Over the next thirty years, the de facto standards for induction into the Hall of Fame will change substantially.   They will not change for the “worse”, in the sense of changing downward.   They will move upward.   They have to.    They will move upward by so much that it will put pressure on the Hall of Fame to revamp their election system, because players are being left out who not only meet but substantially exceed the historical standards for Hall of Fame selection.  The Hall of Fame will revise and expand its selection processes to include more players—as they have revised their process many times in the past—but even so, “deserving” players (deserving in the sense of being better than those selected in the past) will continue to be excluded.    The reason these things will happen is expansion.

            Wait a minute (I hear you saying); expansion began in 1961.  There hasn’t been an expansion now for more than ten years.   Why is this an issue now?   But the effects of expansion on Hall of Fame election are not felt at all for about 25 years after the first expansion, and are but slightly felt at first after that.

            What we are really talking about here is the ratio of accomplishments by eligible players to Hall of Fame selections.    That ratio, having begun to increase sometime in the mid-1980s, then increased a tiny bit more, and a tiny bit more, and a tiny bit more, like interest compounding at some low percentage.  As a consequence of these small movements and as a consequence of other events, a point was reached about 2002 where there was a significant impact.   That impact grows larger now every year, and will continue to do so for many years into the future.   Eventually, it will dramatically alter the Hall of Fame discussion.   This hasn’t happened yet, but it will happen.   The goal of this article is to open your eyes to it, so that when it happens you will be in a better position to understand the debate.

            We are going to need a bunch of timelines in this article.   Major league baseball began in 1876, let us say; some people prefer 1871 and reason prefers 1901, but my data sources are organized around 1876, so let’s stick with that.   The cumulative number of major league teams which there had ever been, beginning in 1876, was as follows:

            By 1919 there had been 654 major league team/seasons, as we have decided to count them.  This would double before expansion:

            And it has essentially doubled again since expansion:

            I became a baseball fan in 1961.    Essentially one-half of all the major league teams there have ever been have played since I became I fan.

            What is relevant is not the number of team/seasons, exactly, but the number of Hall of Fame type accomplishments.   What are “Hall of Fame type accomplishments”?    Well, you know. . .hitting .300, scoring 100 runs, driving in 100 runs, getting 200 hits, leading the league in something significant, winning 20 games, throwing a no-hitter, getting 200 strikeouts, winning an Award, playing in an All-Star game, getting a big hit in a World Series game.  Those kind of things; there are Hall of Fame type accomplishments for a season, and there are Hall of Fame type accomplishments for a career.  As there are more teams, there are more players having Hall of Fame type accomplishments.

            Let us say, as a working assumption, that there are five Hall of Fame type accomplishments for each team.  That may seem a little high intuitively, but it isn’t; it’s actually low.  Look up a few teams. Almost every team has at least a couple of guys meeting one standard or another, and some teams have 20+ Hall of Fame accomplishments on the roster.   It doesn’t actually matter for our present analysis what the number is; let’s just say it is five per team.

            So by 1935, as there had been 910 teams, there had been four to five thousand Hall of Fame type accomplishments.   Of course, through 1935 there had been no players selected to the Hall of Fame, since the Hall of Fame prior to 1935 was merely an abstract idea.  Selections began in 1936, with 5 players.    There were 7 more persons selected in 1937, 3 in 1938, and 10 in 1939:

            Got ya, din’ I?   With 5, 7, 3 and 10, that would be a total of 25 by 1939, not 21.   It’s only 21, however, because the first 25 included Morgan Bulkeley, Ban Johnson, Alexander Cartwright and Henry Chadwick, none of whom ever played in the majors; they were selected for other contributions to the game.

            It is not always clear who should “count” in this way.    We could count only those who were selected as major league players, but there are also many people who were very, very good players, but who were selected as managers or in some other role—Clark Griffith, for example, won 237 games with a very good winning percentage, but was selected for his role as a team owner, and John McGraw, who had one of the highest on base percentages of all time, was selected as a manager.

