Friends of HBT Bill and The Common Man -- proprietors of the Platoon Advantage blog -- are writing over at ESPN’s Sweet Spot today. Their big conversation starter of the day: a proposal for the Hall of Fame to lower the bar. This, Bill and TCM argue, will help alleve the giant backlog that many have identified as a major problem with future Hall of Fame ballots:
Before you go screaming about this, know this tidbit that Bill and TCM point out: almost everyone who has ever gotten two-thirds of the vote has eventually gotten in anyway. As such, rather than lowering the actual quality of Hall of Fame inductees, it would merely lower the amount of time it would take to get the current quality of players inducted. Rather than let in the unworthy, it would merely eliminate that last year or two in which players who are destined for induction anyway are pushed over the current 75% threshold. Think of it as eliminating one of those years everyone spent arguing for Bert Blyleven. Think of it as cutting off the small cadre of dead enders who penalized Roberto Alomar last year from exacting their moral price.
I’m struggling to think of any real problems with this apart from that of perception, but perception would be a huge problem. It would certainly be spun as the Hall of cheapening its standards, even if no one who wouldn’t have otherwise gotten in gets in now. Unfortunately I think this perception problem would be enough to render the proposal dead on arrival.
Really, the practical way to deal with this is to reform the voting pool, not the voting standards. The actual working baseball writers -- the ones who vote on awards and follow the game closely -- tend to do a damn fine job when it comes to this sort of thing. The problems, it seems, tend to come from guys who last covered baseball during the Ford administration and hold on to their Hall of Fame voting privileges despite the fact that they now do the senior beat at the Southeast Valley Suburban Advertiser or whatever.
Food for thought, though.