A Follow-Up Thought on the Hall of Fame Standard
Yesterday, I noted that the historical average set by the Hall of Fame was to induct between 1-2% of the total population of baseball players, and that was fairly consistent throughout history. In response, some commenters noted that expansion and specialization meant that perhaps the inflation of the number of players hasn’t led to a proportional inflation of worthy of Hall of Famers, and wondered what the data looks like if we exclude the legions of middle relievers who bounce around the game but obviously aren’t in consideration for election to Cooperstown.
This was a good point, and a potentially interesting challenge to the idea I put forward yesterday. Perhaps the change in roster construction in the modern games means that we should be electing a lower percentage of players now than we have been before. Maybe the correct model isn’t total percentage of all players, but total percentage of all players who had long sustained careers that would give them at least a fighting chance to end up on the HOF ballot.
So, I took the same process I had yesterday, but I re-ran the numbers with some significant playing time minimums. For each birth decade, I only looked at the total number of players and Hall of Famers who either had 5,000 plate appearances or 2,000 innings pitched. This basically translates into 10 full seasons of work, so a player who hit these milestones was a regular contributor for the better part of a decade. By isolating just regulars with longevity, we’re eliminating the vast swath of middle relievers who now make up about 20% of today’s rosters, and are simply looking at the Hall of Fame percentages of players who put up at least long enough careers to be acknowledged on the ballot.
To the data, in the same format as yesterday.
| Year of Birth | Hitters | Pitchers | Players | HallHitters | HallPitchers | HallPlayers | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| <1900 | 161 | 97 | 258 | 40 | 24 | 64 | 24.8% |
| 1900-’10 | 61 | 32 | 93 | 21 | 3 | 24 | 25.8% |
| 1911-’20 | 50 | 16 | 66 | 14 | 3 | 17 | 25.8% |
| 1921-’30 | 55 | 22 | 77 | 8 | 5 | 13 | 16.9% |
| 1931-’40 | 66 | 33 | 99 | 19 | 7 | 26 | 26.3% |
| 1941-’50 | 113 | 55 | 168 | 7 | 7 | 14 | 8.3% |
| 1951-’60 | 106 | 41 | 147 | 15 | 2 | 17 | 11.6% |
| 1961-’70 | 118 | 42 | 160 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 1.3% |
It is pretty eerie how consistent the percentages are for the first 2/3 of baseball history. Essentially, 1/4 of all long career guys ended up in the Hall of Fame, with the mark being almost exactly 25% in four of the first five time periods we looked at.
And then expansion hits. MLB goes from 16 teams to 24 teams in a decade, a 50% increase in available roster spots, which keeps players in the game longer. We have an almost immediate doubling of the number of players who meet the 5,000 PA mark, and while pitcher longevity didn’t keep up with roster spot inflation, there’s still a significant jump in the number of HOF eligible players, thanks to expansion.
But, as we can see, the election committees never really adapted to expansion. Of the 168 players who fit the criteria and were born between 1941-1950, only 14 have been elected to Cooperstown, roughly the same number of electees as we saw in the 1911-1920 and 1921-1930 birth decades. Since 1900, we’ve seen between 14 and 26 players elected from each birth decade, so the number of elected players by era has stayed pretty consistent, even as the total population of candidates has exploded.
For me, perhaps the most telling data point is this.
Born in 1940 or before, 5,000 PA/2,000 IP: 593 players, 144 HOF, 24.3% HOF%
Born between 1941-1970, 5,000 PA/2,000 IP: 475 players, 33 HOF, 6.9% HOF%
Even if we give the BBWAA assumed credit for adding all of the no-brainer choices from the 60s who are coming up soon, and we assume the veteran’s committee will eventually put in guys like Tim Raines and Alan Trammell (and Jack Morris, if he’s not elected this year), we’re still looking at something like 50 players being enshrined, or about 11% of the players who met the playing time thresholds.
And again, like we did yesterday, we can see that the historical standards would suggest a much higher rate. The lowest election rate by birth decade of the 5,000/2,000 club is 16.9%, from the players in the post-WWII era; if we elected 16.9% of players born between 1961-1970, we’d settle on 27 Hall of Famers, so far, we have two. Interestingly, that 27 HOFer minimum matches our estimate from yesterday based on total player population, which helps support the idea that inflation of roster spots hasn’t simply been led by a legion of non-worthy players.
This isn’t just an issue where an influx of part-time players has inflated the number of total players who appeared in an MLB game while the number of potential Hall of Famers has held steady. As expansion has created more roster spots, more players are meeting the 10 year minimum for Hall of Fame consideration, and the election results simply haven’t adjusted for the addition of more candidates. The pool of electable players has dramatically increased while the rate of electees has not, and that has created the backlog of qualified candidates we see today.
Certainly, the PED issue is a significant factor in the gridlock of the current ballot, but this data shows that it isn’t the only issue. While there are a bloc of voters who are quite happy to keep out nearly every player who starred in the 1990s, the 70s and 80s seem underrepresented as well, given the number of players who have been elected to the Hall of Fame in prior eras. The veteran’s committee will inflate these recent numbers, but there’s a huge gap between where we are now and where the prior standard was. Barring a change in the way players are elected after being dismissed by the BBWAA, the veteran’s committee won’t be able to clear the backlog as fast as it is being created.
