TORONTO – Even in the partial transparency of the last few years, no Hall of Fame election process is as open and public as the balloting for enshrinement in Cooperstown.
Consider that over the past four years, the number of voters to voluntarily reveal their choices on the Baseball Writers’ Association of America website has increased from 22 per cent in 2013 to 70 per cent last year.
Year | Total Votes | Made Public |
---|---|---|
2013 | 569 | 125 (22%) |
2014 | 571 | 159 (28%) |
2015 | 549 | 231 (42%) |
2016 | 440 | 307 (70%) |
Even better is that next year, the BBWAA will make every single ballot public, so no one will be able to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. Becoming fully transparent means there’s a real accountability to the process, far, far more than exists for, say, the hockey, basketball or football halls.
For the players whose lives are so impacted by the results, and the fans who are so invested, there will be a pretty solid understanding of how the electorate arrived at its verdict, whether or not they agree.
Additionally, anyone way off the grid will be subjected to the scorn of the vote shaming set, a kind of check and balance that should inject more responsibility into the process. On the flip side, it may also leave voters vulnerable to public pressure in their decision-making.
At minimum, the full list will give those lobbying for a specific player the names of voters they need to sway on the path to the 75 per cent threshold required for induction. Some will take things too far by spamming voters and calling them names if they don’t change their minds, and an unwanted by-product of the increased transparency is sure to be more grief.
Still, if the end result is that eligible writers must be ready to defend their vote, that’s a good thing.
I’ve made my ballots public since first becoming eligible for the 2013 election, and what I’ve found is that when people understand your rationale, they typically tend to be more accepting of your decisions, even if they disagree.
With all that being said, here’s my ballot, in alphabetical order: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Vladimir Guerrero, Trevor Hoffman, Jeff Kent, Mike Mussina, Tim Raines, Ivan Rodriguez, Curt Schilling and Larry Walker.
Guerrero and Rodriguez, both first-time eligible, are the only new additions as a policy I’ve had since the outset is that once I vote for a player, only his selection for induction or removal from the ballot can pull him off. The other eight selections were holdovers from my ballot last year.
As I’ve explained before, I vote for Bonds and Clemens because a strong case can be made that they were Hall of Famers before they are believed to have begun using performance-enhancing drugs, and that not only are they statistically superior to their contemporaries, in many ways the game revolved around them for two decades.
For better or worse, that’s the way it was.
Still, I remain uncomfortable with the notion of enshrining players tied to PEDs for many of the reasons Tom Verducci described so eloquently here. In particular, I dislike the potential of incentivizing the usage of PEDs for young players. I struggle with that every year.
But in my view, the achievements of Bonds and Clemens are simply impossible to ignore, particularly in the parts of their career when we believe they were clean.
The trouble is we can’t be certain of who was doing what, and there’s an argument to be made that many of the players they were competing against were also using PEDs. That’s why I’ve made case-by-case calls on players on that front, as I personally see lots of grey here, and a binary approach that either uniformly implicates or exonerates doesn’t make sense.
As part of my process I speak to current and former players, coaches and executives about the players I vote for and allow that to inform my view.
In regards to my two new additions this year, the consensus among the people I spoke to was that both Guerrero and Rodriguez were worthy.
Guerrero was a transfixing player to watch, a monster at the plate, in the field and on the bases. As longtime Toronto Star sports columnist Dave Perkins likes to say, when he was due up in the next inning, you would hold off a trip to the bathroom or the concession stand out of fear of missing his at-bat.
A tool I like to use is the JAWS scoring system developed by Jay Jaffe that combines a player’s career and seven-year career peak WAR totals, and allows for comparison to other Hall of Famers by position. In this regard, Guerrero doesn’t fare well with a score of 50.2 compared to an average in the Hall of 58.1. On the flip side, the Bill James Hall of Fame Career Standards measure is much kinder, rating Guerrero at a 58 when the score for an average Hall of Famer is 50.
Additionally, his career OPS of .931 would rank 18th all-time among all Hall of Famers, and only three of the hitters ahead of him have more than his 181 stolen bases. Factor in his ability to hit pitches virtually anywhere around the plate, his incredible throwing arm and simply how much of a joy he was to watch play and he’s easily deserving.
Rodriguez is a bit more complicated because of the allegations of PED use, but when you consider that he logged 2,427 games behind the plate and 20,348 big-league innings there, both big-league records, it’s hard to argue against him. Then there are his 311 homers and career OPS of .798 that would simply make his candidacy overwhelming if not for the Jose Canseco’s accusations in his 2005 book “Juiced.”
Situations like this are where voters face the biggest dilemma, as we’re charged with historically accounting for a tainted era with no guidance from the Hall and Major League Baseball. Nice passing of the buck there.
Some writers feel the elections of Bud Selig and Tony La Russa to Cooperstown by the veterans’ committee shouldn’t prevent PED users from enshrinement, as why punish the players but give the executives and managers who ran the game a free pass? It’s a fair point.
Ultimately, my personal feel is that you can’t discount Rodriguez’s workload as solely a product of PED use and I didn’t feel the need to defer on him the way I do with some candidates. Anyone who catches that much needs far more than PEDs to survive, if he did indeed use them.
As for the rest of my ballot, I’ve explained it before so I won’t regurgitate. In short: Hoffman’s role and consistency are simply too crucial for a team to ignore; Kent, along with Roberto Alomar and Craig Biggio, is one of the defining second basemen of his era; Mussina delivered consistently in an AL East that turned many pitchers into mincemeat; Raines is basically Lou Brock and let’s stop punishing him for not being Rickey Henderson; Schilling is 15th all-time in strikeouts and was a playoff boss; and Walker was not only a multi-tool star, his success helped trigger a boom in Canadian baseball.
Let the darts and laurels begin.