II. The Special Ballot

 The Hall of Fame has launched a new attempt to straighten out some wrinkles in the voting, and I heartily and unreservedly applaud the effort.

Five points here, some of them old and some of them new:

1)  The Hall of Fame’s voting structure, at its inception, was very, very badly thought through, which is to say really that it was not thought through at all.   There were two assumptions on which the system was built:  a) that the BBWAA should be the electoral college, and b) that a player should be selected only if 75% of them agree that he is worthy of selection.  They didn’t stop to think through how any of this was going to work in practice, so it doesn’t actually work very well in practice.

2)  Because the "front door" of the Hall of Fame has never been reliable, the Hall of Fame has found it necessary, over the last 70 years, to create "back doors" into the Hall.   They have created, at different times, many back doors.   This is the "new back door", but there is nothing new about the fact that they have created a new back door; they do that all the time.

3)  It was, in fact, necessary and appropriate to create this "new back door" at this time, due to The Expansion Time Bomb.   The Expansion Time Bomb was an article published here on February 17, 2010.  The first paragraph of that article reads as follows:

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.

                This new effort, this "new back door" IS the revision of the process that was predicted in that article almost four years ago.  I am pleased and surprised that it happened this quickly.  I would have guessed, given the troubled history of the Hall of Fame’s selection process, that they would have waited until the problem was out of hand until they tried to address it.   They didn’t.   Good for them.

                4)  The Expansion ballot also represents an important step forward for the Hall of Fame selection system, in another way.   It’s a two-step process.

                One of the reasons that the Hall of Fame selection system hasn’t always worked is that they have relied entirely or almost entirely on a one-step process.    When the Veteran’s Committee does something stupid, like vote Rick Ferrell or Lloyd Waner into the Hall of Fame, there is nothing that anybody can do about it, because it is a one-step process.   Once it is done,  it is done.    When the Special Committee on the Negro Leagues selected Alex Pompez in 2006, everybody in the world who wasn’t on the committee said, "Oh, my God; what have you people done?", but there was no way to undo it because it was a one-step process and the step had been taken.

                In The Politics of Glory, I urged the Hall of Fame to consider a two-step process—that is, a process in which one group nominated new members, and another group ratified them or declined to do so.   Here, for the first time, they have actually done that.   I applaud the step forward.  

                5)  While the yet-to-be-announced results of the second step are being widely debated (and will be debated here over the next two days), what could be missed is that the first step of the process has been done very well.    Whatever group did the initial stage of research, quietly and behind the scenes, nominated 12 people (who we will discuss one at a time in just a moment.)    All 12, in my view, are reasonable nominations.    There is no one on that list of 12 who is clearly or even arguably below the standard of those who have been selected in the past.   There is no George Kelly here; there is no Tom Connolly or Vic Willis.   Again, I applaud them for their effort.   Good job, guys.