And, again, I will repeat something I said yesterday. The Hall of Fame, and those responsible for inducting people into the Hall of Fame, should be motivated to ensure that as many eventual HOFers as possible are inducted while they are still alive. It is sad that Ron Santo had to be inducted posthumously, when there was every chance for him to be recognized while he was alive. If we’re going to have committees to add worthy players to the HOF because we don’t feel the BBWAA is inducting enough players, then let’s just reform the system so that the BBWAA inducts more players, leading to more living inductions and fewer posthumous ones.
The creation of the veteran’s committee, and various other entities tasked with increasing the rolls of the Hall of Fame, suggest that the Hall’s own standard is lower than the BBWAA’s standard. Maybe it’s time for the Hall of Fame to simply tell the BBWAA to come in line with what the Hall wants the standard to be, so that we don’t have to have backup committees filling in the gaps where the Hall thinks the BBWAA failed. Let’s get it right the first time. If they’re going to go in eventually, let’s make sure they go in when they’re alive.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
To me, it’s simple to see how things have arrived here.
A guy born in 1950 played ball in the 70s and 80s. 60: 80s and 90s. And so on.
Baseball writers, let’s say, started being born in 1940-1950. The players they grew up with as idols, Mays, Mantle, etc… occupy a mythical status in their minds (and hey, they ARE great). They now want to basically preserve that forever. They’re stuck viewing the game through a ten year old’s eyes. Guys the same age as them playing ball were, gasp, human beings. And they saw all their warts and such. Warts that never existed in their lionized image of their childhood heroes. And writers subsequently born have lived with these same writers talking about Walking Gods of Baseball.
They don’t want a hall of fame. They want a museum. They want the world of baseball to forever be their childhood.
So basically, you’re saying the Baby Boomers ruined the HoF just like they ruined everything else. Makes sense.
In seriousness, it looks to me like the ’21-30 cohort were penalized by serving in WW2/Korea during their prime playing years and the fact that counting stats were the only stats used to judge worthiness at the time. It seems like the ’41-50 and subsequent cohorts (basically those debuting in ’61 or later) are the ones suffering from this expansion effect.
The thing that boggles my mind by its absence here is an analysis of how long it takes players to get into the Hall of Fame. Yes, there are 17 players born in the 1910’s who are in the Hall of Fame. One of them is Joe Gordon, elected in 2009.
If you want to analyze whether there are too many or too few players born in the 1960’s in the Hall, wait until 2040, when the Veteran’s Committee process has had its chance to percolate through the system. Otherwise, you’re comparing apples to oranges.
Eddie Vedder saw this coming 20 year’s ago:
The kids of today should defend themselves against the 70’s
It’s not reality, just someone else’s sentimentality…
It won’t work for you…
Baby boomers selling you rumors of their history
Forcing youth away from the truth of what’s real today
The kids of today should defend themselves against the 70’s
Stadium minds with stadium lies gotta make you laugh
Garbage vendors against true defenders of the craft
Mike Watt wrote it.
But Vedder mumbled it.
The “mythical” greats of every era DO get in. It’s the guys who were also very good that don’t. Ricky Henderson vs. Tim Raines, for example. The oddity of the current crop is still mainly that guys like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were unquestionably “Walking Gods of Baseball” the likes of which the sport hadn’t seen since the 20s – and that they’re not getting votes.
… for rather obvious reasons, whether you agree with those reasons or not.
Though in past eras, a good % of the “non-mythical” greats got in as well.
If you played for 10 years, and when you played there was such a thing as a Brooklyn Dodger, you had a 25% chance of making the HOF. For reasons best explained elsewhere, it seems that’s the dividing line in baseball history.
Time to make it like French art: Done before 1850 you get the Louvre; after 1850 you get the Musee D’Orsay. Both are beautiful, but visited for different reasons. Cooperstown, NY, keeps everyone in MLB before 1957; we need a new HOF for those of us who don’t pine for the good ole days!
So Dave Cameron and his peers are so gullible that they vote in line with the old fogeys who chatter on about the virtues of RBIs and clutch hitting and pitching to the score? If septuagenarian baseball writers are that persuasive, they should run for higher office and stop wasting their time covering a game of rounders.
These are not standards. They are observations of voting outcomes after the fact. HOF voters don’t base their decisions on trying to satisfy some arbitrary criterion of electing a certain number of players born per decade. There is no reason to expect that the same number of players have to be elected each decade.
“There is no reason to expect that the same number of players have to be elected each decade.”
%
Also, yeah, there probably is.
What is the reason then? …since the data suggests it hasn’t happened apparently…
The reason is that the HoF is a museum commemorating the history of baseball. Suddenly, starting around 1980, and affecting all baseball played after 1960 or so, there appears to have been a decision to exclude a much larger portion of that history.
Yeah, but that didn’t actually happen, did it? The voters don’t vote as a collective. THey are individuals that each determine who they think deserves enshrinement. There was never any decision made, nor is there even anyone that can make such a decision.
That data suggests there was a standard, but that it changed. Four out of five at almost exactly 25% is pretty damn good. And the outlier is easily explained by two prolonged wars. All 5 of those first decades has a standard deviation of just 4%. So, we’re clearly starting to see a real trend with those first 5 data points. Maybe the real mean is somewhere between 20-30%, but the next 3 decades are well below that. Like Dave says the VC will bring those totals up some, but the current decade getting elected is clearly not going to fair well with the BBWAA (as shown by the previous ballot, and soon the next one too) and the previous two decades aren’t going to see too many more VC elections either….