            The key to our analysis here is the relationship between on-field accomplishments in the organized major leagues, and Hall of Fame selections.    As such, we’re going to focus on the number of persons selected who had played in the major leagues—the white major leagues.   As the Negro League players are perforce excluded from our count of teams, they must also be excluded from the count of accomplishments.   But if you played in the majors at all, you’re included in the count.   Walter Alston had one major league at bat and struck out, but he played in the major leagues, so he counts.  Willard Brown counts.

            OK, by 1939 there were 21 players who had played in the major leagues, and who had been selected to the Hall of Fame.   There had been almost 5,000 Hall of Fame type accomplishments.   That’s one Hall of Famer for every 230+ Hall of Fame type accomplishments.

            Except that this assumes that the Hall of Fame is electing people now based on what they did yesterday.  In reality, the Hall of Fame has always made most of its selections based on what players did 30, 40, and 50 years ago.   The accomplishments of players 25 years ago are, as of yet, but lightly honored.   Go back 25 years ago, and look at the star players:   Jack Morris, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Tim Raines, Bert Blyleven, Fred Lynn, Ron Guidry, Barry Larkin.   Many of these players eventually will be in the Hall of Fame; they’re just not there yet.   The accomplishments of the 1980s have not yet been fully honored by the Hall.

            If you look forward to 1990, the accomplishments of the stars of 1990 have barely begun to poke into the Hall of Fame.   By 1990 the major leagues included Griffey, Bonds, McGwire, Clemens, Maddux, Smoltz, Schilling.   Even if you look back to 1980 or 1970, there are still many stars who will later be honored by the Hall of Fame, but have not yet been. 

            What I am saying is that there is a lag time between the “pile of gross accomplishments” and the granting of honors based on those accomplishments.   Look at it this way:   the last ten men elected to the Hall of Fame who played major league baseball were Andre Dawson, Jim Rice, Whitey Herzog, Rickey Henderson, Joe Gordon, Dick Williams, Billy Southworth, Goose Gossage, Cal Ripken, Tony Gwynn.    At least 90% of the accomplishments which put those men in the Hall of Fame were more than 20 years ago; at least 70% of them were more than 25 years ago.   There is a lag time between accomplishment and honor, which we will say is 25 years.

            This lag time was originally larger than it is now.  When the Hall of Fame opened its doors it was 60 years behind in its work, and it took it about 40 years to catch up.   Players elected in the 1940s included Rube Waddell, Jimmy Collins, Joe Tinker, Frank Chance, Eddie Plank, Fred Clarke, Ed Walsh and Ed Delahanty, all of them stars of the 1900-1910 era—and included many from before then, many from the 19^th century.   The Hall of Fame started out about 60 years behind in its honoring, and closed the margin gradually until they were only (let us say) about 25 years behind.

            So the relevant number to represent the size of the pile of accomplishments in 1940 isn’t based on the number of teams up to 1940, but on the number of teams up to 1915.    By 1915 there had been 590 major league teams, so there had been, let us say, 2950 Hall of Fame type accomplishments. By 1940 there had been 21 major league players elected to the Hall of Fame.

            Let us say that each Hall of Fame selection clears off 40 Hall of Fame type accomplishments.     By 1940, then, the Hall of Fame was about 2,110 accomplishments behind in its work—2,950, minus 21 * 40.     By 1950, as the Hall of Fame elected 32 players during the 1940s, this number had been reduced to 1,630:

            I have been doing a lot of “let us say” math here, but the exact numbers aren’t the point.   Whether you say there are five Hall of Fame Accomplishments per team per season or eight, whether you say that each selection clears 40 Accomplishments off the deck or 60, whether you say the lag time is 25 years or 35, it doesn’t really matter.   The math in these charts is going to work out about the same anyway; I’m just trying to use reasonable numbers to illustrate the point.   I’m not claiming it IS 5.00 accomplishments per team or anything like that. 

