How to Fix Baseball Hall of Fame balloting: Clear the path to Cooperstown

By ANTHONY WITRADO
The voting process for the Baseball Hall of Fame is flawed. This is not the best or most efficient way to elect candidates for induction into Cooperstown.

Plain and simple.

Barry Bonds is arguably the greatest hitter ever. Roger Clemens is arguably the greatest pitcher ever. Mike Piazza is easily the greatest hitting catcher in the history of the sport. None of them got more than Piazza?s 57.8 percent of the vote this year, and no one - in a year in which the ballot was stacked with no fewer than a handful of surefire candidates - received the necessary 75 percent of the 569 ballots cast to earn induction into the Hall of Fame.

But at least Aaron Sele got a vote.

After the voting results were announced, Hall of Fame president Jeff Idleson said this: ?The Hall of Fame has always entrusted the exclusive voting privilege to the Baseball Writers? Association of America. We remain pleased with their role in evaluating candidates based on the criteria we provide.?

MassLive.com Staff It's the end of the road for these eight players, who failed to meet the Baseball Writers? Association of America threshold of receiving votes on 5 percent of ballots in order to remain on future Hall of Fame ballots.

Each of the players included here received at least one vote, however, a tribute to their long careers and accomplishments.

An additional 11 players on the Hall of Fame ballot failed to receive any votes.

8 MLB players eliminated from the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot in 2013 gallery (9 photos)

Part of the problem is portions of the criteria are absurd. Another part is that a good-enough-sized chunk of the electorate shouldn?t be voting on what is ultimately the greatest honor a baseball player can achieve.

As a member of the BBWAA - I don?t yet have the required 10 consecutive years of membership to have a Hall of Fame vote - I like the exclusivity of being considered a legitimate documenter of the sport I grew up loving. But I am also not arrogant enough to think there aren?t legitimate baseball writers who are excluded from our Association because some people deem them illegitimate based on who employs them. I am also not dumb enough to believe that all of this year?s 569 voters should be considered qualified for this privilege.

In that, I find a major flaw in the system. Some of the non-BBWAA writers are as informed, reasoned, intelligent and diligent at covering the game as anyone in the Association. But their opinion isn?t considered worthy because of the outlet for which they work. Meanwhile, some voting members of the BBWAA haven?t stepped a single foot inside a ballpark or clubhouse for years and haven?t written a word about the sport in just as long.

Some voters are retired from the business of sports journalism. Others have no other outlet to express themselves beyond a blog, a vehicle that the BBWAA has said is unworthy of inclusion. Other voters go decades without even working in sports but still are considered qualified to vote. They are grandfathered in and don?t pay any attention to what is happening in the game until December when the Hall of Fame ballot is due.

That isn?t right.

The 10-year rule for Hall voting is wonderful. It allows a writer the time required to get a feel for the sport and its inner workings, and how to gauge a player?s contributions. That decade is supposed to provide proper perspective, but that is in an ideal world. We don?t live in such a world. When some voters are away from the game for a long period of time, perspective of what the game has become is completely lost.

Reducing the number of ballots is reasonable. If the Hall of Fame is such a sacred and exclusive club, the people who vote should be held to some sort of standard. They aren?t, though that is an entirely different problem.

The BBWAA asks voters to consider things, including character and sportsmanship, beyond statistics when evaluating Hall candidacy. But there are a couple of problems with this.

The first is that from 1936, the year BBWAA members started voting for the Hall, until 2007, the first year Mark McGwire appeared on the ballot, voters didn?t consider either of those things. During that time, plenty of unscrupulous characters were inducted and sportsmanship wasn?t a factor - and it probably won?t be again outside of suspected performance-enhancing drug users.

But now that players like Bonds and Clemens are eligible, along with guys like Mike Piazza and Jeff Bagwell, voters who never have before considered a player?s ?character? are damning some of them because they are ?steroids guys.? The arguments against them are asinine and contradictory, and they conveniently redact periods of history when similar acts happened but weren?t chastised.

The other problem with the character debate is that you are asking a huge panel of voters, some of whom are inevitably flawed in character, to judge another man?s life choices. I understand that part of voting for anything is to judge, but to judge someone in this way seems entirely unfair, especially when voters have no insight into exactly how and why certain decisions were made and wouldn?t want their own closets opened (myself included).

Another part of this year?s Hall debacle is that the voters have become just as big a story as the players they are judging. That should never, ever be the case. While it?s a good idea to create some accountability by making some ballots public at BBWAA.com, voters shouldn?t be the story.

That they are even a small part of the story is wrong and needs to be fixed. One way to do that is to take part of the judgment out of their hands. A character and sportsmanship clause never was a vital part of the vote before 2007, so it should be removed. If it isn?t, players who beat women or cheat on their wives or doctor the baseball or trash talk and play dirty never should get into the Hall of Fame. That includes executives, coaches and managers.

Tony La Russa is a Hall of Fame-caliber manager, but he endangered lives by driving drunk. Is that not a character issue? BBWAA members can?t vote for a manager, but you get the point. Standards should be universal and held high for everyone, not just a select group.

This isn?t a criticism of the entire BBWAA because the overwhelming majority of the members deserve respect and cover the game in a professional manner. I enjoy being a part of the Association and gladly follow its guidelines. But there are problems, despite what MLB commissioner Bud Selig thinks.

?This idea that this (year?s vote) somehow diminishes the Hall or baseball is ridiculous, in my opinion,? Selig said Wednesday from the owners? meetings in Arizona.

Selig is correct. It doesn?t diminish the Hall of Fame. It just makes it unnecessarily incomplete.

Source: http://www.masslive.com/redsox/index.ssf/2013/01/how_to_fix_baseball_hall_of_fa.html

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