Then new average is going to sit at about 10%, when it was at least 20% for the first 2/3 of baseball history.
DNA+, that is exactly how prejudice works. Shedding light on collective prejudice is a productive thing to do, even if there is no single person you can point a finger at as THE problem.
The data might suggest to that there was a standard because the variance was low, however we can be pretty sure that there was never any standard. Why? Because we know the process by which people get elected to the HOF. It is by ballot involving lots of individuals, none of which is likely to have ever filled out their ballot with the idea that X% of eligible players need to be elected. In any case, those voters are all dead now, and new voters each get to make up their mind based on whatever they personally value.
It may not be a conscious decision, but they’re clearly applying a higher standard to post-1960 players than was applied to those who came before. It’s probably a combination of using absolute criteria rather than considering players relative to their peers and the rose colored glasses of history effect mentioned in the first comment.
DNA+, of course the votes get to do what ever they want with their ballot, the point is what they are collectively doing is upholding a higher standard than previous generations.
While the voters don’t make individual choices based on X% of players must get in, the collective effect of their individual choices can be measured as such. So, the basic point is that they need to start voting for more people to keep up with the “old” standard. And it doesn’t really matter that this standard was never agreed to and in the minds of the voters. Through their individual choices that standard was created, much like how we now discuss 60 WAR as the quick and dirty HOF line. That’s just been the historical precedent. Many things work the same way. Think of it like a market force in economics. There were forces at work to make the old norm >20%, now some of those forces have changed and its more like 10% and maybe even lower in the near future.
So now that we have some measure of the effect of these forces, we can start discussing what they actually are. Like how a boundary point seems to be around expansion and PEDs. PEDs we probably could have guess, but I was surprised to learn about the effect expansion likely had, and that’s why new data is cool!
Anyway, the take home is that for us to even keep up with the 10%, we need voters to start putting down more people on their ballot, especially with the current backlog of players fighting for 10 votes. If the BBWAA isn’t careful, we may have something like 5 more inductees over the next 10 years.
Hey Dave,
Great piece(s), and I emphatically agree that we need to recognize more of the recent (living) greats, preferably through the BBWAA “front door.” But what is your prescription for getting the writers to fall back in line with historical norms? Seems like you can’t just order voters to consider a guy HOF-worthy if their opinion differs… Since we really are talking about opinions, unless you want to have the “Hall of WAR.”
What’s the fix? Eliminating the voting limit seems an obvious first step. Lowering the voting threshold, e.g. to 50%? Or should they change the rules so that every year, the top 2-3 vote-getters are elected, regardless of %? That would start clearing the logjam, at least, but might still be too slow…
Or, we can go really radical, and remove HOF voting from the BBWAA. I’m not sure who “owns” the right to enshrine baseball players into the HOF but, assuming it is the HOF itself, can’t they just pick some other way to decide which players get in?
If it is the BBWAA who “owns” the right to enshrine baseball players into the HOF, then we pretty much have to go by whatever they say.
If it is MLB who “owns” this right, then they’ll never take away this power from the BBWAA as they will get skewered in the press (by the BBWAA) for doing so.
Clearly, I am uninformed as to who “owns” this right, but it is the root cause of the issue.
The Hall of Fame owns the rights to get in and out of the Hall of Fame. The Hall, for instance, made the decision to bar banned players like Pete Rose from inclusion on the ballot. The Hall decides who sits on the various committees.
Of course, Bud Selig is on the Hall’s board of directors, so MLB has a certain degree of power as well.
instead of having it at 75% (or 50%), have those top 5 vote getters, at a minimum get enshrined. Also, add any more that have achieved a certain percentage 75, 66, 50 % of the votes in as well. So, a given year will have 5, perhaps more enshrined.
I would really hate that. Yeah more people gets in but its such a different system that it cheats those who would have gotten in the other way. But that’s simply an aesthetic point.
Also, there will not always be 5 guys really worthy I went back to 2000 and moved forward with it.
2000: Fisk Perez (top2 already in) Rice (50) Carter Sutter (39)
2001: Winfield Puckett (2 elected) Gossage, Garvey, Tommy John (28)
passable, though we are clearly hitting the boarder line.
2002: Smith, Dawson, Morris, Kaat, Byleven.
It worked better than i would have thought for three years but the only players not currently elected in that were on the 2002 ballot were Trammel (good player but also his first year on the ballot), Dale Murphy, Dave Parker and Keith Hernandez and David Concepcion. One of the great things about the baseball hall of fame is that we get to remember players and reevaluate them as their hall of fame status is up in the air. In this system, everyone gets in in a 2.3 years and the marginal player stories never get told.
in real life Fisk Perez got in in 2000, Winfield and Puckett in 2001 and only ozzie in 2002
There aren’t 5 new, worthy candidates hitting the ballot every year. Even with the ballot as backlogged as it in right now, within a half-dozen years or so the automatic induction would outstrip the influx of new candidates and we’d have extremely borderline choices getting inducted.
I can see requiring that the top ONE vote-getter be inducted, but any more than that would do more harm than good.
Biggio was stiff armed last year, and I agree that at least 1 player should get in. I like this suggestion.
