The Three Problems With Hall of Fame Voting

The 2014 Hall of Fame ballot was revealed last week, setting the stage for the next month of baseball discourse. Unfortunately, what should be a stimulating debate about the relative strength of some phenomenal careers is going to be undermined by three critical flaws in the voting process.

1. The "first-ballot" distinction. Some Hall of Fame voters (tenured members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America) will acknowledge that a player is eventually worthy of induction into the Hall, but somehow not worthy of being inducted on their first year of eligibility. This is a dumb idea that somebody just made up one day, and it's caught on, to the detriment of the process. The forty-something first-ballot Hall of Famers don't actually represent an 'upper echelon' of talent like some people believe (the group includes Kirby Puckett, Dave Winfield, and Eddie Murray, but excludes Jimmie Foxx, Yogi Berra, and Cy MotherEffing Young). This false distinction probably has its origins in the 1950s, when great players like Joe DiMaggio and Rogers Hornsby didn't make the Hall on the first try because there was a ton of backlog on the ballot. Some writers didn't vote for Craig Biggio last year, because, they apparently reasoned, "if Joe DiMaggio wasn't a first-ballot Hall of Famer, then Biggio isn't!" Of all the stupid reasons to withhold your vote from a player, this is among the stupidest.

The whole point of the Hall of Fame is that once you're in, you're on equal footing with everybody. Regardless of what ballot you came in on. All inductees have the same plaque in the same gallery. Willie Mays enjoys the same status as Jim Rice. Ralph Kiner probably said it best:

"It's not like the guys who get elected in their first year get Cadillacs and the rest of us get Chevys."

Refusing to vote in deserving candidates on the first ballot only contributes to the second problem:

2. Backlog, thanks to the 10-man limit. For some reason, writers still aren't allowed to vote for more than ten players in a single election cycle. For a long time, this hasn't been an issue, because it's rare for more than ten Hall of Famers to accumulate on the ballot at the same time. But now it's suddenly a huge problem. The writers' stubborn selectivity when it comes to voting in players on their first ballots, coupled with a new wave of eligible players from the talent-rich 1990s, has stacked this year's ballot with at least twenty players who deserve to have their Hall of Fame credentials debated:

Barry Bonds
Roger Clemens
Greg Maddux
Jeff Bagwell
Frank Thomas
Curt Schilling
Mike Mussina
Tom Glavine
Mike Piazza
Tim Raines
Craig Biggio
Rafael Palmeiro
Mark McGwire
Sammy Sosa
Edgar Martinez
Larry Walker
Alan Trammell
Fred McGriff
Jack Morris
Jeff Kent
Lee Smith

There are undoubtedly many writers out there who would vote for more than ten of these players if they were allowed to. But the 10-man limit prevents them from doing so. As a result, those writers suddenly have to make strategic decisions on which ten players to vote for. Choose the ten most deserving names strictly based on merit? Or cleverly leave off someone who's a cinch to get elected anyway (like Greg Maddux) in favor of a player who desperately needs the support (like Edgar Martinez)? Either way, genuinely worthy players are going to be left off of ballots -- not by voter choice, but because of the mandated 10-man limit. Those players will end up with artificially-low vote totals, keeping them on the ballot for the foreseeable future ... and exacerbating the backlog even more.

This problem isn't going away by itself. In fact, without a change to this restriction, the ballot is about to become even more clogged than it already is. Next year, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, and Gary Sheffield will join the field. The following year: Ken Griffey Jr. and Jim Edmonds. After that: Ivan Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and Vladimir Guerrero. Great players are becoming eligible for the Hall faster than the writers can induct them.

The rule limiting voters to ten names per ballot was dreamed up all the way back in 1936 when the Hall of Fame was first established. Since then, the number of teams has doubled and the pool of eligible players has expanded to include more racial groups and nationalities. It's just logical to expect more Hall of Famers now. The 10-man restriction is a relic of an earlier time, and it needs to go if the ballot is going to be unclogged anytime soon.

3. The obsession with performance-enhancing drugs. Arguably the best position player and the best pitcher in baseball history were both eligible for Hall of Fame induction last year. Yet only about a third of the writers voted for them, leaving them astoundingly short of the 75% threshold needed for enshrinement.

The only reason why Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens aren't in the Hall of Fame right now is their connections to performance-enhancing drugs. The same can be said of Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza, and perhaps even the Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa/Rafael Palmeiro trio. This is an understandable emotional response to their assumed cheating, but ultimately it's a misguided and unprecedented reason to exclude these players from the Hall. Logically speaking, there are three possible justifications for keeping suspected drug users out, and none of them hold up to serious scrutiny.

Justification #1: PEDs violate the character clause.
Here are the official criteria that the baseball writers are instructed to consider when filling out their ballots:

Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

The integrity, sportsmanship, and character requirements are usually bundled up and referred to generally as the "character clause." The argument goes, then, that players who took steroids and other PEDs exhibited a lack of character that therefore disqualifies them from Hall of Fame consideration.

