Crowded 2013 Hall Of Fame ballot produces no Hall of Famers

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.”

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:

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.

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

Later, Heyman sent this out into the world:

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.

“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.

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.

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 stage. 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:

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.

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.

It wasn’t that long ago that I cared about the Hall of Fame, and those who were enshrined in its walls, quite a bit. I still do care in the present, but whatever fire for Cooperstown once existed within me has been reduced to cooling embers by this point. Opinions about who deserves entrance -- and who should be barred from Cooperstown’s halls -- remain, but whether or not things work out the way I prefer is of less consequence now than it used to be. I want to care more, but instead, the whole post-holiday time frame where Twitter, the blogosphere, and the Baseball Writers’ Association of America stop to take their annual turn as cause-heads for Cooperstown is just exhausting.

Not to pick on one person, but this can be traced back to when Jim Rice was elected in 2009. Now, Rice was a fine ballplayer in his own right, but personally, his career is outside the scope of what Cooperstown is supposed to represent. Given he wasn’t elected until his final year on the ballot, giving the voters 15 chances to decide he was worthy, it’s not as if I was alone in this opinion, either. Here’s the thing, though: just because I didn’t think Rice wasn’t a Hall of Famer doesn’t mean I think he was bad. Nuance doesn’t get a lot of room (or attention) during this time of year, though, as it’s those on the extremes who get the notice. Rice became something of a symbol for the old guard, who created legends about his prowess and the fear he engendered at the plate. This left his career, in many ways, with less dignity than it would have had, had he just been allowed to slip off the ballot in that 15th and final attempt. On the other extreme, Rice was presented as something less than he was in order to counter the overly glowing perception of him from many of those with a vote, an equally unfair fate.

Monday, a couple of thoughtful and thought-provoking articles about Hall of Fame voting were published by New York newspapers (which was not, I think, entirely coincidentally). First, from the Post’s Ken Davidoff:

My only quibble with Davidoff is probably just semantics. He would probably agree that it’s not really an either/or proposition; that there’s room for both science and art, and in fact almost nobody has one without the other. I mean, the pure scientist might just look at fWAR or JAWS and call it good. Similarly, the pure artist might apply THE FEEL TEST -- you know, “Does this guy feel like a Hall of Famer to me? -- without looking at a single number. And there are more pure artists than pure scientists out there, at least among the actual voters. But of course the vast majority of voters fall somewhere in the middle.

You could make a pretty good team out of the Hall of Famers who didn’t crack one percent in their first year on the Hall of Fame ballot. Bobby Doerr, Arky Vaughn, Joe DiMaggio, Luke App-

Wait, wait, wait. Joe DiMaggio? Well, there’s a bit of an asterisk here, as the first time he picked up a vote was in 1945, when he was 30 years old and reluctantly in the Army during World War II. He came back and played six more seasons, five of which were outstanding. And then, five years after he retired, the voters did the right thing and … passed him over on two more ballots. He finished with 44.3 percent in 1953, and 69.4 in 1954, both times below Rabbit Maranville.

Bernie Williams? Yeah. Here’s Joe:

As for actually winning playoff series, I don’t know how to measure that. But a couple of years ago, Beyond the Box Score’s Adam Darowski compiled a Top 100 list of postseason Win Probability Added ... and Bernie Williams didn’t make the list. He didn’t make the Top 100 list.

The question on Monday was “Who was the best player on a Hall of Fame ballot to not get a single vote?” The natural follow-up question? “Who was the worst player to get a Hall of Fame vote?”

But before we get there, some caveats. This isn’t an exercise undertaken to mock the voters who cast these votes, or the players who received them. This isn’t a look-at-these-dolts pile of smug. I was just curious. And if I had a Hall of Fame vote, I can’t say for sure that I’d fill the 10th spot on my ballot with a winking nod of a pick if I couldn’t find 10 realistic candidates, but I might. Robb Nen might have given his career for the Giants’ championship chances. If I couldn’t find 10 players to vote for in 2008 -- and by my count, there were five I would have voted for -- I might have shown my appreciation for Nen in that way, knowing he wasn’t going to make it.

Monday, FoxSports.com’s Ken Rosenthal presented his Hall of Fame ballot ... along with a column about the controversy. I’m not wild about his ballot, which includes Alan Trammell but also Lee Smith. Oddly, he doesn’t have room for Craig Biggio, and doesn’t even include Biggio on his list of Most Difficult Snubs (Non-Steroid Division). But it’s pointless to argue about individual ballots, since everybody’s got one. What’s more interesting are the general discussions of the process ...