Just a concept guys.. The number “Five” doesnt have to be the mandate. It can be minumum of three instead. Work with me, instead of finding flaw.
what about a couple of special elections to the hall if things get too backed up. that worked in the 70’s(?) after 2 years without a selection.
I don’t like the idea of making it easier to get it, but i would add Joe Pontowski’s suggestion to eliminate people who don’t get 50% of the vote by year 10 (only 1 player has failed that check and gotten in, and that was sort of freak anyways) and have either a lower bar for 1st year people on the list to stay on or allow up to 1 player who gets booted off to be brought back to the list.
This doesn’t really solve the problem though, since the problem people have is that alot of voters don’t think there are 8-10 hall of famers on the ballot. I do think the 50% would help reapportion votes to increase acceptances.
The two most popular suggestions I’ve seen are either electing two/three every year or reducing the vote threshhold to 50%. (Because all but, I think, one or two players who hit 50% would eventually go on to get 75%.)
If you looked at pre-1940 HOF WAR, how would that compare to post-1940 HOF WAR. Has the approximate level of WAR required for HOF election changed as well?
It was much easier to accumulate WAR back then because replacement level was so low. Now that the competition level is so high, it’s far harder to excel compared to your peers. Babe Ruth wouldn’t do nearly so well against today’s pitchers.
Well, not if he emerged from a time machine straight into the batter’s box at Yankee Stadium. But with a modern diet and 21st century training? I’d put him on MY 25-man roster.
So saying his WAR overstates his value because the competition was lower from a lower talent pool is the same as saying he wouldn’t make a 25 man roster? Great logic there and you really proved that point wrong.
I love Psych, but that was an overreaction there. The comment gave no indication that he said he wouldn’t make a 25 man roster, just that he wouldn’t be as good, at least that is how I read it.
“Great logic there and you really proved that point wrong.”
Where is the logic in taking Babe Ruth from a time machine and throwing him in today’s game without assuming he’d get the same ‘upgrades’ that today’s pitchers have which cass states are the reason he wouldn’t do so well?
Cass:
If that is true, then that is a sound justification for fewer Hall of Famers in the newer generation of players. If the competition is so much greater than it has been in the past, then we should be seeing evidence that MLB is a sport evolving to where every player is average, and there are no outliers of ability.
The punchline being, of course, that if anything, there have been more outliers of exceptional ability in recent years.
I’d just have Ruth pitch every 5th day and DH the other days. I’ll take the 12 WAR on my team anytime!
Just give him the major league minimum and he’d be ecstatic! (Note: Don’t explain the concept of inflation to Ruth)
Mean and max WAR per birth year have remained almost perfectly constant from 1880-1970.
The implication then is that the approximate level of WAR required for HoF election has changed, since so many fewer players have made it in recent history.
source is here. I think it’s a better approach than the more arbitrary “X% of players” line of reasoning.
http://makenolittleplans.net/the-hall-is-getting-smaller/
I take it back. It’s complementary, not better.
Thank you for the follow-up, Dave.
I suppose one counterargument is that just by expanding, the number of top players does not increase. So the fact that a similar absolute number of players has been elected reflects that the Hall standards remain the same, i.e. you need to be a certain caliber of player to make the hall and the number of those caliber players has not changed. My guess is that the BBWAA would take pride in that.
There are of course problems with that argument, firstly that the pool of potential players has increased over time too due to racial and geographic inclusion. That alone should mean we have more high caliber players today than in the past.
Either way, the number of players born from 1961-1970 who are in the hall remains way too low.
A lot of people seem to be under the misapprehension that Latin players were excluded from the early years of major league baseball. They weren’t.
The population of the US has doubled since 1950, and training methods and health care are much better. Those are even bigger factors than racial inclusion. Basically, expansion has kept pace with population, and everything else is gravy. On the downside, baseball has more competition from other sports both in developmental years and in the pros.
A question that’s difficult to answer is “about what percentage of players is the *right* percentage of players to elect from a given era or generation”? There’s no question that earlier generations are comparitively over-represented, but a lot of that is based on some very questionable additions by the Veterans Committee over the years.
I don’t know that we necessarily need to see the numbers get back to the ~25% threshold (of players with 5,000 PA and/or 2,000 IP) that we saw in previous years, because with some of the weaker additions that the VC made, ~25% seems like too much and many of their additions in and around the 1960’s seem underqualified. At the same time, I think we definitely have well-qualified players born in or after 1940, and that group is under-represented.
I don’t think the pendulum needs to swing back all the way back up to ~25% (and thereby letting in almost any and all marginal cases like Mattingly, Lofton, Parker, Steib, Hernandez, Concepcion, et al) just because it’s been there in past generations, but it should certainly swing farther than ~7% because supremely qualified players are on the outside looking in (even those without any link whatsoever to PED’s like Biggio, Raines, Schilling etc.). But how far to swing is the tougher question to tease out, even before wading into the PED morass.
Players should each be elected on their own merit, rather than some arbitrary criterion of how many players per era should be admitted. How can the voters even making voting decisions in that way? What would their thought process be?
“I need one more player to get up to X%, I guess that means Bubble Candidate is in…”
That is not the point Dave is trying to make (which he has done so in two different manners). Dave is illustrating (convincingly) that HOF standards have become more difficult and the result is less players being enshrined than there were in the Golden Era of the game. He makes a solid point that standards are too high (apparently) right now as compared to the levels of the past. Its almost like we have a Hall of Very Good for the old timers but now we have a much more exclusive Hall. Its up to the reader to decide if this needs to be fixed or if it is a problem at all. I imagine we will see a “veterans committee” type fix in the next decade.
