We are less than a week away from learning the results of this year’s Hall of Fame vote. I have a lot of thoughts on what might be the most talked about HOF ballot in history, but before I get to those, let me show you my Wordle scores!
No, let’s skip that.
Disclaimer: I do not vote for the Hall of Fame. Although you are reading this, which clearly means I have written it, my job description is broadcaster. So, I do not belong to the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) and, therefore, I do not receive a ballot. I am simply part of the discussion, an interested observer, like the rest of you.
Some thoughts:
Getting 75% of people to agree on anything is incredibly difficult
Is it nice out today? Where should we go for lunch? Do you think players who used steroids belong in the Hall of Fame?
This is simply the biggest and most difficult hurdle of the process. Remember how hard it is to get even a simple majority in most cases, and then know that clearing the 75 percent bar is incredibly hard for anyone not named Ruth, Seaver, Griffey, Jeter…you get the idea.
Can we please get 75 percent to agree that we don’t care about your Wordle scores?
How you or I define “Hall of Famer” doesn’t really matter
Is it a player who was among the best in his era? Is he someone who eclipsed round number milestones? Is it someone who performed well in the postseason?
Remember that great scene in A Few Good Men (I know, aren’t they all great?) when Tom Cruise gets drunk and loses it on Demi Moore, and then Cruise asks Kevin Pollack if he would put Jack Nicholson on the stand? (Look, if you aren’t following this because you haven’t seen the movie, I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself). Pollack answers by reminding Cruise that only he, meaning Cruise, can make that decision because nobody else is the lead counsel for the defense in this particular case.
This is what Hall of Fame voting comes down to. There are certain guidelines, but in the end it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. It’s all in the hands of the person filling out the ballot, and that person alone. And then someone else gets to count them all up and see if 75 percent of the people voting agreed, which if you don’t remember is really hard to achieve.
The rules are pretty simple, but also quite complicated
Basically to be eligible you had to have played at least 10 years and be retired for five years before you get the chance to be on a ballot.
Other than that, these are the only instructions The Hall has provided to its voters:
Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.
That’s it, nothing more. Nothing about how many awards they won, how many home runs they hit, how they compare to others at their position.
And there certainly isn’t anything specific about how to handle the steroids issue, so that all depends on how one defines integrity, sportsmanship, and character.
These are not words that baseball writers made up to justify some sort of gatekeeper status. These words are part of the instructions written BY THE HALL OF FAME. And the Hall is who handed the voting responsibility to the BBWAA.
This process gets misconstrued quite often because people don’t like the results and want someone to yell at, so they yell at the people who cast the ballots. Understandable. But the process gets more complicated when the guidelines are not specific regarding steroid users.
And for all the arguments about the Gil Hodges, Don Mattingly, and Keith Hernandez types – and Pete Rose, who the Hall of Fame has never allowed to appear on the ballot, so yell at them if you must – the real question most fans have right now about the legitimacy of Hall of Fame voters comes down to their stance on the known and suspected PED guys.
So let me take a stab at this and give you my take.
More people think Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens belong in the Hall of Fame than don’t
This looks to be the sixth straight year in which both players will get at least 50 percent of the vote and the third straight year in which they get at least 60 percent. This makes you a winner in just about everything in life, but again we’re back to that 75 percent is hard thing.
The problem isn’t simply what you think about steroid users, either, because there isn’t one standard here. Do you think all users should be in or out? Do you think Bonds and Clemens proved their greatness before suspected PED use and that makes them Hall of Famers, or do you think the timeline of their guilt shouldn’t matter? Do you care that there was strong evidence, but no positive tests?
See how all of this gets complicated quickly?
I’ve never had to seriously answer this question because I don’t have a vote. And in just thinking about it over the years I’ve waffled a bit because it’s so complicated. But I think – I think – I’ve come to my own answers. I believe there is enough evidence to suggest both players used PEDs. I believe that being “clean” up to a certain time (and how do we really know) doesn’t absolve the user (the old “I was a law abiding citizen before I robbed that bank, your honor” defense). And I believe that players who used PEDs chose the rewards of longer, richer careers and I’m not inclined to reward them further.
There are enough elements to think about here that it’s not hard to see why that extra 10 to 15 percent is so hard to achieve for two players who were undoubtedly among the greatest we’ve ever seen. But if you do have a vote, you’ve been instructed to consider integrity, sportsmanship, and character without any clear definition as to how they apply to PED use.
If you think it’s easy, it’s probably only because you have your mind made up. It’s not that easy for the voters I know that wrestle with this every year.
How is David Ortiz that different than Alex Rodriguez if both players were named in the 2003 survey testing?
You mean the anonymous survey testing? The one where some of the one hundred plus names were leaked out years after the fact, but not all of them?
Ortiz denied that positive test and there has been at least some credible talk that some of the positive tests from that list were false positives. And since we are living in a COVID world I think most of us are now familiar with how false positives can work. Other than that, no evidence of PED use stuck to Ortiz.
Rodriguez used that same leaked survey test result to confess to several years’ worth of PED use, asked people to “judge me from this day forward,” and then was embroiled in a second PED controversy that, even though it didn’t include a positive test result, had enough evidence to support a year-long suspension in 2014.
There is nothing borderline about either player’s statistics. Both would waltz into the Hall of Fame with a near unanimous vote if that’s all they were judged on. But once again, voters are asked to determine individually what integrity, sportsmanship and character mean to them. And it seems more people are willing to draw that line at the testing era and actual failed tests and penalties, which has seemingly torpedoed Manny Ramirez’s chances of ever making the Hall of Fame just as it has for Rodriguez.
