Hall of Fame Not Keeping Up With Time

In 2013, no recent players were inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame. That was a travesty, as there were arguably so many deserving players on that ballot that one could not have voted for all of them under the 10-vote maximum rule. This year the ballot was even more crowded, and the travesty of last year did not repeat. Not quite. The voters elected Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas to the Hall. All are unambiguously deserving. I haven't seen yet whether Maddux beat Tom Seaver's record for highest percentage of votes. Thomas getting in first-ballot is interesting given the voters' typical bias against people who played DH a lot. But, as with last year, the story really isn't who got in, it's who didn't get in. My previous post detailed who I thought was deserving and who I'd have voted for, and I'm not going to repeat that. I am just going to point out that, by inducting only three new players, the Hall of Fame is not keeping up with the pace at which deserving candidates are added to the ballot.

All three newly-elected players were on their first ballot. That's weird in and of itself. It also means that zero of the people on last year's ballot got in that year or this year. One of those, Jack Morris, was in his final year of eligibility, meaning we will no longer have to hear obnoxious baseball writers angrily insisting that he deserves induction even though he obviously doesn't. The others, though, will get more chances, so in a sense there's no harm done. Except... this ballot is getting awfully crowded. You really can't vote for everyone who deserves to get in. And today's results, while not as bad as last year's, will contribute to keeping that logjam going, and will even make it a bit worse. Because Maddux, Glavine, and Thomas were not the only deserving new names on the ballot. Mike Mussina (somewhat arguably) and Jeff Kent (even more arguably) will now join the crowd of plausibly-deserving players on next year's ballot. A ballot, by the way, which will see the addition of Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, and Gary Sheffield, not to mention Hall of Very Good types like Brian Giles, Nomar Garciaparra, and Carlos Delgado. The year after that will feature new names Ken Griffey, Jr., Jim Edmonds, Billy Wagner, and Trevor Hoffman. Ivan Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and Vladimir Guerrero will join the party in 2017, followed by Chipper Jones, Jim Thome, Scott Rolen, Andruw Jones, Bobby Abreu, and (in the somewhat unlikely event he doesn't make it back to the majors) Johan Santana.

You get the point. Simply to keep up with the influx of new deserving candidates, the BBWAA needs to be voting in about four players per year. And that's the level that won't drain the logjam at all. If they want to get the ballot back to a place where voters can actually pick everyone they think is deserving, they need to be putting in something like six or seven people per year. They're not going to do that, of course, which means an awful lot of deserving people are going to miss out over the next few years. It's a damn shame. It's also a problem that goes back a long way. This massive influx of deserving candidates was predictable, after all. To prepare itself, therefore, the Hall should've been running ahead of the addition of new deserving candidates for several years. Like, for instance, the 2012 ballot, whose strongest newly-added candidate was the eminently undeserving Bernie Williams. That would have been a good time to put in, say, three new people, and clear a bit of space for the upcoming flood. I was particularly hopeful that Lee Smith would get in, since he's (to my mind) deserving but was clearly not gonna survive this onslaught, as indeed he seems not to have done. Instead, they inducted only Barry Larkin, who wasn't even close to being the best candidate on that ballot, though he is deserving. So after wasting a whole bunch of years when electing two or three people would've meant clearing space on the ballot for future years, the Hall has got itself stuck needing to elect historic numbers of people per year to clear the backlog. It's ridiculous, and honestly if they keep leaving out the vast majority of deserving players on each year's new ballot it's really going to make the Hall of Fame irrelevant going forward.