Harold Baines.....Lee Smith in Hall of Fame

[atomic]

6 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

 I don't like wild inconsistency.  I don't like random groups of old people bestowing high honors on their buddies while excluding more deserving players.  And I'm well aware of the eligibility of various players.

 I'm happy for Harold Baines, he seems like a good guy.  But there are a lot of good guys, and some of them could play the field and got a little black ink, too.

 Don't you think it's a little weird that there's a process in which Harold Baines was overwhelmingly rejected by the writers, but he gets a do-over and goes in anyway?  Baines top year on the writer's ballot he finish 15th, well behind Don Mattingly, Fred McGriff, and the steroid-tained Mark McGwire.  The next year he dropped off the ballot after finishing behind Juan Gonzales (an indignity I'm sorry he had to live through).  On that same ballot he finished 10 places and about 160 votes behind Edgar Martinez.

Bobby Grich got 2 percent of the vote the one year he was eligible for BBWA to vote him in.  The Baseball writers are clueless.  They shouldn't be voting. 

I think you don't realize that the veterans committee cannot vote in Edgar Martinez.  Fred McGriff cannot be voted in by the veterans committee.  That you could be arguing something so adamantly and you have no idea how the process works at all is beyond bizarre.  

And your argument has zero logic throughout it. How are the Baseball writers votes be more valid than the Veterans committee?  The point of the Veterans committee is to put in players that the BBWA made mistakes on. 

[atomic]

Also they are not inconsistent with Baines.  His numbers are similar to Tony Perez, Andre  Dawson, and Dave Winfield.  Your problem is you can't look past WAR and actually look at the numbers.  

[DrungoHazewood]

4 minutes ago, atomic said:

Bobby Grich got 2 percent of the vote the one year he was eligible for BBWA to vote him in.  The Baseball writers are clueless.  They shouldn't be voting. 

I think you don't realize that the veterans committee cannot vote in Edgar Martinez.  Fred McGriff cannot be voted in by the veterans committee.  That you could be arguing something so adamantly and you have no idea how the process works at all is beyond bizarre.  

And your argument has zero logic throughout it. How are the Baseball writers votes be more valid than the Veterans committee?  The point of the Veterans committee is to put in players that the BBWA made mistakes on. 

I know exactly how the process works, or more accurately doesn't work.  The writers are often shockingly unqualfied to vote on the Hall, both intellectually and tempermentally.  But at least they get 10-15 years to mull over their thoughts and the prevailing views of the players in question.   The committees get together and free-associate names they like.

Yes, the various committes have often been put in place to fix oversights from the BBWAA.  And mostly they've failed, often spectacularly.  The smaller groups comprising the committees have been little better qualified and tremendously more biased.  There are probably two dozen players in the Hall simply because some guy on some committee thought he was awesome, even if that was completely at odds with the consensus on that player.

The BBWAA, although poorly chosen and following a comical process, mostly gets things right.  Not always, clearly.  And that percentage has been plummeting recently.  But certianly a higher percentage of the time than the committees.

At this point I think the only real solution is to change the selection criteria to "players who had some kind of positive impact to baseball at some point in history."  At least that matches up with the results, and we can stop making odd faces when decent players go in and borderline great ones sit on the sidelines.

[DrungoHazewood]

1 minute ago, atomic said:

Also they are not inconsistent with Baines.  His numbers are similar to Tony Perez, Andre  Dawson, and Dave Winfield.  Your problem is you can't look past WAR and actually look at the numbers.  

They're hugely inconsistent with Baines.  There are a ton of players similar to Perez, Baines, Dawson, and Winfield who aren't in the Hall.  And Perez, Dawson, and Winfield played defense.  Dawson was no shoo-in to Cooperstown, and he was about as good a hitter as Baines while spending half his career as a center fielder.  

You still haven't chimed in on why Baines but not Rusty Staub.  They're pretty much the same player, except Staub was better defensively.  And nobody argues for Staub's induction.

[SteveA]

2 hours ago, atomic said:

 

I think they need to stop worrying about who was on steroids during the steroid era.  There is no way you can say any player was definitely not on steroids during that era.  Baseball choose to ignore and perhaps condone it.