Ortiz has overcome several obstacles, including his lack of glove work (more on that later), in part because he won multiple championships and that is a legitimate part of the voting criteria. But the vote so far is also showing that Ortiz’s likable personality plays a role in overcoming obstacles others cannot.
And that brings us to the idea of the popularity contest.
Is Curt Schilling being kept out of the Hall because of his socio-political takes?
Schilling’s final vote this year will likely indicate that it is a factor with many voters. But he’s teetered on election with over 70 percent the last two years prior to this. That’s just enough of a discrepancy to where his 216 career wins might not be enough to sway some voters to his side despite the strikeout numbers and postseason success that do play in his favor. I would have thought Schilling would have made it already and I have thought of him as Hall of Fame worthy. But I can see where his win total might be a factor with some voters; consider that Mike Mussina’s candidacy needed time to gain traction despite his 270 wins.
It’s clear that there are some legitimate beefs with Schilling over (you guessed it) integrity, sportsmanship, and character. This would be a lot simpler if there were some further explanation of that clause to mean that it should only be applied to the person’s actual playing career and not his post-playing career. But without even that kind of guidance, it is once again left to the individual voter to decide, and the Hall of Fame seems to like the process just the way it is.
Have there been people who don’t vote for players they simply don’t like? I’m sure that’s happened more than once, and it’s quite likely racism played a part in some past voting eras as well. But a clear-cut Hall of Fame candidate shouldn’t have much trouble overcoming that obstacle to meet the 75 percent threshold. I’ve yet to meet a reporter who liked Eddie Murray, and he probably took a little hit for that despite over 3,000 hits and 500 home runs. But he still skated through the process with 85 percent on his first ballot.
Schilling also lobbed his own little grenade into this mix. A year ago, after coming up less than five percentage points short of election, he hit send on a pre-written letter just minutes after the announcement and asked the Hall to take his name off the next ballot. The Hall declined his request, but he has lost enough votes since last year to think some voters decided to honor his request on their own.
I enjoyed covering and knowing Schilling as a player. I’ve long thought of him as one of the best big game pitchers ever and worthy of making The Hall. However, I do not agree with many of his post-playing career comments and statements. I don’t know how it would impact me if I were casting a ballot.
Okay, enough about Integrity, Sportsmanship, and Character. Why doesn’t defense come more into play?
We talk so much about needing good defense in baseball, don’t we? So why is it, then, that Ozzie Smith seems to be the only player ever rewarded for it? Is it because of his other-worldly defensive highlight reels? Or was it the whole package of supreme defense, postseason success, and durability that allowed him to backflip into The Hall with 91 percent on his first ballot?
Defense was used against Edgar Martinez for too long because he was primarily a DH. Finally, enough people recognized that DH is an actual position whether you like it or not, and Martinez was recognized as one of the most feared and accomplished players of his time. Ortiz’s election, this year or next, will further erode the stigma attached to the DH.
Two players on this year’s ballot, Andruw Jones and Scott Rolen, were not shoo-in candidates because they failed to compile milestone offensive numbers. But in my mind they still achieved a great deal of offensive success to go along with defensive greatness. Both players needed an extra bedroom just to store their Gold Gloves – 18 between them – and in my opinion they passed that other test we hear so often about.
Yes, when I watched Jones and Rolen I knew I was watching two of the best players in the sport. I’d even put Jimmy Rollins and Todd Helton in that discussion. If you don’t think they were among the best, then I don’t believe you were watching closely enough. However…
If I don’t like your ballot, I’m not going to suggest you should your vote should be stripped from you
This has become the default response to almost every Hall of Fame ballot. I have disagreed strongly with many ballots I’ve seen, complete with eye rolls and “what were they thinking?” comments. But then someone says “take away their ballot” and all I can think is why does that person get to make the decision about someone else’s ballot? Have we become such an argumentative society that we think we can simply find any means possible to enforce our way of thinking against someone who disagrees, and we’re going to make the Hall of Fame voting the battlegrounds?
I have found what I believe are some absolutely horrible balloting mistakes over the years, and none worse for me than the blank ballots in which a voter can legitimately look at all the candidates and say there is no one deserving of a vote. Even when they give their reasons, I’m sure I will still strongly disagree with almost all of it.
But, I also don’t believe in turning Hall of Fame voting into some sort of fascist election where people get threatened into voting a particular way. We still are only talking about baseball, and last I checked we lived in a country where we are allowed to express a dissenting opinion. And because there are such a large number of ballots, the rest of the voting bloc can usually overcome some stray madness and the math will work itself out. Is it perfect? No, but it’s mostly been very, very good.
And one last thing as the arguments continue:
Anyone in the Hall of Fame is a Hall of Famer
That sounds a little weird, but it’s really more about the arguing over balloting. Did I think Harold Baines deserved election? No, but he got in and that makes him a Hall of Famer.
Too many times the disagreement ends with “he isn’t a Hall of Famer” about a player who won election. Guess what: that makes him a Hall of Famer. Jack Morris, Jim Kaat, take your pick – if you disagree with the assessment, you’re entitled to it, but those players are every bit as entitled to call themselves Hall of Famers because that’s what they are.
We find out next Tuesday if anyone else can make that claim in 2022.
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