Many writers aren’t voting based on merit anymore. There is a “gut factor” that is hugely asinine and infuriating from the Murray Chass types, that it’s like pornography – they can’t define a hall of famer, but they know one when they see one. It gets back to the first comment at the top from MrKnowNothing: “They don’t want a hall of fame. They want a museum. They want the world of baseball to forever be their childhood.”
Basically, they were able to see that this class of players was human, but Mantle, Ruth, Mays? Those guys were somehow superhuman perfection. Because the writers never saw them play as adults, only heard about them from their dads. I’m going to be telling my kids someday about the amazballs things that I saw players do as a kid. But to the writers that covered those same amazing, otherworldly players? They just saw a bunch of jerks who didn’t want to be interviewed every second of every day.
So, I’m not going to be able to take my kids to Cooperstown and show them the players that I followed growing up, because they won’t be there. I’ll have to tell my kids about my idols myself. Which isn’t so bad. But I don’t think the writers really understand why we have the hall of fame. If they did, they would be cataloging all of history, not freezing it way back when they were kids.
…but they are not freezing it since they don’t vote as a collective. Each writer that fills out their ballots with players, wants those players enshrined (with the exception of the courtesy votes that some writers give out for whatever reason). They want to put people in the hall, sometimes there arent enough voters that agree with them….
They are indeed voting as one homogenous group. They mostly have the same gender, age and ethnic background. They grew up watching the same television shows and movies. They have all shared the same experiences; their commonalities far exceed their differences. And they’re all growing old together, keeping everyone else on the outside of their little club. Disgraceful.
“…but they are not freezing it since they don’t vote as a collective.”
This consistent line of argument from you renders you not worth talking to about this.
You are missing the point. The criteria have changed over time, to the point where voters are, for the most part, refusing to vote players into the HOF. The X% is not a standard that Dave created. It’s a reflection of how HOF voters have changed their standards, to the point where voters can’t recognize Hall-worthy players. Many of these players that haven’t been admitted would have been admitted with the previous voters. For some reason, recent voters have decided to unreasonably exclude several players who would have been worth if they had had the good fortune to come up for admission with any other set of HOF voters.
Very few voters are refusing to vote players into the HOF. Almost all voters submit a ballot with at least one name. That means almost all individual voters thing there are worthy players in every election. …just not enough think the same players worthy, apparently. …this is how elections work.
*think not thing
It is pretty clear that some players are no-brainers, but the voters ignore this logic entirely. “Well, it would be disrespectful to vote for this guy the first time” or “Can’t have more than a couple players on my ballot” – these are not rational voters. They are mostly petulant children who don’t know how to get things done.
Murray Chass isn’t the only douche who refuses to vote for anything besides Jack Morris types.
Trying to frame the argument that the BBWAA voters are failing in their duty as some sort of dig against the democratic process is very dishonest. Voter irrationality is a thing, (illustrated beautifully by the current HOF voters) and we make attempts to thwart it in real life through the use of a representative democracy. (debatable success) The BBWAA writers are the opposite of that. Stop pretending that there legitimately aren’t any deserving candidates because a group of crotchety old men are fucking things up. If you listen to the logic behind not voting for some of these guys, you will realize that it mostly comes down to directing attention away from the player in question and towards the writer in question.
unquestionable failure, imo
This is @ DNA+. Your comment about each voter picking SOME Hall-worthy players, but just not enough of them picking the SAME Hall-worthy players, put me in mind of the possibility that we are witnessing a mathematical problem unfolding here: too many possible candidates; the more candidates, the more possible variations in ballots, the more possible variations, the more difficult the 75% and even the 5% standards are to reach! Thus, this might NOT be a fault of a group of “small-hall”-oriented writers, this might be a simple mathematical problem.
Solution? Lower the 75% and 5% standards and most likely open up the ballot to let writers choose 15 or more players. something DOES need to be done, though, because the problem is not going to go away, it is, rather only going to get worse because the pool of players is inevitably going to remain much larger going forward forever than it was in the long past era when their were only 16 teams.
Assuming continued growth in population and improvements in sports medicine, we can more and more players will reach HoF “milestones”. Therefore the Hall has to either get bigger or keep raising the milestones. What you are arguing in favor of here is the former. I would prefer the latter.
It’s not even a little bit about milestones or counting stats. It’s about how amazing these players were in their own era compared to all other players. Again, in comparison. Sure, a bunch of players hit 500HR, and we should kind of ignore the “wow factor” of 500. Or even 600 (Sosa). But we can say that some of those guys, or even guys that never got to the big round number did a million other things that were so great and amazing we have to enshrine them.
Is the milestone not 5,000 PA/2,000 IP and the argument that the BBWAA should shoot for electing 25% of the players who reach those milestones per decade? Or am I misunderstanding.
The HOF would be much more interesting with a set #. In order to elect a new member, the least deserving member would need to be voted out. That way only the best of the best survive. No more of this crap about allowing Player X means you have to bring in 5 lesser players. Best of the best, nothing less.
Except judging players between eras is fraught with difficulty.
