Curt Schilling's glove displayed at the Baseball Hall of Fame. 3,000 strikeouts for ALS (photo by: Joy Manning)
As are most (all?) voting processes in the United States, the Baseball Hall of Fame's process is broken.
Currently the process consists of 571 voters having the opportunity to vote for 10 candidates. If a player's name is on 75% of the ballots (429 votes) they are inducted. If they are on less than 5% of the ballots they are taken off the ballot. Anything in between 5% and 75% and the player gets to stay on the ballot for the next year, unless of course they've been on the the ballot 15 times.
Although the math behind the process may seem odd, I don't think that is the problem with the process. While many of the people voting probably should not have the honor, a changing of the guard may still not fix the issue. The problem I see with the voting process is that instead of voting whether or not a player deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, voters are also worried about who gets in on the first ballot and adjusting their votes accordingly. Additionally, voters don't want too many inductees to get in on the same ballot. So basically instead of just voting for who should or shouldn't get in, the voters are over-analyzing their vote and in turn messing up the whole process. As an aside, it reminds me of students voting for a student body president who they feel bad for and then getting stuck with some darkhorse candidate who benefited from the front runners losing their votes to the "feel good" candidate.
So who do I think lost out to this type of over-analyzed voting this year? Without a doubt, I think this is what has happened to Curt Schilling. In 2013 Schilling was on the ballot for the first time and received 38.8% of the vote. This was in a year when no one was voted into the HOF. This year he was on the ballot for a second time and received 29.2% of the vote. Why did he suddenly get less? Although players usually get more votes their second year, Schilling had some "first-ballot Hall of Famers" to contend with this year. He also had to deal with voters not wanting too many players getting in this year. As long as voters are worried about guys getting in on the first ballot and too many getting voted in at once, any subsequent system will be flawed.
Although the math behind the process may seem odd, I don't think that is the problem with the process. While many of the people voting probably should not have the honor, a changing of the guard may still not fix the issue. The problem I see with the voting process is that instead of voting whether or not a player deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, voters are also worried about who gets in on the first ballot and adjusting their votes accordingly. Additionally, voters don't want too many inductees to get in on the same ballot. So basically instead of just voting for who should or shouldn't get in, the voters are over-analyzing their vote and in turn messing up the whole process. As an aside, it reminds me of students voting for a student body president who they feel bad for and then getting stuck with some darkhorse candidate who benefited from the front runners losing their votes to the "feel good" candidate.
So who do I think lost out to this type of over-analyzed voting this year? Without a doubt, I think this is what has happened to Curt Schilling. In 2013 Schilling was on the ballot for the first time and received 38.8% of the vote. This was in a year when no one was voted into the HOF. This year he was on the ballot for a second time and received 29.2% of the vote. Why did he suddenly get less? Although players usually get more votes their second year, Schilling had some "first-ballot Hall of Famers" to contend with this year. He also had to deal with voters not wanting too many players getting in this year. As long as voters are worried about guys getting in on the first ballot and too many getting voted in at once, any subsequent system will be flawed.
RSS Feed
