I’d better do some work here.  Ma’ buddies Joe Posnanski and Tom Tango have been having a semi-private, semi-public discussion about the Hall of Fame voting structure and how it relates to Gary Sheffield and Tim Raines and such, while I have been rolling around the house like a large pool of liquid lethargy, not having written anything in a month.   It’s an interesting topic, and actually, I love writing about how to get better Hall of Famers; the only problem is that it seems futile.  I could come up with a thousand schemes to elect Hall of Famers, all of them better than the current system, but the Hall of Fame wouldn’t adopt any of the thousand.  What then is the point?

                The point is that it leads to better understanding of the problem, and also, I’ve got to do something to get myself out of this life-destroying lethargy I have been in since I got back from Ireland.   The first thing that should be noted, about the Hall of Fame’s selection process, is that more than 99% of the shoddy work has been done not by the BBWAA, but by the various and sundry and mundry committees that have acted on the Hall of Fame’s behalf.

                It is an odd thing, that

1)      MOST of the people who are in the Hall of Fame were not actually selected by the BBWAA,

2)      ALL or virtually all of the unworthy selections to the Hall of Fame were not made by the BBWAA, and yet

3)      Discussion about the Hall of Fame selection process is 90% focused on the BBWAA voting process.

Even sophisticated people like Joe and Tom fall into this trap, or what seems to me like a trap, of trying to fix the part of the system which isn’t broken.    You take your Honda to the Honda dealer, explain that your transmission is shot and the gas pedal is balky; they offer you an oil change and a new set of spark plugs.   I am going to fall into this trap myself in just a moment, but first I wanted to observe that I was walking into this trap.   That way, I don’t feel like I am falling into a trap; I feel like I am walking into a trap with my eyes wide open and my zipper shut.

Why are we focused on fixing the part of the automobile that actually works fine?   Because it is public.    What is public is accessible; we feel that we can influence it, that we can fix it.   The work done by committees in darkened rooms of the Otesaga Hotel has been uniformly terrible, but we don’t have enough details to discuss it.    Rick Ferrell is elected, or Doug Harvey or J. L. Wilkinson, and we all say, "What the blank?", but beyond that we don’t have enough information to discuss the event—nor did we have any warning to prevent it.

The first thing that needs to be done, to fix the Hall of Fame system, is:  Terminate all of the side committees.   Close all of the backdoors and side doors and windows and air vents or however the hell it was that Alex Pompez and Travis Jackson and Dracula got into the building.     Get rid of those, and promise us that there will never, ever, ever be any more of them.   That’s a good start.

Next, establish a rule that four persons must be selected to the Hall of Fame in each year; not four persons MAY be selected; four persons MUST be selected.

A regular flow of entries of a fixed and steady number—coming out of a consistent and well-defined process--creates standards.    The Hall of Fame suffers from indefinite standards because inconsistent and incompatible processes are used to make the selections.    Travis Jackson is in; Alan Trammell—obviously a better player than Travis Jackson—is out.    This is because those passing judgment on Alan Trammell’s career are different in every way than those who plucked Travis Jackson from the lost island of New York Giants history.  If four candidates and only four candidates could be selected each year in a well-thought out, public process, Rick Ferrell, Alex Pompez, Eppa Rixey and Dracula would never have been selected because they could never have fought their way past the better-qualified candidates who have been left out.  

Varying processes, with a lack of review.  A group of 12 or 16 or 18 old men get together in a room and talk themselves into believing that Chick Hafey is a Hall of Famer, and nobody reviews it; they just announce it, and then they try to sucker everybody into believing that this wasn’t some colossal foul up, but that Chick Hafey had mystical abilities that have up to now escaped proper documentation.    You need checks and balances; we need for one committee to review the work of the previous committee, and decide whether it was reasonable or unreasonable.    The problem with that is, if one committee reviews another, you can reach stalemate, as all of the committees disagree with one another and nobody gets elected except Cal Ripken and Derek Jeter.

OK, we have terminated the side committees, and now we are going to replace the BBWAA.    We are going to replace it with a four-step process, in which the four steps are:

1)      Nominate 32 candidates,

2)      Cut the list to 16 by head-to-head competitive voting,

3)      Cut the list to 8, and

4)      Cut the list to 4.