Ortiz put up two 1000+ OPS seasons once after he reached 36 and long after they started testing for steroids. I am not sure how they could justify keeping Ortiz out.  I mean if they keep him out with everyone else they keep out they  might as well just shut the Hall of fame down.  

Man, if they actually did that, the next four or five inductions would be steroid-fests.   Clemens, Bonds, Sosa, Palmeiro....they'd all HAVE to jump to the top of the charts.

And the percentage of the population that hates them because of steroids would go insane with anger at induction ceremonies filled with these "criminals".

[atomic]

7 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

They're hugely inconsistent with Baines.  There are a ton of players similar to Perez, Baines, Dawson, and Winfield who aren't in the Hall.  And Perez, Dawson, and Winfield played defense.  Dawson was no shoo-in to Cooperstown, and he was about as good a hitter as Baines while spending half his career as a center fielder.  

You still haven't chimed in on why Baines but not Rusty Staub.  They're pretty much the same player, except Staub was better defensively.  And nobody argues for Staub's induction.

Staub had a lower average, much lower OPS, less hits ,significantly less home runs, and was terribly defensively.  

Looking at Baseball Reference 4 out of the 5 most similar batters to Baines are in the Hall of Fame.  The one missing Dave Parker.    

1. Tony Perez (943.9) *
2. Al Kaline (883.5) *
3. Dave Parker (871.6)
4. Billy Williams (864.8) *
5. Andre Dawson (856.5) *

 

[Frobby]

59 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

 

Don't you think it's a little weird that there's a process in which Harold Baines was overwhelmingly rejected by the writers, but he gets a do-over and goes in anyway?  Baines top year on the writer's ballot he finish 15th, well behind Don Mattingly, Fred McGriff, and the steroid-tained Mark McGwire.  The next year he dropped off the ballot after finishing behind Juan Gonzales (an indignity I'm sorry he had to live through).  On that same ballot he finished 10 places and about 160 votes behind Edgar Martinez.

I agree with this point.     It’s not like Baines ever came close on the BBWA ballot.    

[Just Regular]

My goofy thought at this goofiness is Jay Jaffe lobbied too successfully for Tim Raines, and there was some rhyming name carryover.

I'll be curious to see if the Baines firestorm pushes the ballot size restraint towards a tipping point.  I know some of why the ballot has stayed clogged is thoughtful voters seeing more than 10 guys they want to vote for and having to game play, pick and choose within that limit.  It's why I imagine there will be a few strategic Mariano Rivera non-votes among the bigger strategic voting enthusiasts, which of course is an affront to the pure excellence part this would ideally be about.

[TonySoprano]

So far, the biggest story out of these meeting has been this.  Today, Tony LaRussa and Al Avila had to go on MLB and answer delicately worded questions basically asking, "Harold Baines? WTH were you thinking?"
 

 

[Can_of_corn]

1 minute ago, TonySoprano said:

So far, the biggest story out of these meeting has been this.  Today, Tony LaRussa and Al Avila had to go on MLB and answer delicately worded questions basically asking, "Harold Baines? WTH were you thinking?"
 

 

LaRissa can just claim to have been drunk.

[Moose Milligan]

As I've told you jackalopes before, Joe Posnanski's Patreon is where it's at.  He wrote a column today on the history of the veteran's committee.

Not posting it all as it's paid content, but here's a healthy chunk:

Quote

The Baseball Writers blew it. If you want to know why there are Hall of Fame veterans committees at all, and why for 80 years they have somewhat arbitrarily elected people into the Hall (some overdue, some questionable, some plain bizarre), you merely need to go back to the 1940s, when the Baseball Writers Association of America had a chance to make sense of it all.

And they blew it.

This isn’t meant to be too hard on the BBWAA. The truth is, I'm not sure they could have done anything BUT blow it. See, in the beginning, nobody thought much about HOW the Hall of Fame election process should work. The challenge of raising money to build a baseball museum in Cooperstown, getting baseball’s leaders behind it, marketing the place, collecting memorabilia, etc., all of that was so monumental that logistical questions like “Wait, how do we actually decide which players get in?” were dumped into the, “Yeah, we’ll worry about that later” file.