            The honoring process was relatively slow throughout the 1950s, but by 1960—about the time I became a baseball fan—the Hall of Fame had cut the deficit to 1550 honors:

            With some more aggressive honorin’ in the 1960s, they had reduced that by 1970 to 1,110:

            And, with the help of Frankie Frisch and his madcap cronies, by 1985 they had entirely wiped out the backlog:

            I know when Frankie Frisch died; don’t write me letters.  I am using Frankie to stand in for that entire generation of voters, who selected 59 former players between 1970 and 1985.  Twenty-four were selected by the BBWAA; 35 by other selectors.

            Anyway, 1985 is 24 years after the first expansion.   The expansion effects are just now beginning to show.    Over the next 17 years, the ratio of accomplishments to honorees stayed about constant, and the deficit near zero:

            You see my point?   About 1985, we finally reached a “stable point” in the Hall of Fame process, in which the old debts had been paid off, and the Hall was up to date on its work.     That’s where we stayed, and that’s where we have been during most of my career—most of your adult lives, I would guess, for many of you.

            About that time the Hall of Fame changed the Veterans’ Committee process, which is unnecessary to say; the Hall of Fame changes the Veterans’ Committee process all of the time, so one could say that about any year, that about that year the Hall of Fame changed the Veterans’ Committee process.   It’s always true.   Anyway, for several years the Veterans stopped selecting anybody.   This threw off the balance:

            The ratio of Hall of Fame type accomplishments to Hall of Fame selections has substantially increased in the last ten years.    What does that mean?   That means it’s substantially more difficult to get into the Hall of Fame than it was ten years ago.

            “Good!,”, you may be saying.   “It’s about god-damned time for that.”   I’m not arguing with you.    I’m not arguing pro; I’m not arguing con.   I am pointing this out—1)  That there has been a shift in the ratio of Hall of Fame type accomplishments to Hall of Fame selections, and 2) That this change is nothing compared to the change that is going to occur if we continue along the course we are now marching.

            From 1961 to 1970 there were 31 ex-players selected to the Hall of Fame.  From 1971 to 1980 there were 41; from 1981 to 1990, 29; from 1991 to 2000, 29; and from 2001 through 2010, 23.   Let us say that we elect 25 men to the Hall of Fame in the next ten years, and 25 in the ten years after that.   What is this chart going to look like, then, in 2030?

            And ten years after that, it will look like this:

            Over the next twenty to thirty years, if we continue to elect Hall of Famers at something like the pace of the last fifteen to twenty years, there will begin to develop a huge backlog of players who have not been selected, despite accomplishments greater than those who were honored in the years 1980 to 2005, when the ratio of accomplishments to honorees was historically stable.   What that will mean is that players who have accomplishments like those of Goose Gossage, Kirby Puckett, Bill Mazeroski and Tony Perez will not be honored—players like that, and some better than that.

            Of course, this argument is entangled with every other Hall of Fame argument.  The perceptiveness and consistency of the voters is an issue.    Ross Youngs and George Kell were not better players than Ken Boyer and Ron Santo; they just weren’t.   There’s really no way to argue that they were.

            In the 1940s, the Hall of Fame selected a whole bunch of people who maybe weren’t exactly great ballplayers.   This tied the Hall of Fame argument into a knot, and that knot can never be untied.   The only way to make the Hall of Fame “fair” and “consistent” would be to honor everybody in baseball history as good as or better than Rico Petrocelli, and we are not going to do that.     Since we are not going to do that, there are always going to be inequities in who is selected.

            There is also generational inequity.   There are some time periods in baseball history that have been treated kindly by the voters; there are others, not so much.    I’m not getting into that; I’m not dealing with that here.   I’m just trying to get you to understand a dimension to the issue that, up to now, I don’t think very many people understand.