Bill asked, rhetorically, in a recent (1/17/2021) "Ask Bill" column, "Is Willie Randolph not a man of good character?" in the context of a larger discussion of "character" as a consideration in Hall of Fame voting, his larger point being that "The character clause is not an excuse to pick and choose your favorites from a list of qualified players."
Without going into my usual ill-tempered tirade against Willie Randolph’s character (you’re very welcome), it did occur to me that this might be an interesting experiment: on every HoF ballot, to ask voters to single out three candidates for "good character" and "poor character" marks. Most candidates of course would fall into the middle category, which I would call the "How the hell would I know, and who am I to judge?" category. That’s as should be, and asking for three candidates in each extreme may be too many. But (in my imagination) if we had three mandatory good character and three mandatory bad character candidates named on every ballot, wouldn’t it be interesting if some sort of consensus emerged?
(By "mandatory," I’m suggesting that no ballot would be valid, and no valet would be ballad, without the six players being so designated. A long career designing quizzes and tests with questions that invariably draw some students’ complaints that I’m asking very unfaaaaaaiiiir questions has made me immune to folks not liking the way I design my examinations, but I persist because I’m looking to learn some valuable things from my subjects, things they are probably unwilling to reveal about their thinking without being under compulsion.)
But what, exactly, might we learn from such an experiment?
Assuming we had a large enough pool of voters, I think we could eliminate cases of personal animosity. If one voter, for example, wrote down the name of a player who had one time spoken to him rudely, as an act of personal vengeance, that would mean just about nothing. "Pissed-off voter" I would say, and pay that vote no attention whatsoever. But how about if twelve people write that same player’s name as having been inconsiderate, foul-mouthed, mendacious, malicious, dishonest, or otherwise of poor personal character?
I would call that "evidence." Not "proof," which exists only in mathematics and alcohol, but a pretty solid indication of—something? Maybe it merely supports that someone suffered from a lousy personality, or that voters are a bunch of overly sensitive flakes of snow who lack a sense of humor and a spinal column.
What would interest me would be the bearing-out of my suspicion that some candidates would draw votes in both categories. To take a player whose character I’ve recently considered very closely, I think Dick Allen would draw "bad character" votes, for sure, but maybe a few "good character" votes as well. Heck, I might just cast my ballot in both categories for him—as my review of his biography explains in great detail, I think his surly, uncooperative, even selfish qualities make an important political statement that might outweigh the negative view I had of Allen before I read this biography. "Ya wanna treat black players like dirt, and then claim it was all a big misunderstanding? Well, if I stand here and scream about what racist dicks you all are, maybe somebody will pay attention, even if it means I ain’t winning any personality trophies this week" might be a fair summation of Dick Allen’s stance towards MLB, and who’s to say that doesn’t reflect virtues in Allen’s character that rarely got acclaimed in the press?
The whole idea of "character" is inherently subjective and therefore weird, but on some level, we all agree that it exists. That it is not just about picking and choosing your favorites, agreed? We will disagree, and do, on who displays bad character and who displays good character, but it ain’t nothing. I would say that something similar to the thought experiment I propose here would be a first step in determining if there are cases so extreme that we can actually reach something approaching a consensus.
It might seem unfaaaaaiiiir that I make three choices in each category mandatory, and it is, but I’ll defend it. Say you’re a voter and only two names jump out at you in the "poor character" category. I’m forcing you to pick on one undeserving candidate to complete your valid ballot. Maybe you pick someone because he gave an interview you found arrogant one time, or because he didn’t play the game "right" by your lights (took too much time between pitches, didn’t always run out groundballs, smoked a cigarette in the dugout, etc.), or maybe even because you’re a racist and he’s the wrong shade of skin color.
I say "Dudn’t matter." With a body of voters of any size at all, your vote will be a mosquito on the windshield of life. If no other voter picks the same poor-character player (and how long are the odds that one other voter will?), it just gets written as a "pissed-off voter" vote, and reduced to nothing in the tallying.
But if ten or twenty other voters pick the same one, well, doesn’t that mean something? Again, it’s evidence. I’m not calling for a Hall of Good Character (though I’ll take nominations). I’m just saying that I think it ought to be a factor. Maybe it’s a Max Factor. Maybe it’s Maybelline.
I think it’s a Minor Factor, and that’s what it should be. Babe Ruth should easily get into the HoF, even with a lot of character issues working against him, because he’s that good. Jackie Robinson doesn’t need his character working in his favor, because he’s got votes to burn. Cookie Rojas could win the good-character votes unanimously, and it wouldn’t help him get to Cooperstown—he’s somewhere on I-90, around Cleveland maybe, and he’s walking towards the Finger Lakes region on two broken legs.
But a genuine, solid-gold, notarized douchebag who’s on the bubble anyway? Ahh—that’s what the character clause is for.
Will there be politicking? You betcha. Voters may organize campaigns in favor of or against candidates but I think it will be very hard, outside of collusion, to rig the vote in this election. No one’s going to vote to besmirch or to canonize someone’s character because other people tell him to.
How might this work? I’m thinking you have, say, 100 HoF voters, so 300 positive characters, 300 negative. The first x number in each category equals 0. Let’s say that number is 10, so the 11th character vote raises (or lowers) the threshold for election by 1 percentage point. That is, if you have 11 "poor character" votes, you now need to reach 76% of the votes to get elected. If you have 31 "poor character" votes you now need 96% of the votes to get elected, which may be difficult.
But fair. And the other way is also fair: if you have 31 "good character" votes, you now need only 55% of the vote to get into the Hall of Fame without paying admission.
You might get some interesting results. I suspect that Bonds and Clemens would get over 90% of the vote but not get elected because they might draw enough "poor character" votes to require over 100% of the vote.
This new wrinkle on an old Shar-Pei, the Curt Schilling wrinkle, might not have any real-world results different from the current results, but it will put the character issue into high relief. I’m happier, personally, with a result that says "We collectively think that Schilling was a hell of a ballplayer, whose achievements call for election to the Hall of Fame, but we also, again collectively, have decided that he’s just too much of a creep and a social maladapt for people to praise and to socialize with, so: Sorry, Charlie."
You might not agree with me (a big Red Sox rooter, btw, and a fan of the man on the mound with the bloody sock) about Schilling, but I think this would be a big step in the direction of quantifying what the "character" issue actually means. If Schilling were to get in, over my objections, with a super-majority of the vote, meaning that some people voted him out on "character" but he was good enough to overcome those negative votes, I would have no kick coming. And if he were kept out, purely and explicitly on the basis on character, I might start to consider believing in the existence of a God.