“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”
--Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Everybody is Against You
Sometimes stand-up comics bomb. They die out there. You watch them, on the stage, in the glare of the house spotlight, armed with nothing more than a microphone and their words. And you can’t help but cringe a little when it’s not working, letting out another slow groan with each horrible, predictable punchline. Nothing they say seems funny. Maybe it’s their fault. Maybe the material isn’t all that good, not that clever. There are a lot of hacks out there, cranking out sub-standard material. It happens.
But then again, sometimes, it’s not the comedians’ fault at all. Sometimes they run into a bad audience that isn’t receptive to what they have to say. An audience that isn’t willing to meet them halfway, a group of people in a collective bad mood that won’t seem to lift. No matter how professional and polished and proven the material is, the set isn’t going to succeed. They find an audience that’s not easy to impress. And it looks like it ain’t gonna happen on their night, either. Every now and then, you play to a “Tough Crowd.”
I can think of a handful of historical Tough Crowds. Bob Dylan (the man who wrote “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “The Times they are a-Changin’” and “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” and so on) was booed off the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, forced to end his set after three short songs. They say that the fans were angry because Dylan decided to play his songs on an electric guitar. That was seen as an Act of War, a metaphorical gesture comparable to spitting in the face of the folk scene, and so the audience instantaneously turned on him. They voiced their displeasure, they registered their discontent. Thus Bob Dylan – despite all his fame, success, and musical accomplishment – was stranded and doomed. It wouldn’t have mattered what songs he chose, how amazing his lyrics were (and let’s face it, they guy was capable of some pretty decent lyrical work) or how much soul he put into his performance. In the end, the crowd did not want him to play an electric guitar. They booed him off the stage. That’s an example of a Tough Crowd.
Here’s another one. Jimi Hendrix was booked as the opening act when The Monkees went on tour. Now Hendrix, of course, was a musical genius who revolutionized rock music with his incendiary guitar playing. It’s not really a stretch to call him the greatest rock guitarist of all time. He was brilliant, innovative, and trailblazing. The Monkees, on the other hand… were not. They were a group of four cute young white guys who were thrown together to create a television show. Having Hendrix open for them was a bit of inspired madness that seems slightly demented and absurd in retrospect. And it resulted in arenas full of worshipful teenage Monkees fans reacting to Hendrix with cold bewilderment on a nightly basis. They were there to hear Davy Jones sing “Daydream Believer,” just like on the show. Cheer up, sleepy Jean/Oh, what can it mean?/To a Daydream Believer/And a Homecoming Queen? That’s all they wanted. It wasn’t too much to ask for. Instead, they were rudely greeted by the plodding and demonic dissonant tritone intervals that led to the E7#9 machine gun chords of “Purple Haze.” Uh, no. That really wasn’t going to fly. Wrong place, wrong time. Jimi Hendrix – amazing showman, masterful guitarist, and musical genius – got thrown off the tour as the Monkees’ opening act. Like I said, Tough Crowd.
Dylan ran into a group that was not going to accept him, despite all his contributions to the world of music. Hendrix ran into a crowd that wasn’t going to accept him, despite all his prodigious talents. And then there were the dozens of writers who voted that Cy Young did not deserve to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Victory is not Enough
Hall of Famers are a select group, the absolute best players ever to play the game. But even in a club as exclusive as the Hall of Fame, there are still different tiers, different levels, different stratifications. Some guys got elected without a hitch, because their greatness was never questioned. Eveyone knows and accepts that they deserve the highest honors imaginable. In his election year, Hank Aaron received 97.83% of the vote. Willie Mays received 94.68%. Cal Ripken Jr. got 98.53% and Mike Schmidt got 96.52%. No worries, no arguments. All these guys cleared the required 75% threshold without any difficulty. By any measure, these men were deserving.
Then, there are the guys who squeak in. They know that they need to receive 75%, and it’s going to come down to the wire, every vote counts. They seem qualified, but there’s too much uncertainty. These players were really good, but maybe not dominant enough to waltz right in.
Tony Perez had the benefit of playing on some awesome offensive teams. Surrounded by talent like Bench, Morgan, and Rose, he built his reputation on his RBI numbers, a stat that is almost completely dependent on team context. While some writers were clearly unconvinced of his merits, he did manage to get elected when he received 77.15% of the vote.
Receiving even less support was Bruce Sutter. A relief specialist, and one who wasn’t as effective as a contemporary like Goose Gossage, Sutter seemed to receive a halo effect for having popularized a new pitch, the split-finger fastball. It was an odd way to build a Hall of Fame portfolio. Still, Sutter managed to barely claw his way in, picking up 76.90% of the vote.
