With this year’s Hall of Fame voting results just around the corner, you’re going to see a lot of BBWAA members publishing columns explaining their ballot and why they voted the way they did. Many of these opinions will be well-thought-out, well-researched, and well-reasoned. Many others will be flat out batshit insane. Many voters looked painstakingly into the numbers of each candidate and compared each player to his contemporaries, the era, and other players who are in the Hall. Other voters drunkenly cast their ballot at two ticks before the deadline only after one of their colleagues had to remind them they had a vote in the first place. Ahem.
How do we differentiate the good from the asinine, though? Surely Hall of Fame voting is a subjective game if there ever was one, but how do we tell which writers actually put thought into their vote, and which ones used their ballot as toilet paper? Well, here are a couple of helpful hints. If, in the next few days, you see a writer use one or more of the following arguments to justify their HOF vote, it’s a clear indication that you shouldn’t be taking them seriously.
1. Blame stat nerds for falling in love with statistics and voting for an undeserving player, and then use stats to make a totally convoluted case for your own guy.
Anti-intellectualism sucks, but it’s rampant once HOF voting season rolls around. Many older BBWAA members make it a kind of sport of ripping the saber-nerds for favoring certain players because they’re looking solely at the numbers. They aren’t taking into account the fire in which they played the game, or how much tobacco they chewed per inning. Calculators don’t win games, and so forth.
What these same voters then do is make their case for a guy by quoting his accumulated career numbers, like how many wins or home runs or RBI he had. That’s perfectly okay, except that by using ERA, wins, and whatnot, this is an argument using, wouldn’t you know it…stats! What’s it going to be, fella?
2. Cite one particular great or famous performance and wrap a player’s HOF case around that.
This occurs with Jack Morris all the time, namely with his 10-inning shutout in Game Seven of the 1991 World Series. Great clutch performances such as that should generally be regarded as extra credit, not a major component of a Hall case. If we’re going to elect guys for awesomeness in one game, let’s start up the bandwagons for Don Larsen, Bobby Thomson, or Fernando Tatis.
3. Dismiss a candidate’s deficiency in one facet of the game by stating that said skill wasn’t understood as valuable in his day.
One of my favorite bullshit arguments, it’s especially popular with players with mediocre OBPs who played in the ’70′s or 80′s, as if not making outs is suddenly some new age philosophy we’ve only recently stumbled on. The best players, players who are Hall-worthy, will have numbers and skills that are generally far better than their peers, relative to the league and position average, in any category. This was true in the 1920′s, and it’s true today.
4. Fun with arbitrary endpoints.
Sometimes voters will tell you that Player X should be in the Hall because he led the league in home runs or total bases or strikeouts from 1985-1996, and no one else came close. Sounds like he was a totally dominant player, right? Well, if this timeframe seems suspiciously arbitrary to you, that’s because it was cherry-picked simply to highlight that player’s peak years, while conveniently ignoring his decline phase. Said voters will then compare their player, using only these selected years, to another sort of similar player, only they’ll use the other player’s entire career, breakdown years and all. Those sly bastards.
5. Use meaningless blanket statements instead of actual analysis.
If you learn one thing in your life as a baseball fan, let it be this. You may see a writer claim that a player was the “most feared of his era” or “was the grittiest of his era” or “most clutch” or “he just seemed to be a Hall of Famer when I watched him”. This is code for “I’m too stupid and/or lazy to form my own coherent argument for why I’m voting for this (probably) undeserving player so I’m going to throw out meaningless, tough-sounding character traits and dare anyone to question me.” These voters/writers have such a disregard for the intelligence of the average baseball fan that it’s laughable. Beware.
Not for nothing, my Hall of Fame predictions. I’d guess Roberto Alomar, Andre Dawson, and Bert Blyleven get in, with Barry Larkin falling just short and getting in next year.