This is the weakest of all the logical justifications -- because the baseball writers have never used the character clause to exclude a player from the Hall until, conveniently, right now. In fact, they've never hesitated to induct players whose crimes were far more immoral than drug use. Ty Cobb, the classic example, was a well-known racist whose off-the-field altercations with African-Americans ultimately led to a an attempted murder charge. It has been speculated that Cobb, perhaps along with Tris Speaker and Rogers Hornsby, were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Cap Anson helped perpetuate racial segregation within baseball by refusing to take the field with African-American players. So did Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of baseball. All of these people are enshrined in the Hall of Fame. So too are countless drunks, addicts, abusive spouses, and petty criminals. The sudden interest in judging the 'integrity' of Cooperstown candidates rings hollow given the current moral state of the institution's membership.

Justification #2: PEDs represent a violation of sportsmanship and a mockery of baseball rules.
This argument rests on a more nuanced interpretation of the character clause. Some writers claim that the transgressions of racists and criminals aren't relevant to Hall of Fame voting because they took place off the field. Instead, they would argue that the character clause only applies to conduct and integrity on the field -- in a word, sportsmanship. By this logic, a writer could withhold his support for cheaters like Bonds and Clemens strictly because of their violations of baseball rules, thus keeping their crimes separate from those committed by racists and criminals (which might be morally worse in a vacuum but did not affect baseball's level playing field).

But this justification doesn't work either, because there are already confirmed cheaters and drug users in the Hall of Fame. Gaylord Perry, a member of the 300-win and 3,000 strikeout clubs, admitted that he doctored baseballs during his career (with substances ranging from saliva and dirt to Vaseline and fishing line wax). Don Sutton and Whitey Ford cut and scuffed baseballs. The George Brett pine-tar incident is remembered fondly, but technically represents another instance of cheating. Dozens of hitters have corked their bats (including, allegedly, Babe Ruth). The 1951 Giants won the pennant thanks to an elaborate sign-stealing system.

The cheating extends to drug use, too. It dates all the way back to Hall of Famer Pud Galvin, whose drug of choice in the 1880s was monkey testosterone. More relevantly, legends like Mike Schmidt, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Mickey Mantle all used amphetamines, or "greenies." Willie Stargell allegedly passed them out to his Pittsburgh Pirates teammates. It is naive to believe that steroids in the 1990s was the first instance of widespread performance-enhancing drug use in baseball.

Clearly the writers have never cared about cheating in baseball when it comes to the Hall of Fame, until now. The only difference between a player using amphetamines in 1970 and using steroids in 2000 is that steroids were probably more effective. Both substances provide a boost to performance, both were illegal without prescription in the United States, both were simply part of baseball culture, and both were eventually banned by the commissioner's office. Condoning amphetamines while condemning steroids is a logically inconsistent position. Any writer who does that is basically saying that certain degrees of cheating are acceptable while others are not. Who draws the line? And where is it?

It's not like baseball players in the 1990s were more corruptible or more nefarious than their counterparts in the 1970s. Earlier players just didn't have access to the really good drugs. The realities of human nature suggest that if stars in the 1970s knew about steroids, they would have taken them, too. Here's what Bob Gibson said about that hypothetical:

"I'm just glad they didn't have steroids when I was playing. You know, I don't know what I would have done."

Let's stop pretending that steroid users were the first cheaters or drug users in baseball history. The Hall of Fame has never policed against that stuff, and there's no reason why it should start now.

And finally -- what happens if a player currently in the Hall is revealed to be a steroid user? Is that player expelled from Cooperstown? Or is he allowed to stay while other cheaters are kept out? Neither of those scenarios are particularly compelling.

Justification #3: PEDs make it impossible to objectively judge a player's career.
This is the most nuanced position on PED users, and one that doesn't rely on crutches like character or morality. Basically, some writers don't have an ethical issue with players who used steroids. But they assume that the huge impact of steroids on the statistics of those players makes it impossible to know whether or not that player deserves to be a Hall of Famer. How many home runs would Mark McGwire have hit without the help of drugs? Because the answer to that question is unknown, some writers withhold their votes from PED users just because their true talent level is impossible to discern.

Here's the thing -- we don't know enough about steroids, scientifically, to assume that they had the huge impact everyone assumes they had. Did steroids help McGwire more than the spitball helped Gaylord Perry? Are steroids the only thing responsible for Barry Bonds' transformation from "All-Time Great" into "Maybe The Best Player Ever"? If steroids are an instant talent-giving elixir, then why did so many mediocre-to-bad players see little-to-no boost in their performance after taking them? Because the extent to which PEDs actually enhance performance is unknown, it's unfair to just assume without any evidence that Bonds or Clemens or McGwire could not have achieved their Hall of Fame credentials without artificial assistance.

There are seven players on this year's ballot with varying connections to PEDs: Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Mike Piazza, and Jeff Bagwell. Not voting for McGwire, Sosa, or Palmeiro because of steroids is understandable, because statistically they aren't slam-dunk Hall of Famers anyway -- McGwire wasn't very durable, Sosa had a crazy-high peak but little else, and Palmeiro had no real peak to speak of. But there is no excuse for any writer to withhold a vote from Bonds, Clemens, Piazza, or Bagwell. They were simply too damn good at baseball to be chemical mirages created by magical drugs. And a Hall of Fame that excludes four all-time greats because of some flawed notion of morality or purity will become an institution without any credibility or relevance.