Also, holy crap that would be a PR fustercluck every time some great old dead guy had to get voted out to make room for, say, Roger Clemens.
bk, I think you need to go read this:
http://joeposnanski.com/joeblogs/the-willie-mays-hall-of-fame/
Then come back here and make a cognizant argument in favor of a tiny hall. And why it would be a good thing. Your way would remove a ton of the game’s history from the forefront of people’s minds.
Such a great article, I didn’t realize the sarcasm until about halfway.
Interesting to you maybe.
I don’t think a hall commemorating a sport which adds almost 2,500 games worth of actions and accomplishment should create an artificial and arbitrary limit to the number of players it recognizes.
Let’s say you set the limit at 50 players. The player who is currently the 25th best player of all-time will, at some point, be only the 51st best playe of all-time and will no longer be included in your hall? His accomplishments and greatness somehow diminished because the pool of eligible players has exponentially expanded over time?
Very, very happy you’re not in charge of such things.
Might have the answer to this question in my head floating around somewhere, but it’s escaping me at the moment.
You mention the increasing specialization of middle relievers? How were pitching staffs handled in the past? What was the distribution of innings among how many pitchers?
Starting pitchers threw a lot more innings because they made more starts (and frequently made relief appearances as well) and completed more games. For instance:
Warren Spahn: 21 seasons (1942-1965, 3 years in Korea)
665 starts
5243.2 innings pitched
382 complete games
Roger Clemens: 24 seasons (1984-2007)
707 starts
4916.2 innings pitched
118 complete games
Spahn also threw nearly 100 games in relief compared to only 2 for Clemens.
Roger Clemens, arguably the greatest pitcher ever, is tied for 327th most complete games with Bob Rush and Kaiser Wilhelm.
The active leader in complete games is the now retired Roy Halladay with 67. CC Sabathia is second with 37.
I think the word “retired” takes Halladay off the “active” list.
I haven’t read through all of the comments on both threads; I just did a quick glance. But one thing I read a lot is that just because they made bad calls in the past and elected some players that weren’t worthy, that doesn’t mean we should lower our standards for today’s players.
With that in mind, wouldn’t we need to come up with some sort of filter for who *should* have made it in the past, rather than who was actually elected? If they elected 5% from one decade, but a lot of them were poor choices, then that doesn’t mean we should necessarily elect 5% from this decade.
Even if all 5% were good choices in the previous decade, it still doesn’t follow that we have to elect 5% of players this decade….
no, you keep saying this but you’re wrong. The fact is that the Hall of Fame is not based on absolute standards, it’s based on relative ones. How good a player was relative to the average player, how good he was relative to replacement-level, how good he was relative to other all-stars, these aren’t absolute benchmarks, they’re relative ones that change over time so you can’t establish absolute standards for something like the Hall. The whole point is that the best players are enshrined because they’re the best. It’s also why longevity standards like 300 wins make no sense.
Nonsense. Entry into the HOF requires a percentage of votes by the voting members. The voters each decide what the entry requirements are. The ideas of the voters change over time. The voters themselves change over time.
Yes, the voters each decide what the entry requirements are. Unfortunately, that statement is meaningless without considering the factors that should determine those decisions. As relative factors are much more applicable than arbitrary thresholds, the voters should be using relative factors. The fact is that once a player is in the Hall, he’s in for life. Now, one Rick Ferrell does not lower the global standards for enshrinement but the fact is that, regardless of whether current voters require Hall of Fame players to be inner-circle type players, voters have historically elected players like Ted Lyons and Zack Wheat and that is what the standard for enshrinement should be.
In my opinion, the Hall is weakened at least as much by the exclusion of players like Tim Raines as it is by the inclusion of borderline players like Jim Rice. Now, I’m perfectly happy to withhold the highest honor in the game from players who knowingly and continually broke the rules and law in order to perform better on the field. And if that means that the percentage of players who make the Hall from this past generation is lower than previous generations then that’s fine. From what I understand, that’s actually exactly what the article is arguing.
Dave’s not suggesting that there be a quota or whatever for each decade. Rather, it’s an empirical demonstration that far, far fewer post-WWII players have been elected. Furthermore, given the current voting rules, this issue is only going to worsen in the coming decade (that was his point in the previous piece). That strongly suggests that a number of very deserving players (if held to the same standards as previous generations of players) will be excluded from the HOF.
…it could equally suggest that underserving players were elected in years past. …see the problem?
If you really believe that, please identify the ~86 players born before 1941 who should be removed from the Hall based on your “underserving” argument.
Dude, relax. He’s just making on observation. He’s not offering this as definitive reasoning that more players need to be elected into the HoF.
I don’t believe it, clearly. It is faulty logic. I’m just pointing out that the logic that Dave used is the same.
We probably all think that deserving players are not making the HOF right now. Consequently, Dave’s article is like candy. Put it in your mouth and it tastes sweet. However, it dissolves very quickly and leaves you with nothing since the premise that the rate that players are elected should remain fairly constant is not based upon anything.
Again, Dave is not trying to offer a logical conclusion. He is simply presenting observational data.
Except a five-decade pattern and the idea that a museum should accurately chronicle that which it purports to chronicle.
Basically, the game changed rather drastically with expansion/integration,has continued to do so,and the people charged with documenting the game for future generations have collectively refused to acknowledge that fact. Whether they’re doing so because they’re the Stonecutters or simply because they all grew up in a similar environment and have similar worldviews is beside the point. How we got here isn’t particularly important, recognizing and repairing the situation is.