My ratings for those wrongs: 8, 9, and 9.

There’s no mystery about the subject of this post, so we might as well dive in.

First, we should point out that this is going to be restricted to 1978 and after because of the way the Hall of Fame voting was structured. Here’s how voting works now, from Wikipedia, which is never wrong:

Most of the time, I’m just writing about baseball, which is inherently unimportant. It’s just a game, people. But occasionally, I’ll stumble upon a big, breaking story that will make you rethink how you view the Internet. This is one of those times.

There are a lot of excellent articles out there about the current crop of Hall of Fame candidates, but none of them are willing to ask the hard-hitting questions. For example, what happens when you enter the player’s name as a URL in your browser’s address bar? The results might surprise you.*

I came up with a proposal for a reality show on MLB Network called “The Search for the Most Asinine Hall of Fame Argument.” I conceived a couple of different formats. It would either involve two people in chairs yelling at each other for a half-hour (something we haven’t seen on TV yet), or it might be a camera trained on a guy looking up stats on a computer for an hour. One thing I know for sure is there would be elimination battles, backstabbing, and general skullduggery. The winner would get a round of golf with Jack Morris.

The problem, though, is there would be an obvious winner. There wouldn’t be any suspense -- think something like “Albert Pujols, Cade McNown, and Dave Mustaine star in ‘Who Can Hit a Baseball Farther?’, coming to TLC this fall!” People would tune out after the first three weeks, so I junked the idea. So much hard work, ruined.

You are a writer with a Hall of Fame vote. You’ve worked hard to get where you are, and you’ve written thousands upon thousands of words about baseball. You’ve watched tens of thousands of hours of baseball. That’s three hours a pop for about 180 games a year or so. And if you have a vote, you’ve been writing for at least 10 years. Assuming one game per day during the season, that’s a minimum of 225 full days of around-the-clock baseball.

You’ve earned this. And you take pride in it. You take pride in selecting the very best baseball players and telling future generations that those players were baseball. More than almost all of their peers, these players defined baseball for you. So you take this responsibility seriously.

This story has been brewing for a while, but we brilliant humans have a tendency to ignore brewing stories until they’ve actually come to a head. And this one’s coming to a head ...

Which is the problem, assuming that you’re a fan of the greatest players getting elected to the Hall of Fame with some degree of timeliness.

This might be painting with a brush too broad, but I’d wager a few of you are looking around, wondering how someone cut to your core so quickly. Don’t worry. You’re still a unique snowflake. But there are a lot of us who think alike. And another part of the profile is supporting players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens for the Hall of Fame. The categories for potential inductees break down like this for the EIEIOs:

No arguments

Curt Schilling and Craig Biggio

The Ford C. Frick award honors baseball broadcasters, and it’s sponsored by the Hall of Fame. The winners will get to make a speech at the Hall of Fame upon their induction, and they will have a display honoring them at the Hall of Fame. But it’s important that you shalt not refer to them as “Hall of Fame broadcaster” or describe them as being “in the Hall of Fame”, or else Rob Neyer will stab you with a sharpened pencil. I’ve learned a lot over the last two seasons.

The Hall of Fame has announced the list of 41 semi-finalists for the 2013 Ford C. Frick award, and the idea now is that fans are supposed to go to the Hall of Fame’s Facebook page to vote for the broadcasters to make the cut for the 10 final spots. The 10 finalists are then voted on by historians and past winners.

The elephant is about to step into the room.

Bonds spoke out recently in an interview with MLB.com’s Barry Bloom on the Hall of Fame issue:

Don’t get too cocky, though, Mike. Apparently you were big and someone -- probably a reporter who was also a medical doctor, like Dr. Sanjay Gupta -- noticed that you had acne on your back. That might diminish your status as best hitting catcher to play baseball.

Now, Piazza was asked in front of the crowd at a Knicks game, which probably wouldn’t be a great time to say ...

I’m pretty sure that nobody thinks about Hall of Fame voting more than Chris Jaffe. And he, like some others, has been wondering if the huge backlog of terrific Hall of Fame candidates might lead to a bizarrely counter-intuitive happening: nobody getting elected by the BBWAA in one more years in the near future.

Fortunately for the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce, that probably won’t happen:

There are a lot of things about this whole discussion that make me uncomfortable, but perhaps what makes me most uncomfortable is how quickly so many writers’ brains shut down immediately upon seeing the word steroids.

Herein you’ll find the “ethics clause” to which Moore refers: