few writers scrawled "ALL THE LEFTYS PLEASE" on a square of toilet paper and mailed it in. No idea.

The important part is that baseball writers were weird back then. Which is totally unlike now.

A dearth of great candidates

In 1971, there was an empty class, but only 15 eventual candidates came from the pool. There were a lot of recognizable names -- Yogi Berra, Duke Snider, Richie Ashburn -- but there wasn't an obvious inner-circle guy other than possibly Berra, who caught the wrath of the first-ballot zealots. Seven players that year were inducted by either the Veterans Committee or the Negro League Committee.

In 1996, only six of the players getting a vote eventually got in. And most of those were fringe cases, too. Consider this list of the players who were later elected:

Career WAR:
Phil Niekro, 91
Ron Santo, 67
Don Sutton, 61
Tony Perez, 50
Jim Rice, 44
Bruce Sutter, 23

And let me rejigger it, to make a point:

Career WAR:
Phil Niekro, 91
Ron Santo, 67
Kenny Lofton, 65
Don Sutton, 61
Tony Perez, 50
Jim Rice, 44
Bruce Sutter, 23

I'm all about having a conversation about Kenny Lofton and the Hall of Fame. I think it's a shame that he dropped off the ballot on the first try, like Lou Whitaker. But I don't think Lofton was a guaranteed, had-to-be, no-argument Hall of Famer. Yet he might have been the third-best player on the '96 ballot. (The Veterans Committee inducted two players in '96, with Jim Bunning still alive.)

So now that we have two categories for the no-inductee BBWAA ballots, which one is 2013 going to fall under? I think … and this might be a shock … that when the slow trickle of time carves a canyon into baseball's collective psyche, when all of this hysteria is over, this year could possibly go under the "Overcrowded ballots and baseball writers are weird" category.

Maybe. I mean, I'm just spitballin' here. But there were 11 players I would have voted for this year, along with two more that I would have seriously considered. It was an overstuffed ballot. That, and I think there was something about performance-enhancing dogs, which seems weird now that I think about it, but I don't follow this stuff too closely.

There you have it: the years when no one was worthy of the Hall of Fame, even though there were several people worthy of the Hall of Fame. This year isn't a precedent-setter. In fact, it fits with the weirdest of the bunch, even if there are some different reasons for this year's empty class from the BBWAA.

BBWAA throws shutout at Hall of Fame candidates

2013-01-09T19:18:56Z

Wednesday, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum announced the results of the annual voting by the Baseball Writers Association of America, and it's not likely that the Hall's board of directors is pleased ... the BBWAA didn't elect anyone this year, which means for the first time in a long time, this summer's induction ceremony won't honor a single living inductee.

Among those shut out: Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and Craig Biggio, who came the closest to election with 388 votes, 39 votes short of the necessary 75 percent of the electorate. Here's a snapshot of all the candidates who received enough votes to gain a spot on next year's ballot:

There is precedent for nobody being elected. In 1996, for example, and despite the presence of two 300-game winners on the ballot -- Phil Niekro and Don Sutton -- nobody was elected, with Niekro falling 32 votes short. A year later, Niekro alone would be elected. There simply weren't a huge number of great candidates in the middle 1990s, though; aside from Niekro, only five other candidates on that '96 ballot -- Sutton, Tony Perez, Bruce Sutter, Jim Rice, and Ron Santo -- have been elected since, and the truth is that most of those guys have (at best) marginal Hall of Fame credentials.

There's also precedent for a player like Biggio getting snubbed, his first time out. Biggio finished his career with 3,060 hits, and of course 3,000 hits has always been a magic number for Hall of Fame voters; the great majority of players with 3,000 hits have been elected immediately upon become eligible for the Hall. But not all of them. Rafael Palmeiro finished with 3,020 hits. This election was his third, and he's now farther from Cooperstown than ever, receiving only 50 votes this time around.

But of course Palmeiro's a special case. For a better example, we have to go all the way back to the 1940s. In 1944, Paul Waner collected his 3,152nd (and final) hit; at the time, he ranked seventh on the all-time list. But while Waner first became eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1948, he wasn't elected until his fifth try, in 1952.

Absent the whole steroids mess, these times are a bit like those times, with ballots just loaded with excellent candidates. In 1952, when Waner and Harry Heilmann were elected, Al Simmons and Bill Dickey finished fifth and sixth in the balloting; Hank Greenberg and Joe Cronin were 11th and 13th. But all of those men were eventually elected ... and so were literally dozens of others on that ballot. So for Biggio and many others who didn't make it this year, this is just the beginning; some of them will spend the rest of the lives nursing hopes that are not, if history's any guide, terribly unrealistic.

The other big news, of course, is that Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds both failed to garner support from even 40 percent of the voters. At this point, that situation probably speaks for itself. If you have any sympathy left in your heart, you might consider sending it toward Kenny Lofton, who (according to Baseball-Reference.com) won more games for his teams than Biggio, but has fallen off the ballot after getting only 18 votes.

There will be a wait, and perhaps a significant wait, for Biggio and everyone else who didn't make it this year. Because next year's ballot will feature Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas, all of whom are going to draw significant support (although Maddux might be the only one who's actually elected). The year after that? Randy Johnson, Pedro Martínez and John Smoltz.

This was Biggio's -- and Jeff Bagwell's, and Mike Piazza's, and Curt Schilling's, and Alan Trammell's, and Jack Morris's, and Tim Raines's, and everyone else's -- best chance for a while. For them, what's next is a lot of years hoping for a phone call that won't come.

Welcome to the modern Hall of Fame, everyone! Brought to you by drug users and baseball writers!