And then there was Catfish Hunter. Hunter had a cool nickname, played on some excellent teams, and signed a big contract that helped set him apart from the crowd. He only won 224 games in 15 years, and his ERA+ for his career was an underwhelming 104. That’s not very good. Still, Catfish apparently did enough things to make a positive impression on the voters, and he snuck in there with 76.27% of the vote.
Not a lot of breathing room for those guys. Perez (77.15%), Sutter (76.90%) and Hunter (76.27%) were all marginal candidates, but because the winds were blowing in their favor and Fate was smiling down on them on their respective election days, they were able to corral just about the absolute minimum necessary to get a plaque in Cooperstown.
Of course, they all received more support than Cy Young, who barely got his passing grade, garnering 76.12% from the writers.
(And Young was actually fortunate to improve up to 76.12% of the vote. Because the year before, in his first year of eligibility, only 49.1% of the writers voted for him. Forty-nine percent. That’s less than half. After winning 511 games in his career, less than half the voters were impressed enough to support his candidacy. The writers were allowed to vote for up to ten candidates. And on over fifty perent of those ballots, Cy Young was not considered one of the top ten candidates. He didn’t make the cut.)
I Can’t Get Into Your Head
I would like to have known a person who chose not to vote for Cy Young. I would like to have discussed with him the standards he had for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown. What constituted greatness for this voter? What level of accomplishment was necessary in his eyes in order to gain entry? You know, when a man wins 511 games and does not receive your vote, my question becomes, how many more wins does he need to impress you? And how, exactly, did you reach that figure, since nobody else in the history of baseball has ever achieved it?
Most people think that getting 300 wins makes you a mortal lock to get voted into the Hall of Fame. It’s such a difficult accomplishment, that conventional wisdom often suggests there will no longer be any 300 game winners in the future, due to the advent of the five-man rotation and the greater reliance on relievers. It’s a dying breed, in danger of extinction.
Cy Young had 300 wins. He crushed that number. He reached 300 wins, then piled another 211 on top. That’s a lot of additional wins in excess of traditional, standard greatness. If you won 20 games a year, every year, for an entire decade, you would still come up short of the number of games Cy Young won after posting his 300th win. So how does he end up pulling 76.12% after bombing out at under 50% the first time around?
Look, I want to give the Hall of Fame voters the benefit of the doubt. I want to try and understand them. I want to try and figure out reasons why someone wouldn’t vote for a man with 511 wins, a 2.63 lifetime ERA, 749 complete games, and 76 shutouts. (He also led the league in saves twice, and finished in the top ten for saves in ten different seasons. I only mention this because I suddenly find myself in the odd position of having to prop up Cy Young’s credentials.) Keeping all this in mind, here are some possible theories on why a reasonable man might choose not to vote for Cy Young.
Theory 1, The Illusion of Longevity. We can also call this “The Don Sutton Rule.” When Sutton was eligible for enshrinement, a lot of voters were reluctant to vote for him because they felt he padded his counting stats by showing up and hanging around. Sutton won 324 games by being an above average pitcher over a twenty-three year career. The argument against him at the time was that he was consistent, and he was good, but he was rarely dominant. As an illustration, they pointed out that he had only won twenty games in a season once. So maybe the voters felt that Cy Young was the ultimate beneficiary of The Don Sutton Rule, a guy who kept playing and playing until he racked up 511 wins.
Except that when he was forty years old, Young won 21 games (eighth in the league) and carried a 1.99 ERA (fifth in the league.) And when he was forty-one, he won twenty games (fourth in the league) and had a 1.26 ERA (good for second in the league.) When he hit the age of forty-two years old, Young won 19 games (fourth in the league) while sporting a 2.26 ERA. Man, I don’t care who you are. A starting pitcher with a 1.26 ERA is nothing to sneeze at.
Young didn’t hang around to pad his stats. He was dominating batters for years after he passed his fortieth birthday. Whatever the reasons are for choosing not to vote for Cy Young, a “diminished tail end to his career” is not one of them. Next.
Theory 2, The Adjustment for Era Context. Because Young played at the turn of the century, you could argue that his pitching stats should be de-valued. Pitchers had all their numbers inflated back then, and you need to discount everything, to take the records with a grain of salt. I can see that. That’s valid.
Of course, if every pitcher was benefiting from the conditions of the time, why was Cy Young the only one to win five hundred games? Why couldn’t Mickey Welch, or Charles Radbourn, or Eddie Plank, or John Clarkson also win five hundred? Even under optimal pitching conditions, Young was still performing at a level far beyond his peers. He wasn’t a mirage created by the conditions at the time. He was a superior competitor, and the margin of difference is instructive.