You might not know this — I didn’t know this — but the original plan was for the BBWAA to handle everything. The Hall of Fame itself was going to stay out of it. This was 1936, and the BBWAA WAS everything. There was no other baseball media. There was obviously no Internet and no television but in 1936 none of the New York teams even allowed their games to be played on the radio. There were only a handful of magazines that ever wrote about baseball (most prominently The Sporting News and Baseball) but those stories were almost exclusively written by newspaper people.

So think about this from the Hall's perspective. Where could they go to find a group of people with the credibility to choose players for the Hall of Fame? There were really only three options:

1. The BBWAA
2. People inside baseball (Players, former players, managers, executives, etc.)
3. Fans

The second two options were unwieldy and, anyway, not at all useful for a fledgeling baseball museum just trying to get attention. It had to be the BBWAA. And so, the BBWAA was charged with figuring out who should be the first people elected to the Hall of Fame.

You probably know the first class they elected: Ty Cobb; Walter Johnson; Christy Mathewson; Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner.

What you might not know is that the BBWAA was ALSO supposed to choose the “old-time baseball players” — meaning players from before 1900. I didn't know this. I thought that there was a special committee set up to choose pre-1900 players ... and indeed there was. But the BBWAA was given first crack. In 1936, the BBWAA balloted 78 of its oldest writers (and included a few old players), the ones who might best remember those players from the early days. The 75 percent rule had already been put into place (this was the one thing the Hall of Fame was ALWAYS insistent upon), so the players needed 59 votes to be elected.

As you might suspect if you know a bit about the arithmetic of ballots, nobody got close to election.

1. Cap Anson, 39.5 votes
2. (Tied) Buck Ewing, 39.5
3. Wee Willie Keeler, 33
4. Cy Young, 32.5
5. Ed Delahanty, 21.5
6. John McGraw, 17
7. Old Hoss Radbourn, 16
8. Mike Kelly, 15
9. Herman Long, 13.5
10. Amos Rusie, 11.5
11. Hughie Jennings, 11

And, no, I don’t know what a half-vote means, either. In all, 58 players got at least one vote. As we now know, when you have an open ballot like that, there's almost no chance at all for consensus. The BBWAA didn't stand a chance.

But that's now how it looked in 1936. It looked then like the BBWAA didn't think a SINGLE PLAYER FROM THE 19TH CENTURY deserved to go into the Hall of Fame. Newspaper headlines across the country talked about how none of the old-time players stacked up, and people got mad. The BBWAA was ruining what was supposed to be a celebration of baseball! People were not happy at all.

And for the first time -- but certainly not the last -- the BBWAA's inability to elect players fundamentally altered the future of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Landis Takes Over

The BBWAA's failure to elect anyone pre-1900 convinced baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that the writers lacked the experience, judgment and sense of history to handle this take. He promptly created his own six-person committee of friends and fellow baseball insiders, and they promptly elected five people into the Hall: executives Morgan Bulkeley and Ban Johnson, managers Connie Mack and John McGraw, plus pioneer George Wright. The next year, they elected pioneer Alexander Cartwright and famed “Father of Baseball,” sportswriter Henry Chadwick.

A quick point here: The Landis group without even thinking much about it determined the future of the Hall of Fame by electing executives, managers and pioneers. Remember: Nobody even knew what the Hall of Fame was supposed to be at that point. It could have just had players. It actually could have had ACTIVE players -- that was a common thought in 1936 before an influential St. Louis sportswriter named J. Roy Stockton suggested that it would be better for the Hall of Fame to honor retired players.

The American League PR man — and creator of the first Hall of Fame ballot — Henry Edwards, agreed, “thus allowing the future to take care of men like Frisch, Cochrane, Gehrig and others still active in the game.”

In other words, Landis and crew -- by electing their pals, the people they thought created baseball -- unilaterally determined that the Hall of Fame would have all sorts people in it that didn't play the game. Owners. Managers. Umpires. Pioneers. Even sportswriters. Maybe this is exactly as it should be, but the point is nobody DECIDED that. Nobody even THOUGHT about that.

Like almost everything that shaped the Hall of Fame, it just kind of happened.

You will notice that in those two votes Landis and company did restrain themselves from selecting old-time players. The thought was still that the BBWAA would handle the baseball player portion of things. But in 1939, that ended too. The BBWAA still had not figured out how to elect any players from before 1900. In fact, they had only elected four more people since the original class (Nap Lajoie, Tris Speaker, Cy Young and Pete Alexander).

