&nb​sp;  1)  1936 to 1942, when players like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner and Walter Johnson were the Hall of Fame’s first settlers,

              2)  1945 to 1971, when (after a two-year hiatus), the quality of players selected spiraled downward for a little more than a quarter of a century, and

              3)  1972 to the present.   From 1972 to the present the quality of players selected has gotten gradually but consistently stronger, and is stronger now than it has ever been (except for the start-up phase.)  

              I did a little research here, after reading something on twitter to the effect of "Are we selecting the Hall of Pretty Good, now?"   Of course I’ve read stuff like that for forty years, but. . .how do we know?

              I sorted Hall of Famers into three groups.   Group 1, the "A" Level Hall of Famers, are the guys you think about when you hear the words "Hall of Famer"—Mickey Mantle, Mel Ott, Tom Seaver, Greg Maddux, George Brett, Johnny Bench, Mike Schmidt, Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Tony Gwynn, those kind of players.   

              Group 2, the "B" Level Hall of Famers, are the players who maybe aren’t Joe DiMaggio or Babe Ruth, but when you think of them you think, "Yeah, OK, he’s a Hall of Famer."   Billy Williams, Wade Boggs, Duke Snider, Gaylord Perry, Phil Niekro, Goose Gossage and Ron Santo are "B" Level Hall of Famers.  

              Group 3, the "C" Level Hall of Famers, are the players who have been selected to the Hall of Fame, but usually after a longer wait, and in many cases there are other players not selected who were just as good or better.   Phil Rizzuto, Johnny Evers, Rick Ferrell, Ray Schalk, Chick Hafey, Rube Marquard, Rube Waddell, Earl Averill and Vic Willis are "C" Level Hall of Famers.  

              The players are sorted into "A", "B" and "C" groups by strictly objective criteria.   Formulas.   Things like career hits, Most Valuable Player Awards won, leading the league in Home Runs and RBI, etc.  I won’t explain the formulas today, because it’s a digression from what we’re doing, but I’ll give you the formulas in the next article, published in a couple of days.   Later in this article I’ll give you a full list of who is in which group.

              But for now. . .let’s consider an "A" Level Hall of Famer as "3", a "B" Level as "2", and a "C" Level as "1".    There are 217 players in my study; I didn’t study executives, Negro League Players, or "split career" players who played half their career in the Negro Leagues before the color line broke.  I excluded a couple of guys like Candy Cummings who were players but were selected as innovators, rather than as players.    I studied the 217 players selected from the American and National Leagues.     I marked 30% of these as "A" Level Hall of Famers, 40% as "B" Level Hall of Famers, and 30% as "C" Level Hall of Famers.

              Of the 217 players, 122 were selected for the Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers Association of America, and 95 by other committees.   Those selected by the BBWAA have been dramatically better than those selected by the other committees.   Of the 122 selected by the BBWAA, 58 were "A" Level Hall of Famers, 53 were "B" Level Hall of Famers, and only 11 were "C" Level or debatable Hall of Famers.   Probably the weakest players ever selected to the Hall of Fame by the BBWAA were pitchers Herb Pennock (selected 1948) and Ted Lyons (1955). 

              But of the 95 selected by other committees,  only 7 have been "A" Level or inner-circle Hall of Famers, 34 have been "B" Level Hall of Famers, and a clear majority, 54 of 95, have been "C" Level or marginal Hall of Famers.     About 32 players selected to the Hall of Fame by the committees have had weaker careers than ANYONE ever selected by the BBWAA.    Summarizing that in a chart:

              Almost 90% of the "A" Level Hall of Famers were selected by the BBWAA.   More than 80% of the "C" Level Hall of Famers were selected by the Veterans Committee or whatever it was called at the time.  

              That makes sense; that’s not hard to explain.   The BBWAA gets to choose first; of course they choose the most highly qualified players.   I’m just creating a frame of reference.  

              We have been selecting Hall of Famers for 82 years, or, as Betty White would describe it, the last couple of weeks now.    If we divide the 82 years into three almost equal eras and count the A Level Hall of Famers at 3, the B Level at 2, and the C Level at 1, the average "value" of a Hall of Famer selected from 1936 to 1962 was 2.03, from 1963 to 1989, 1.78, and from 1990 to the present, 2.25.   If we then subdivide the recent period (1990 to 2017) into two 14-year groups, the average is 2.18 in the first half of that, and 2.32 in the second. 

              The average quality has been going up because the number of players selected has been going down, essentially.   The number of "A" Level Players selected in recent years is about what it always has been, but the number of "C" Level Hall of Famers selected has declined.   This chart summarizes the number and quality of Hall of Fame selections in each of the three eras: 

              Not counting the orgy of inductions of Negro League Players and executives in 2006 and not counting managers and such like, only 62 players have been voted into the Hall of Fame in the last 28 years, as opposed to 85 in the previous 27 years.    And whereas there were 33 "C" Level Hall of Famers (or debatable Hall of Famers) selected from 1963 to 1989, there have been only 3 such selections in the last 14 years.  