This one seems plausible. When I first started considering the question of why someone would choose not to vote for Cy Young, I thought the most likely possibility was that there were too many worthy candidates in those initial elections. If there were too many deserving players crowding the ballot, maybe the writers decided Cy Young wasn’t one of the ten most deserving players? I don’t know. It all seems so unlikely to me, but I guess that could happen.
Except that it seems like the votes that were cast didn’t exactly go to more deserving players. In 1937, the year Young was barely elected, 48 of the 201 voters chose not to list him as one of their ten picks. He needed 151 votes for election, and he got 153, clearing the hurdle by millimeters, probably even scraping it on his way over. Here are some other players who received votes in that election:
Lou Criger received 16 votes. Lou played in the Majors for 16 years, had a career batting average of .221 and had 11 total career homers. There were 16 writers voting for Lou Criger in the same election that 48 writers were not voting Cy Young. When Bill James listed 100 best catchers of all-time in his New Historical Baseball Abstract, Lou Criger did not make the top 100. Criger was several spots beyond that at 115. He finished behind such notable recent backstops as Ron Hassey (89th), Jody Davis (90th), Mike Lavalliere (91st), Charlie Moore (96th), and Bo Diaz (97th). Ranked at 115, Criger barely beat out Ron Karkovice, who was listed four spots behind him at 119. Let me ask you, can you imagine voting for Ron Karkovice for the Baseball Hall of Fame? Can you imagine 16 baseball writers doing it in a single year?
Nap Rucker received 11 votes. Rucker and Young were actually contemporaries. Rucker’s career only lasted ten years, and Young was active in the Majors during half those seasons. So it would be possible to compare Rucker and Young – they played in the same period. And in his time in the Majors, Rucker was a .500 pitcher who had a 134-134 career record. Rucker never led the league in ERA (he was only in the top ten twice.) He never led the league in wins (the closest he ever came was fifth.) He did lead the league in walks allowed one year, and he led the league in hits allowed in a different season. So, once again, I would like to point out that Nap Rucker received 11 votes for the Hall of Fame in the same election that Cy Young barely squeaked in by 1.12 percent of the vote.
Jimmy Archer received 6 votes. I won’t say too much about the merits of his career other than to point out that one of the top ten career similarity scores for Archer is Billy Ripken. And his top match is Alex Trevino. So, yeah, there were six writers who voted for that guy.
Bugs Raymond got a vote. Which is inexplicable to me. I’ll give you the stats. Ready? Here we go. Bugs Raymond played in the Majors for six years. His season high was 18 wins. He won 45 games total. And he lost 57. Which meant that he was 12 games under .500 for his career. Oh, and Cy Young was active during Raymond’s entire career, so they were contemporaries that could be directly compared to one another.
And the man who tried to fix more games than any other player in history, Hal Chase, got 18 votes for enshrinement into the Hall of Fame. In the New Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill wrote “The secret of Hal Chase, I believe, was that he was able to reach out and embrace that evil…” and (in a later passage) “This is the corrupt. No matter what his skills, I would not want Hal Chase around, period, and I find it extremely difficult to believe that he ever helped any team, at all, period.” Sounds great. 18 votes for Chase.
If writers weren’t voting for Cy Young, it’s not because they were compelled by other towering figures that demanded their attention. Unless of course you consider Lou Criger, Nap Rucker, Jimmy Archer, Bugs Raymond, and Hal Chase to be the best representatives of excellence the sport of baseball has to offer. I mean, you might. After all, at one point, there were several professional sportswriters who felt that way.
How All This Came To Be
In the end, I think that the most likely answer as to why the writers didn’t vote for Cy Young is that they didn’t know what they were doing. And I don’t mean that as a cheap shot. I mean that they literally had no idea what the process was. From what I gather, a lot of those early voters weren’t even sure if they were allowed to vote for Cy Young. That sort of confusion would probably have an impact of the results.
In 1936 and 1937, voting for the Hall of Fame was a process in its infancy with poorly defined guidelines and very little guidance. The disregard for Cy Young’s credentials and qualifications makes more sense when seen in that regard. Hell, voting for the Hall of Fame today is still nebulous and unpredictable, so I think we have to be a little more forgiving of outcomes that came over seventy years ago. When you take an uninformed voting populace and provide them with minimal instruction, do not be surprised when the election results defy all known reason.
And this is the point in the essay where I was planning to take that previous sentence and tie it into a deeper point. But maybe I’ll just let it stand on its own. Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, it’s best to leave things unsaid.
If you have any thoughts you want to share, I would love to hear from you. I can be contacted at roeltorres@post.harvard.edu. Thank you.