Historically, about three players per year have been selected to the Hall of Fame.   Going forward, I think four per year is a better number.    Some of the reasons why four is a better number than three can be explained by the article "The Expansion Time Bomb", which was published here on February 17, 2010, and which can still be read on this site by clicking "articles" and searching on down until you see it.    Also. . .three PLAYERS per year, plus a certain number of other candidates.   Four per year is about what we have been selecting, if you include managers and executives.  I think four per year is actually LESS than we have been selecting.

The BBWAA has little history of selecting unqualified candidates, but the BBWAA has passed on—rejected—a large number of well-qualified candidates.   The BBWAA whiffed on Joe Torre, Ron Santo, Nellie Fox, Tim Raines, Luis Tiant, Dwight Evans and others.    These are failures, too.  These failures create pressure to open the alternative admissions process—and the alternative admissions process is a dart board.   By insisting that the "regular" process select four honorees per year, we can eliminate the pressures that lead ultimately to the substandard selections.     At four selections per year, the de facto standards for Hall of Fame selection will move up, because all of the selections will be made by a regular, organized process designed to find not players who are to the liking of group, but players who have survived a rigorous process of review and advancement.

I skipped there the step of "Who should be eligible?"

I like the five-year waiting period; I think it serves a proper purpose, and I am willing to allow the Hall of Fame to keep in place their ban on Untouchables like Pete Rose and Shoeless Joey.   But since there are no more Old-Timers Committees or Veterans’ Committees or Special Committees, players (and other candidates) need to remain eligible in perpetuity—and can remain eligible in perpetuity, in this system, without crowding the ballot so as to prevent elections.   Also, the minimum ten-year service in the major leagues is no longer a necessary requirement.  The purpose of the ten-year service requirement was to establish a base-line minimum.  Since four people are going to be elected every year come communism or high water, we don’t need to worry any more about clogging the pipes with unworthy candidates.  Unworthy candidates can be nominated, because they’ll be rejected by the subsequent process.

Then we form fan organizations to nominate the 32 candidates.  There are 30 major league baseball teams.   Each major league baseball team is charged to create a fan support organization, and that fan support organization is charged to nominate one player to represent that team in that year’s vote.   The Yankee fans, for example, can nominate Roger Maris, Don Mattingly, Bernie Williams or Mike Mussina or whoever they want to nominate.    The Tigers fan group can nominate Whitaker or Trammell or Jack Morris or Mickey Lolich or Norm Cash or Bill Freehan or, since we have eliminated the 10-year minimum, Mark Fidrych.    The Dodger fans can nominate Steve Garvey or Bob Welch or Mike Piazza or Babe Herman or Gil Hodges or Maury Wills.  The Colorado Rockies fans won’t really have a strong candidate until Todd Helton retires, but they can still participate in the process by nominating Larry Walker or Andres Galarraga or somebody.

One problem we’re going to run into right away is what to do about franchise shifts.    Fortunately, franchise shifts are now so rare that we don’t have a huge problem there, but. . .OK, what do we do about Montreal?   The Washington fans don’t care anything about the Montreal players, who thus become orphans in the system.

It is normally about 20 to 25 years from the peak of a player’s career until he becomes a serious Hall of Fame candidate, although it is sometimes less.    My suggestion would be that the "old" city owns the right to nominate the candidate until 30 years after the franchise shift.    The Washington fans at this point wouldn’t really have anyone who is a serious candidate anyway.    If we assume that Strasburg or Bryce Harper steps forward and has a Hall of Fame career, then we have to assume that they won’t finish that career until sometime outside of 2025, more likely 2027 or 2028 or well. ..actually later than that.   Five-year waiting period, its 2032 or 2033.   Since the team was in Montreal through 2004, the Montreal fans own the nominating process until 2034.

There are 30 teams, and I have suggested 32 nominees per year.    The other committee is charged to nominate the best candidates not being nominated by any of the 30 team panels.   These would include players like Gary Sheffield, Rusty Staub and David Cone who are not clearly associated with any one team, but also institutional figures like commissioners, league presidents, inventors, umpires, vampires and people who lead drives to build new stadiums.    These would also include the representatives of dead franchises from long ago, people like George Van Haltren and Mickey Vernon. . .anyone who is a good candidate but not being nominated.