Pale Hose,
Dave writes: “…those of us with some semblance of a platform usually try to influence the voters while they have the ballot in their hands.”
He is clearly trying support his narrative that more players need to be elected. He is clearly trying to present this as the logical conclusion of these observations.
Ok, fine. I’ll grant you that. But I see that as a summation of all of Dave’s previous posts on this subject including many pieces discussing the merits of players in this ballot. On top of those discussions advocating for players based on merit he is also observing that the current election rate is well below historical norms. I don’t see a logic flaw here. Even if you assume that too many were elected in the past, you still haven’t refuted that there are seemingly many players that deserve election based in merit.
DNA+, if you (general you here) agree that roughly the right quality of players, relative to their peers, were elected in previous generations, than that is the logical conclusion.
Neither Dave nor I suggested that this analysis was conclusive. That’s why I specifically said “suggests” not “proves.”
I agree that the proposition that too many pre-WWII players are in the HOF is a valid alternative hypothesis.
Actually, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, my personal opinion is that there are about a dozen or so players that are well below any reasonably generous threshold (for the “size” of a HOF based on the number of players who have been elected).
It doesn’t change the fact that a confluence of factors make it very likely that over the next decade a number of players with compelling cases for HOF will fall off the ballot. The situation does not appear to be resolvable given the current set of HOF election rules, so it’s a valid question as to what, if anything, should be done to resolve the situation.
@DNA+
Personally, I think you are just here to make trouble by drawing up strawman arguments. Dave has written consistently about how WAR serves as a good ballpark for who should be elected to the hall of fame, and noting that numerous players over this WAR threshold have not been voted in. This post is an afterthought, which further suggests that the way value has been viewed by the BBWAA has changed over the decades.
Whatever, I’ll still reply here.
I guess it depends on how you define your ideal Hall of Fame. In most people’s view, the Hall of Fame represents the greatest baseball players in the game. “Greatest” can be defined in two ways; absolute value (e.g. the total number of runs created) or relative value (e.g. the number of runs above a replacement-level player during the same period). In both cases, some proportion of the total population is “better” than the remaining population. However, the definition of total population actually varies.
In Dave’s (and many other’s view), “greatest” is a relative phenomenon because it is difficult to evaluate performance across generational gaps (due to changes in the environment, modern medicine, baseball rules, parks, etc.). Therefore, one can define an elite player by comparing the value of said player to those of that player’s generation. When one does this, one constructs a distribution of players, and those who lie on the tail of the distribution can be thought of as elite.
Due to the nature of such distributions, the tail should not be expected to change, therefore, the proportion of players voted into the Hall should also not change. However, here, Dave has shown that the proportion of players accepted into the Hall have changed over the decades, which suggests one of two things: (1) The distribution skews to the right in modern decades because of dramatic changes to the game of baseball in which a greater proportion of players are elite (hasn’t happened) or (2) The voting practices of the BBWAA have changed.
Of course, you could argue that the Hall represents the greatest players independent of time period. “greatest” in this sense would mean having objective hallmarks of what the “greatest” player actually means, and select such objective hallmarks. This argument can become ridiculously quite quickly; if all ballparks were reduced in field size so that the average player hit 50 homeruns a year, then by such logic every position player who played 15 complete seasons should make it into the Hall.
From Dave’s previous article, about 1-2 percent of players make it into the hall until about 1960, this sounds about right in terms of a solid tail for a distribution of “elite” players. Then 0.1 percent of players make it into the hall until about 1970. To me, that highlights a pretty big problem with the modern BBWAA.
Eric,
Mine can’t be a strawman, since I’m really not arguing anything other than that there is no logical reason to expect that the rate of induction ought to remain constant.
You actually illustrate the point quite nicely. You make a distribution of player worth based upon one person’s evaluation criteria and argue that given those criteria the size of the tail ought to be consistent. This is fine, but it doesn’t actually describe the election process.
In reality there are as many evaluation criteria as there are voters. These won’t even remain the same from year to year for the same voter, since they are constructed by humans who can change their minds, or who might just not be particularly consistent. Thus there is not one distribution with a constantly sized tail. There are many, many distributions that change every year.
Hell, many voters wont even evaluate all of the players the same way in a given year! These are humans, that are voting!
Again, not the point. Stop focusing on the X% as though it’s the point of Dave’s posts. Dave never once argued in favor of some arbitrary quota despite your implications that he did.
Let’s flip this: justify only admitting 1% of the recent group when nearly 20% merited induction in every other decade. Players have just gotten considerably worse? Good luck with that one.
There is no reason to justify admitting only 1% of the group. It is the vagaries of election by ballot. There is not one person choosing who gets in here. It is lots of people each using largely unique criteria.
Come on guys…. the inclusion of the 61-70 bucket is an absurd attempt by Dave to cook the books and feed his narrative. He’s relying on people thinking that folks born in the 60’s should have been dispositioned already.
A lot of the folks born in the 60’s are just getting on the ballot or will be on soon (not a full list):
Maddux
Glavine
Mussina
Clemens
Biggio
Piazza
Bonds
Thomas
Johnson
Heck, some guy named Mariano Rivera was born in the 60’s!
Think some of these guys might get in?
It’s a way to really skew the data. The sky is falling only 1% have been voted in! In 10 years that # will look completely different.
