Atlanta Braves and the Crowded Hall of Fame Ballot
The MLB Hall of Fame is simply broken. Some will be rewarded for enhancing their stats. Some will ‘fall short’ because they are compared to those inflated stats. But others may go wanting and waiting simply because of one antiquated rule.
This is not my first rant on the voting for Baseball’s Hall of Fame. Not even during this off-season.
It gets personal because I want to see baseball’s best by honored for their efforts – whether they are members of the Atlanta Braves or not, for this is a baseball problem.
Coming into this year, the Hall of Fame recognizes…
- 22 Managers (out of 698; 3.15%)
- 30 “Pioneers/Executives” (no good way to count these)
- 10 Umpires (out of 367 – sounds light, but that’s 2.7%)
- 217 MLB Players (out of 18,902* or so major league players, or 1.1%)
* (I used Rio Ruiz as the ‘newest’ major leaguer… he’s close enough, though he wasn’t)
In other words, while the Hall was created to honor the best players in the game, there are actually fewer of them – by ratio – than categories of non-players.
Let me put that another way: if you want to be a member of Baseball’s Hall of Fame, your odds are actually better if you don’t play baseball.
And don’t even get me started about broadcasters and writers getting into the Hall. Somebody threw the BBWAA members a very large bone to get them to vote annually. It’s an atrocity, and some members are making a mockery of the process on top of that.
Let’s Go a Little Further
As previously noted, there are nearly twice as many teams in existence today as there were in 1960 (30 vs. 16).
Immediately, that should tell you that there are twice as many players in the league today as was the case in 1960. Thus it follows that inductions should nominally occur at twice the rate per year for those retiring recently.
Players born in 1941 or later would generally begin their careers after the expansion era that started in 1961 and was completed (thus far) in 1998. Those born in 1920 would have mostly completed their careers before expansion.
Of the 246 players in the Hall (this counts the Negro League inductees)…
- 161 were born by 1920
- 40 straddled expansion
- Just 45 were born after 1941
Some were inducted in later years, but based on their efforts in the early era of the sport. Still, it’s pretty clear that early players were looked at a lot more fondly than our modern day stars.