There may be a problem here, which is that the two nominations from that category are not enough.   Historically, people like this—umpires and executives and long-ago stars—have accounted for much, much more than one sixteenth of the Hall of Fame population.    This group would not need to nominate executives or managers; if the St. Louis or Oakland fans want to nominate Tony LaRussa, they have the same right to nominate him as Mark McGwire.

Anyway. . .two "free" nominations are not enough to ensure that good candidates who are not fan favorites in any one city are nominated, so I suggest this.   When a team has a "successful" nomination, that team does not nominate a player the next year, and those four nomination spots are passed instead to the "open field" committee.   In other words, let’s assume that the Yankee fans nominate Derek (Dirty Rotten) Jeter in 2019 and that he is elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, then the Yankees would not have a nomination spot in 2020.

Trying to think along with the rabble. . .I will get letters here complaining that actually, Mariano Rivera will be nominated and elected in 2018, which will mean that the Yankees will lose their nomination spot in 2019, which will mean that Derek Jeter will not be nominated until 2020, which will mean that St. Derek has to wait out an entire year, and this is a terrible injustice and an intolerable situation and yada yada yada.    My response to this is:  1) give me a break; I’m just trying to explain how the system works in theory, not how it will work in detail, 2) that this is not really a terrible injustice or an intolerable situation; it is more in the nature of a trivial inconvenience, and 3) actually, it’s not even that, since in this extremely unusual situation, in which a team has two first-ballot Hall of Famers retiring in two seasons, the Open Field committee can and should nominate Derek Jeter in 2019, rather than making him wait a year.   

Anyway, in each election after the first one, then, there are 32 nominations—26 from teams, and 6 from the open field committee.    My next rule would be that a player who is nominated but not elected must then wait three years to be re-nominated; in other words, if Pedro Martinez is nominated by the Boston fans in 2015 but not elected, then they cannot re-nominate him in 2016; they can switch to nominating Clemens, or Jackie Jensen, or Manny if he is eligible, or Dwight Evans or Dom DiMaggio or Nomah or Nosferatu or Frank White if for some reason they choose to do that , but they can’t re-nominate Pedro until 2018.

Unless.   There’s an "out" from that, a really big out, but I need to do some more explaining before I get there.   First, the 32 candidates are matched against one another in head-to-head voting.   Let us suppose that we are in the year 2018, and let us suppose that the players nominated in 2018 are as follows:

The first question we have to ask is how we arrange these 32 candidates into a field of 16 head-to-head contests, a tournament.   I would be comfortable "seeding" them at random, but other options would include:

1)       Seeding them chronologically by date of birth,

2)      Seeding them by the length of their major league careers, and

3)      Seeding them by previous nominations to the Hall of Fame; in other words, a person nominated four previous times would be seeded ahead of a person nominated/not selected three previous times.  

A random seeding process actually would work fine and would cause no problems, but people who are not mathematically literate tend to be uncomfortable with random seedings, and would probably demand something else.    I don’t care; it really doesn’t matter in the long run how the candidates are seeded.    Let’s say for the purpose of illustration that it is random.    I seeded these 32 candidates at random:

At random, the two leading vote-getters remaining from last year’s ballot are matched against one another (Piazza and Biggio), and it happens that similar players are matched against each other in several cases—Jack Morris against Jim Kaat, Mariano Rivera against Trevor Hoffman,  Manny Ramirez against Todd Helton and Ken Boyer against Stan Hack.    Edgar Martinez and Dave Stieb are not similar players, but they are players of similar stature, and they represent the 1977 expansion pairings, the Mariners and the Blue Jays.   Anyway, someone would win each of these contests and someone would lose.   Let us assume for the purposes of argument that Biggio would beat Mike Piazza, that Edgar Martinez would beat Dave Stieb, that Jack Morris would beat Jim Kaat, that Randy Johnson would beat Dave Parker, that Cecil Cooper would beat the Vampire Lestat, that Minnie Minoso would beat Vida Blue, that Mariano Rivera would beat Trevor Hoffman, that Manny Ramirez would beat Todd Helton, that Mike Mussina would beat Edgar Renteria, that Ted Kluszewski would beat Jerry Koosman, that Barry Bonds would beat Tony Oliva, that Rocky Colavito would beat Frank White, that Tim Raines would beat Dick Allen, that Ken Boyer would beat Stan Hack, that Ivan Rodriguez would beat Andruw Jones, and that Gary Sheffield would beat Tim Salmon.   Then we would have 16 candidates in 8 contests in the second round:

