How To Reform Hall of Fame Voting

Don't try. Give up. But don't give up on the idea.

Okay, a bit of explanation. A lot of people are pretty outraged about the voting process for the MLB Hall of Fame. Last year no one was elected, this year Craig Biggio missed by two votes and almost certainly would've made it were it not for the 10-vote maximum, lots of voters are publicizing their absurd ballots and their even-more-absurd reasonings for those ballots, no one has any coherent sense of how to handle the whole steroid issue, etc. Apparently the BBWAA is going to consider reforming the 10-vote limit for next year. Other people are suggesting other, more radical reforms. I have an idea along those lines:

Give up on the existing Hall of Fame!

Like I said, radical. 

The Hall of Fame, as I see it, has two problems. The first is its history: because there is no mechanism whatsoever for kicking someone out of the Hall, a lot of people have gotten in who we would now see as below the standard for induction. In particular, a lot of players from the pre-war era got inducted because, well, they were the best of the best, so far, but they haven't held up very well over time. And that's okay, that's not necessarily a huge problem, as this piece on marginal Hall of Famers Bill Terry and Elmer Flick argues. But it leads to this weird kind of contradiction whenever someone tries to argue for a high standard going forward. For example, Adrian Beltre has been a much better player than Pie Traynor was. This isn't especially close: Beltre's got 65.1 fWAR to Traynor's 37.7. Those numbers make one look like a borderline HOFer and the other look like, well, a marginal-at-best member of the Hall of Very Good. Now, that's based on metrics that don't love Traynor's defense, unlike everyone who watched him play, so maybe it's a bit unfair, but there's no way that makes up the gap. And remember, Traynor got to not play against black people. But Traynor is in the Hall, and he's never coming out, while Beltre is pretty clearly not quite there yet, though if he keeps up his current torrid pace down in Texas for much longer he will be.

The other problem is its current one, and the problem going forward. It's really the confluence of two big issues that have thrown everyone's sense of what they're voting on into flux: steroids and statistics. Some people want to vote in everyone who put up the numbers, or maybe everyone who still put up the numbers if we take a bit off the performance of the known users, while others want to keep out everyone against whom there's any suspicion, even if it's completely arbitrary and capriciously applied. (See: Frank Thomas vs. Jeff Bagwell.) Meanwhile, some people think that voting should be predominantly based on an accurate sense of how good at baseball players were, rather than on starting with arbitrary narratives, randomly-chosen anecdotes, and a particular set of aesthetic preferences. In general the two divides seem to line up with one another. As a result we have many people saying they look at the current ballot and see fifteen to twenty deserving Hall of Famers, while other people look at it and see one... who isn't one of the fifteen to twenty. There is, in other words, absolutely no common sense of what the qualities are which make one a deserving Hall of Famer. 

Or, to put it another way, the actual official MLB Hall of Fame is getting meaningless. Literally, there's no common understanding of what it means to be a deserving member. Because of the path dependency, there's no great hope for fixing that. Because of the whole structure of Hall of Fame voting, there's every reason to think it will keep getting worse for a long time. There's no real way to fix it.

Except to start over with a new Hall of Fame. An "unofficial" one, I suppose, in whatever sense the current one is official, but really, how much does that matter? This is, in a sense, less radical than it seems. Back in 1936, there was no Hall of Fame, so they started a new one. Currently, there "is" a Hall of Fame, but it's becoming ever more meaningless. So let's start a new one again, and try to do it better. There's only one organization I can think of that could plausibly establish an alternative Hall, and that's the Society for American Baseball Research. So what I'd propose would be for SABR to announce the creation of the new Hall, and to announce an initial nomination and voting period. Maybe the nomination period would last a year, and then the voting period would last another year, or something? Maybe that kind of time wouldn't be needed. 

Anyway, any SABR member could nominate someone for consideration. There would be no criteria here, except the assumption that, being quite serious about baseball and its history, they would take the duty seriously. Well, one criterion: you couldn't nominate an active MLB player, or maybe not anyone who's been active within the last X number of years. The nominator would post an essay with their nomination making the argument that their nominee was deserving. Then, once the nomination period ended, every SABR member would be invited to vote yes or no on everyone who was nominated. Anyone who got over 75% would be a part of the inaugural class. It would presumably be a pretty big class. Then every year we'd do it again, with some sort of rules about how long after retirement a player entered the ballot, what the criteria were for one to fall off the ballot, and which of the people from the original ballot would move to the continuing ballot. Maybe the voting process could include the SABR research committees, or something.