And Landis lost his mind. He decided enough was enough, grabbed two of his friends -- the two league presidents, Ford Frick and Will Harridge -- and they just put in Cap Anson, Charlie Comiskey, Buck Ewing, Old Hoss Radbourn, Al Spalding and (bizarrely) Candy Cummings.* They didn't vote. There was no 75% line. There was nothing. Landis put them in basically by himself because he was tired of waiting.

*Candy Cummings is in the Hall of Fame because Landis believed he invented the curveball.

The Fatal Blunder

So, let's take stock here. The Hall of Fame had started with what seemed a streamlined system: The BBWAA would take care of everything. The BBWAA lost their authority by failing to vote in a pre-1900 player. Then the writers so frustrated Landis with their inactivity that he just started putting in players willy-nilly. In 1939, the writers tried to reassert themselves by electing Eddie Collins, Wee Willie Keeler, George Sisler and, on a special ballot, Lou Gehrig.

And then came the fatal blunder. The BBWAA look at its work, saw that it was good, and decided to rest.

I had long thought that the reason the BBWAA voted in only one player — Rogers Hornsby — from 1940 through 1947 was because of World War II. That probably played some part in all this, but the bigger truth is that the BBWAA was paralyzed. There were SO MANY players worthy of induction that the organization could not process them all. The job was too big. A consensus was too hard to come by. And so the BBWAA didn't even vote in 1940, '41, '43 or '44.

That made a lot of people involved with the Hall of Fame really, really mad.

The came the 1945 Hall of Fame ballot, and it was a baseball disaster of the highest order. It was chaos. None of the writers even seemed to understand the rules. They voted for Kid Nichols, Ed Delahanty, Amos Rusie and other pre-1900 players even though Landis had taken that right away from them. But they also voted for active players like Joe DiMaggio and Bill Dickey. In all, the BBWAA voted for 95 different players. Fifty-eight of them would eventually get into the Hall of Fame. But not that year. No, that year Lefty Grove -- considered at the time perhaps the greatest pitcher in baseball history -- got 11 percent of the vote.

Obviously, no one was elected. When you consider everything, it’s sort of astonishing that Frank Chance came as close as he did, with 72.5% of the vote.

The Hall of Fame fiasco of 1945 made it clear to everyone in and around Cooperstown that the BBWAA simply could not be trusted. The Hall of Fame cannot survive if new players are not elected with regularity. The Hall is a living museum, forever in motion, and the BBWAA by being unable to get out of its own way had managed to tick off absolutely everybody.

And that vote guaranteed that there would forever be a Hall of Fame-installed veterans committee watching over Cooperstown and "correcting" those mistakes that the BBWAA seemed unable to avoid.

 

[Frobby]

Well, I’m certainly glad you didn’t post everything, Moose.   What’d you do, leave out a sentence?

[Can_of_corn]

1 minute ago, Frobby said:

Well, I’m certainly glad you didn’t post everything, Moose.   What’d you do, leave out a sentence?

Some punctuation.

[Moose Milligan]

3 minutes ago, Frobby said:

Well, I’m certainly glad you didn’t post everything, Moose.   What’d you do, leave out a sentence?

That's about a quarter of it.  

[tntoriole]

29 minutes ago, Moose Milligan said:

As I've told you jackalopes before, Joe Posnanski's Patreon is where it's at.  He wrote a column today on the history of the veteran's committee.

Not posting it all as it's paid content, but here's a healthy chunk:

 

This article verifies the point that Halls of Fame are inherently arbitrary.  Period.  From the beginning.  Because it involves human beings.  With opinions.   Sports Halls of Fame cannot be anything else because the selection is completely and totally arbitrary, whether it is writers, fans, veterans committees or whomever...they vote for inductees like we vote for....well, you get the idea, lol.   It is an arbitrary process that arguing over will not make objective.   It will remain arbitrary.  Either enjoy it (like religions that have seemingly incomprehensible rules and criteria for admission/selection/validation) or argue, but either way, it will remain arbitrary.      This is my main reason why letting fans vote makes just as much sense if not more as anybody else doing it.  It will continue to be arbitrary, but at least the fans will have it their way.