Craig Biggio against Edgar Martinez

Jack Morris against Randy Johnson

Cecil Cooper against Minnie Minoso

Mariano Rivera against Manny Ramirez

Mike Mussina against Ted Kluszewski

Barry Bonds against Rocky Colavito

Tim Raines against Ken Boyer

Ivan Rodriguez against Gary Sheffield

In the second round it is obvious that Randy Johnson would beat Jack Morris and that Barry Bonds would probably cream Rocky Colavito despite the steroid issue, but the other outcomes are not as obvious.   Let us say for the sake of argument that Biggio bests Edgar, Minnie Minoso beats Cecil Cooper, Mariano Rivera eliminates Manny Ramirez, Mike Mussina beats Ted Kluszewski, Raines beats Boyer and Ivan Rodriguez comes out ahead of Gary Sheffield (which I don’t believe that he should, but I do believe that he would.)   These, then, would be the four matches for the final round of the voting:

Craig Biggio against Randy Johnson

Minnie Minoso against Mariano Rivera

Mike Mussina against Barry Bonds

Tim Raines against Ivan Rodriguez

Probably your Hall of Fame selections would be Randy Johnson, Mariano Rivera, Barry Bonds and Ivan Rodriguez, I am guessing, but it doesn’t matter much because any of these eight are legitimate Hall of Famers; we are merely selecting the most legitimate, and asking the others to wait a year.

When a player is nominated/not selected, that player (that candidate) cannot be re-nominated in the following year or in the year following that, except that players who are eliminated by direct comparison with the four who are selected can be re-nominated the next year.    In other words—assuming that the four selected are Randy, Mariano, Bonds and Pudge—then any player who has been directly eliminated by one of those four can be immediately re-nominated.    Each Hall of Famer will eliminate three other candidates in the process of selection, so there will be 12 candidates who can be re-nominated the next year; the field of 32 becomes 4 who are selected, 12 who can be immediately re-nominated, and 16 who have to wait three years before they can be considered again.   In this illustration Dave Parker, Jack Morris, Craig Biggio, Trevor Hoffman, Manny Ramirez, Minnie Minoso, Tony Oliva, Rocky Colavito, Mike Mussina, Tim Raines, Gary Sheffield and Andruw Jones could be re-nominated in 2019, while Mike Piazza, Dave Stieb, Edgar Martinez, Jim Kaat, Cecil Cooper, Lestat, Vida Blue, Todd Helton, Edgar Renteria, Ted Kluszewski, Jerry Koosman, Frank White, Edgar Renteria, Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, Stan Hack and Tim Salmon could not be re-nominated until 2021.  

                I think the provision requiring that new names be placed on the ballot is necessary to prevent local nominating conventions from becoming unduly polarized.  Absent such a rule, what is going to happen is that the advocates of some candidate will take over many of the nominating groups, and constantly re-nominate candidates who aren’t going to be elected.    The Tigers group, for example, might be taken over by Jack Morris supporters and re-nominate Morris year after year, excluding Trammell, Parrish, Freehan, Lolich, and other deserving candidates.  But the exemption for those directly eliminated by the Hall of Famers is necessary, because there will be situations in which a first-round matchup is Randy Johnson against Ken Griffey Jr. or something.   It is OK that one of those giants has to wait a year, as Joe DiMaggio did, but less OK that a player of that stature has to wait three years and hope that in the next turn he doesn’t get matched up against Albert Pujols.