My proposal has, I think, several advantages. First, the people in SABR are smart, and they take baseball very seriously. Perhaps too seriously, some might say. You wouldn't find SABR members making the same kinds of asinine arguments we're currently seeing BBWAA members making. And I do not just mean that SABR members would just use a WAR ranking. No, in fact part of the problem with the BBWAA voters has been that some of them have been too dependent on WAR. It's a good stat, and in principle it should sort of be the One True Stat from a GM's chair, but we're not in a GM's chair. But SABR members would have a better understanding than many writers seem to of what does actually make a baseball player good. They would also have an appreciation of how to use that knowledge in context. 

Another thing SABR has is a historical perspective which is probably unrivaled. If you're going to start the Hall of Fame from scratch, you have a big problem with regard to older players. How do you evaluate them? When we're talking about people who pretty much no one alive has seen play, or maybe no one at all, who played when the game itself was very different, and who played when statistical records were spotty, how do you compare them to the players of the very recent past? You need a historical perspective, by which I mean a historian's perspective, and even the ability to combine a statistician's perspective with the historian's. The R in SABR stands for "research," and it doesn't just mean running regressions. The SABR members involved in historical research would be able to nominate very-old-timers based on unparalleled knowledge of their careers and their eras, as well as their impact on the development of the game. This should definitely be a thing. It means that a lot of old-timers who look undeserving on the numbers should get in, that Babe Ruth is the most obvious Hall of Famer even though I don't think he's the best actual player ever, and, in my opinion, that Keith Hernandez should get credit for literally making them change a rule because he was too good at player first base. 

The initial nomination and voting process would get messy, but that's okay. History is messy, and the goal of nomination is to include everyone for whom there exists a plausible case. The goal is not to exclude everyone for whom there doesn't; that's what voting is for. So if some SABR member wanted to nominate their favorite mediocre player, just for fun: okay! They wouldn't get anywhere near 75% of the votes, and no harm done. This is also why you'd want to give a long time for the voting. This process would ideally be a very public discourse, about what people wanted the new Hall of Fame to be, and about all the various arguments that this guy or that guy should or shouldn't be included. Various SABR members would educate one another, particularly with regard to the kind of historical perspective discussed above. Hell, the general public would educate the voters some, because in effect SABR would act in this process as an electoral college representing We, the Fans. 

There are so many meta-level issues about what a Hall of Fame should be. Right now we're arguing over two of them, PEDs and WAR, and we're arguing stupidly. But there are so many more discussions we could be having. How should we handle the segregated era? That's worse, morally, than anything Roger Clemens did. How should we weight peak versus longevity? How high should the standard be? Currently it feels like 60-70 WAR is about the borderlands, but maybe we want that to be higher, or lower. How should we treat someone like Sadaharu Oh, who never played in MLB but was pretty clearly among the greatest players of all time? How should we treat DHs? (That one's being addressed but not discussed very much in the current actual voting.) Or relief pitchers? Most people seem to agree that Joe Jackson and Pete Rose should be in the Hall, but there are genuine issues about what kinds of ethical failings should keep someone out. There are just a ton of dimensions along which you could construct different Halls of Fame, and because our current one started 75 years ago and can't ever change except by adding zero to three people per year, we don't get to debate these issues. Doing it over again, and in an environment with less acrimony and more sense of common purpose than the BBWAA has been displaying of late, would be, I think, really good for the game of baseball.

Obviously this isn't going to happen. I don't know that SABR would have any interest in doing this, and they'd probably piss MLB off enough if they did that they wouldn't bother anyway. But I think that if we could start over on the Hall of Fame, we could set it up better going forward, and make the annual conversation that would resume once the initial chaos had subsided more meaningful. Plus, I would honestly just be interested to see what the results of that initial voting process would be. And let's be honest, the public conversation about the initial induction would be fascinating. We all want to argue about who's in who should be out or who's out who should be in, even when the players in question are decades old. Imagine how much fun it would be to have that debate about everyone in baseball history, all at once, but in a setting where actual logic and reasoned argument would make a difference. Thomas Jefferson is said to have thought that constitutions should lapse every generation, at least until he was President under a generation-old Constitution. The Hall of Fame was create a lifetime, not a generation ago. We don't routinely blow our constitutions up, among other things because lots of actual people would probably get blown up in the process, but since there aren't really any consequences involved, maybe we should blow up the Hall of Fame and consider anew what we want it to look like.

So don't try to reform the BBWAA voting process. Abandon it, and work on getting things right from scratch.