Joe Posnanski’s BBWAA Hall of Fame project

Posnanski makes a good point: there really are two Hall of Fames. (1) the BBWAA Hall of Fame, consisting of players voted in by the writers; and (2) the other Hall of Fame, consisting of managers, umpires, old timers, deadballers and players that the BBWAA didn’t think made the cut, voted in by various incarnations of the Veterans Committee and other ad hoc electorates set up from time to time over the past 70 or 80 years.

This is significant inasmuch as, if you argue what Hall of Fame standards are, you have to acknowledge that you are talking about two very, very different standards. With the BBWAA standard, I think we can all agree, being considerably higher than that of the various Veterans Committees. To that end, Posnanski is taking the next couple of days to try to isolate the BBWAA Hall of Fame standard:

I’ll go through the BBWAA inductees -- position by position using WAR to see where the BBWAA standard is -- and then look and how the players on this year’s ballot match up. Like I say, I’ve been pretty surprised. It won’t change my voting because, like I said, I’m a big Hall guy. But I do think it might help clarify what happened this year with the BBWAA. I think the steroid mess was only a part of it.

He starts with first basemen here, and begins with talking about why and how he’s using WAR.

Overall I think this is worth doing because, however satisfying it is for us to say things like “how can you not let Player X in the Hall when Player Y is already in,” it’s a little disingenuous to do so when X is being considered by the tougher-grading BBWAA and Y was admitted to the Hall by Frankie Frisch’s crazy-permissive Veteran’s Committee in the 70s or whatever.