                Twelve candidates can be re-nominated the next year, but not all of them will be.   Let us take Rocky Colavito, for example; he can be re-nominated in 2019 although he is not a strong candidate.   Once the system is up and running, Colavito would have to beat out in the Cleveland precinct whoever it was who was the nominee three years ago and is now eligible again.  In many cases, the vote to nominate Colavito will have been close anyway; it may have been Colavito 57, Wes Ferrell 56, Jim Thome 55 in his local precinct.  When Colavito’s nomination fails, it is not obvious that he will win the nomination again the next year; sometimes he will, sometimes he won’t.  But in this way, the percentage of "good candidates" in the 32-man field will be increased by allowing the better candidates to be re-nominated more quickly.   

                There are a lot of questions that I have not answered yet, the largest of which is "Who decides between Randy Johnson and Dave Parker?"     But first, I wanted to make this argument.   The genius of this system is that it focuses the task assigned to the voters to a simple, manageable question.  

                One of the problems with the BBWAA voting system is that it assigns the voters a sprawling, unmanageable task. The BBWAA voter is asked to review the credentials of dozens of candidates, make a mental list of them 1 through 44, and decide which ten are the most qualified. That done, he is asked to compare the player to some indefinite, unwritten standard:  is this player above the line?   In that system it is easy for someone to be overlooked—and once he is overlooked, very difficult for him to get redress. In this system that I have proposed, the voter is asked merely to study two specific players, get command of the information about those two, and choose one or the other.   That is a task much more in keeping with the capacity of the human mind.    

                And the player who is "locked out" here—the next Lou Whitaker, the next Ron Santo—that player has an obvious pathway to get back in the process.   Lou Whitaker’s advocates simply have to go the Detroit nominating group, and make the case for Whitaker to be given a place in the rotation of nominees, along with Trammell, Rudy York and Jack Morris.     If the Detroit group doesn’t nominate him, the Open Field group can.

                I think a Tim Raines, an Alan Trammell. . ..I think a player like that has a better chance of thriving in the system if the voter is forced to consider his qualifications, rather than being given the option of overlooking him.  If you are forced to ask yourself "Who do I really want to have on my team:  Tim Raines, or Kirby Puckett?" you are probably going to realize that Tim Raines is the better candidate.    Perhaps I misstated my argument there.  It is obvious, and it would be easy to demonstrate, that Hall of Fame voting is shaped by "attention effects".   Dizzy Dean was selected in part because 1) he was part of the national broadcast team, and 2) there was a movie about him and a publicity campaign for the movie.    Players benefit from an attention effect when they die.  But if the attention effect merely pushes the candidate into a direct competition with another candidate, that mutes the effect.   Am I going to vote against Jim Kaat, a 285-game winner, because Jim Bunning has been elected to the United States Senate?   Am I really going to vote against Vada Pinson because the Yankee fans are emotional about Phil Rizzuto not being elected?

                A panel cannot simply select Alex Pompez; it must select Alex Pompez and reject someone else.  By limiting those selected to four per year, we force the advocates of Phil Rizzuto to show not merely that he is above some imaginary line of greatness, but that he is actually better, more qualified, than a series of other candidates.   They must first select him as their nominee over Mattingly, Maris, Elston Howard and Jim Leyritz, and he must then win three levels of head to head competitions with other well-qualified candidates, judged by impartial experts. 

                Another question:  Who are the judges?    First, I think it is an adequate answer to that question to say simply that the judges should be the best-qualified people that we can find.    Among the failings of the BBWAA system—which again, I am not exaggerating—but among the failings of the BBWAA system is that is very careless as to who gets the ballot and who doesn’t.    Well qualified people—Bob Costas, for example—are permanently locked out of the system, prohibited from voting—while totally unqualified people are allowed to vote.    If we start over and keep our eyes open and our zippers shut, we can avoid that problem. 

                As to who the best qualified people are. .. how about this.   Let us suppose that we set up 16 ten-person panels, with each ten-person panel consisting of three former players, three members of the media, three persons like Craig Wright or Rob Neyer or John Thorn who are very knowledgeable about the history of baseball, and one executive or scout, one baseball professional.    Each of the 16 panels can elect one "moderator" or "captain", before they know which two players they will be asked to compare, and that person’s vote will be the tie-breaker in case of a tie.   Each panel is then assigned one of the 16 sets of first-round candidate matchups.  