         &nb​sp;    As to why I pinpoint the year 1971 as the turning point of the chart.  .  . suppose that we create a "moving average" of the quality of players selected for the Hall of Fame.   Since the average player is a "2", we can start the average at 2.00.   Then, for each new player selected, we multiply the previous figure by .95, and add in .05 times the value of the most recent entry.   When better players are selected, the moving average goes up; when weaker players are selected, the number goes down.   (We arrange the data within a year so that the best players in the group are always the last ones calculated.)

              The moving average starts at 2.00, increases to 2.40 by 1942, but then drops sharply in the late 1940s.   By 1971 the average is down to 1.69:

              The number starts to creep up after 1971, although it remains flat through the 1970s.   But gradually, the number starts up, reaches 1.9 in 1980, 2.0 in 1990, 2.1 in 1992, 2.2 in 2007, and 2.3 in 2017.  

           &nb​sp;  What else happens in 1971?   Bob Davids founded the Society for American Baseball Research in 1971.   It is possible—I will let you all reach your own conclusion—it is possible that the quality of selections began to improve about then due to the increased information flowing into the discussion from SABR.    (If you start the moving average at 3.00, rather than 2.00, or if you weight each new selection at 4% or 7% or 10%. . ..if you do anything like that you get different numbers, but the same conclusion.   What counts is the conclusion, not the numbers.) 

              Well, to this point we have been discussing players mostly as abstractions.   I’ll share my formula with you in the next article, but I will say here that there is only one player for whom it seems to fail at an embarrassing level.  The formula for whatever reason pegs Roberto Clemente near the top of the "2" group—the central group—rather than being an "A" Level Hall of Famer.    Other than that. . . I’m comfortable with all of the classifications.   Not saying they are all RIGHT, you understand; they’re all REASONABLE.   If you pulled a baseball fan out of the cheap seats at Wrigley Field and asked him to sort Hall of Famers into three levels, this is what you would get for four players out of five.   First, the "A" Level or Defining Hall of Famers, alphabetically.   There are 65 of them:

              Next (below) are the "B" Level or center-group Hall of Famers.  There are 87 of them.   They are mostly players that you could describe as great players—300 game winners, many of them, some 3000-hit men, 500-homer men, a lot of MVP Awards in the group.    They’re just not Joe Morgan or Honus Wagner or Stan Musial or Lefty Grove or Randy Johnson:

              And these are the "C" Level or more marginal Hall of Famers.   I’m not saying that these players don’t belong in the Hall of Fame.   Probably about half of them do, and the other half got into the Hall of Fame by catching a break somewhere.   There are 65 of these:

              Of the first 17 players selected for the Hall of Fame (1936 to 1942), 13 were the "A" Level Stars, and only 1 was a C-Level Hall of Famer.   That one was Buck Ewing—a legendary defensive catcher, but not an obviously qualified Hall of Famer based on his performance numbers.    That was through 1942.   There was a war on, then, and they had run out of really obvious guys to select.

              And we have to remember what they were dealing with.   There weren’t any real Encyclopedias at the time; there wasn’t any place you could go to see the career batting records of Hugh Duffy and compare them to Goose Goslin and Sam Crawford.   The information that we now take for granted simply did not exist.

              Judge Landis died, the war ended, and they started selecting players.    In 1945 and 1946 nineteen players were selected for the Hall of Fame, two more than the previous population of the joint.    Two of the new 19 were well-qualified stars, Dan Brouthers and Ed Delahanty, but eleven of them were marginal stars, really no better than 40 others who were not chosen at the time.   (The 11 C-Level Hall of Famers chosen in 1945 and 1946 were Roger Bresnahan, Jimmy Collins, Hughie Jennings, King Kelly, Jim O’Rourke, Frank Chance, Jack Chesbro, Johnny Evers, Tommy McCarthy, Joe Tinker and Rube Waddell.)   When those eleven were selected but 40 more just like them were not selected, that created pressure to open the doors for the other guys.  

              Over the years, more and more of them filtered in. . .Eppa Rixey and Ted Lyons from the long-career-as-a-.500-pitcher camp, and Joe Sewell and Jack Chesbro from the one-great-statistic camp, and King Kelly and Roger Bresnahan and Rube Waddell from the super-colorful and really-good-for-a-while pile, and Ross Youngs and Dizzy Dean from the tragically shortened careers group, and Rick Ferrell and Bobby Wallace from the he-was-super-defensively movement.   Who you knew had a lot to do with who got picked.     Guys like Lave Cross and Carl Furillo and Stan Hack and Sherry Magee and Sam Leever and Freddie Fitzsimmons and Bucky Walters and Lon Warneke got left out because they just didn’t have the right pull with the right people.  

              That’s inevitable; life is never perfectly fair, and honors do not always go to those most deserving of them; I think that’s in Ecclesiastes.  Through the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, these kind of players continued to be selected or not selected, you could never tell.

              But gradually, since 1980 really, the doors have shut on those kind of selections, and the standards have improved.     In the last ten years only two C-Level Hall of Famers have been added to the rolls, Joe Gordon in 2009 and Deacon White in 2013.  

              In a couple of days I will share my formula for sorting players with you.   It’s nothing special, just a sorting tool, nothing more.   When I do that I will run the numbers for some of the players who aren’t in but could be.  Thanks for reading.