                In the second round, we have 8 sets of 20-man panels; in the third round, 4 sets of 40-man panels.   You were probably wondering why I didn’t just suggest a 7-man or 9-man panel in the first round, thus avoiding possible ties, but when you move to the second round, then you have 14- or 18-man panels, same problem; you’re always going to have an even number of voters—thus the possibility of a tie—in the second and third rounds.  

                Let’s talk about the schedule.   First, I want this to be a public process, with the public aware of and involved in the argument at each step of the way.  Let us say that we begin announcing the candidates, one a day, beginning on October 1. On October 1 we announce that Chipper Jones is the candidate representing Atlanta, on October 2 that Brian Giles is the candidate representing San Diego, on October 3 that Bobby Grich has been nominated to represent Baltimore, etc., etc.   In this way there is a screen crawler about the Hall of Fame process every day for a month, which keeps the Hall of Fame in the national conversation.    

                The last nomination would be about November 1.   After that we take a ten-day hiatus to allow the machinery to work, and then we begin announcing results, again, one a day; on November 12 we announce that Bobby Abreu has advanced over Vladimir Guerrero, and that tomorrow’s announcement will regard the competition between Todd Helton and Curt Schilling.   On November 13 we announce that Todd Helton has been selected to advance over Curt Schilling.   This goes on until late November, then we take a ten-day break, and begin announcing the results of the second-round voting. The final selections will be announced in early January, one a day for four days.  

                The "string along" schedule of announcements is necessary in part because some player might be nominated by two different groups.  If all of the groups meet on November 3 and announce their nominations on November 4, we might find that Gary Sheffield has been simultaneously nominated by the Dodgers and Yankees; it might seem unlikely, but it CAN happen, and then there is Murphy’s Law:  Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.  If there is a way the system can fail, nature will find the pathway to that outcome.  The "Open Field" nominations need to be made at the end of the process, because it is their job to clean up after the other committees, to nominate the most deserving candidates who are being overlooked.  They can’t be certain who has been overlooked until the other nominations are known. 

                There will be objections here that we will be embarrassing players by announcing that they have been rejected as Hall of Fame candidates.   I don’t really see it that way.   We have five candidates for each Oscar; four of them will be publicly rejected on national television.   Are they embarrassed by this?   Are they humiliated by their public rejection?   You can look at it either way:  that it is an honor to be nominated, or that it is an embarrassment to be rejected.   If you’re a healthy, intelligent person, you’ll look at it as an honor to be nominated.   90% of Hall of Fame caliber athletes are healthy, intelligent people, and athletes understand competition. They’ve lost before.  I don’t really think that athletes are going to react that way, although some members of the media will seize themselves up in righteous indignation supposedly on behalf of the athletes.   But I think we can get past that. 

                Some of the votes are going to be controversial.  There is going to be some selection that doesn’t seem right to the wise men of ESPN, and it will be attacked.  Who are these people, who think that Bobby Abreu was a greater player than Vladimir Guerrero? What are they smoking?   When these men were active and competing against one another, Vladimir was a huge star. If you had said that Bobby Abreu was a better player than Vladimir Guerrero in 2001, when they were at their peak, you’d have been laughed out of the building.   Can we get one of these voters on the phone, to discuss this?

                That’s OK, too, that there will be criticism and controversy of that nature; controversy is the lifeblood of the Hall of Fame. What one hopes is that through the controversy, through the smoke and fire extinguishers, the eventual selections become highly anticipated events.  We want the networks standing by their desks in January, awaiting the announcements with experts primed and painted and ready to comment.  

                But I am not advocating this system because it will generate controversy; I am not advocating this system because it can be used to keep the Hall of Fame debate front and center for three months.  I am advocating this system because I believe it will select the best qualified players.  We don’t find the national champion in basketball by watching the teams practice and then voting on who would win; we find the champion by putting them through a systematic, organized competition.   A system of sifting the candidates through layers of comparison will produce better Hall of Famers than any process of simply lining them up and choosing an indefinite number of players from a long list of maybes.