It’s a lower level than the early 1900’s but the 1% in the 60’s is relying on people overreacting to info they have carefull assessed. (It also conveniently helps take a 40 year sample much lower when 1/4 of that sample is basically meaningless).
The other aspect is the veteran’s committee – it’s not like the vet committee is voting on many players born in the 50’s and 60’s.
Hank: That’s still only about ten names, and some of them are seriously doubtful, given how many writers say said they’ll never vote for guys they suspect of PEDs. Find 20 names that you think are a very good bet to get in, and you’ll have an argument that the era will probably be well-represented.
The whole premise of this piece is clearly driven by narrative. Dave’s contention is that deserving players are currently not being elected to the HOF (something I agree with). In order to support this narrative he shows that more players were added to the HOF in years past. Narrative supported.
However, if Dave started with the contention that undeserving players were elected to the HOF in years past, he could take the same exact data and show that players were, in fact, added to the HOF at a greater rate in the past. Narrative supported.
The obvious flaw is that there is no good reason why the rate that players are added to the HOF ought to be consistent between eras, so even though you can fit the data equally well to both opposing narratives, neither really follow.
I agree. I found the past two articles to be very interesting and thought provoking, but I don’t exactly agree with Dave’s conclusion (or premise, as you point out).
My way of thinking about it is, suppose the 300 players in the HOF all plaid in the same decade. Say there were only 10 teams, and they all played for exactly only 10 seasons. Then say the next decade all 300 of those players were replaced with replacement level players who played the next 10 seasons. On an unrelated note it’d be very interesting to see the WAR totals between the two groups (would Reggie Jackson in Decade A accumulate the same WAR as Mike Morse in Decade B?). If the top 2% of each group was inducted you’d have a HOF that included was 50% comprised of basically pathetic players, and in total 49% of the players that had every played the game were worthy Hall of Famers denied enshrinement. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t expect to see the rates be closer than they are (in reality), it’s just to say that ensuring each decade is proportionally represented is a flawed system for setting up the HOF. It should either be based on individual merit or (if the # of spaces in the HOF were set) surpassing the individual merit of the nth best player in the HOF with your own individual merit. I really don’t care about the HOF much, and don’t mind disagreement over what criteria to use, but I loved these two pieces. Very thought provoking.
Wow that was sloppy. Wrote that at work with the window as small as humanly possible in the bottom corner of my screen at %50 zoom (last day at this job, feels like karma would make today be the day I’m finally busted for graphing fans at work.)
Present the argument then that the rate today should be 5% of the rate throughout baseball history.
That isn’t necessary. There is no a priori reason why the rate should remain consistent given the nature of the election process. The null hypothesis is clearly that rates between eras should be largely independent, since the voters are different, the players are different, the way we evaluate players is different, randomness, etc. If you want to argue that the rates should be the same, despite what we know about the election process, that is up to you to show. Dave just declares it (unjustifiably).
That’s not a hypothesis at all, it’s an argument, and one that makes little sense; no one is arguing that players and voters are dependent upon the past. The rate could be the same and independent, or it could be different and independent.
The reason why we would expect the rate to be the same is because the purpose of the Hall of Fame is to elect the “greatest” players, which are the statistical outliers of a generation. Such a statistic is normalized based on the proportion of total players, hence the BBWAA should be voting in the same rate of players.
Sure, the BBWAA may change, baseball may change, and their notions of “greatest” may change, but the ratios should still remain the same. The election process should capture the “greatest” players of a generation; the fact that it isn’t is a problem with the process itself.
Eric,
No one knows what “greatest” is. What this means to every individual voter is fluid.
The only actual statistical outlier that matters with respect to the HOF is the percentage of votes a player receives in an election cycle.
I think you really dislike the human element of the voting process, but that is the system.
Despite the fact that Eric is exactly right, and this isn’t a hypothesis, you’re completely wrong about independent vs dependent.
The set of voters does not change at discrete time points. So its not like we have group A then group B and there is nothing connecting them. Rather at time T we have group A, then at T+1 we have A+X-Y, and so on.
Second, the whole mindset about how to evaluate players is spread through community relatively uniformly until recent times. And as far as the BBWAA goes, that shift in thinking has hardly effected them since you have to be part of the BBWAA for 10 years to get a vote. So even if each year the pool of votes are completely different, it would hardly mater if on average they all value the same things.
Third, how do many voters judge a player’s HOF worthiness? They compare them to people already in the HOF. Lets break down the events:
1. Group A elected players L, M, N and P, but not Q R and S.
2. Group B comes along, and they need to vote on player P.
3. They rate O relative past players LMNPQRS and find him right between N that got in and also P that got in. Then they think, he must be worthy!
That’s dependence and you see it in almost everyone’s HOF ballot arguments. And it doesn’t even matter if group A and B even use the same metrics to judge a player. The very fact that the standard (whether its 60 WAR or 500HRs and 3000 Hits) makes the current choices dependent on the past ones.
Wally,
“you’re completely wrong about independent vs dependent”
You are correct that it isn’t actually independent. I was careful not to claim it to be so.
“Second, the whole mindset about how to evaluate players is spread through community relatively uniformly until recent times.”
You just made that up. There is no actual evidence for this is there?
“Third, how do many voters judge a player’s HOF worthiness? They compare them to people already in the HOF”
Many also don’t do that. …you are right about the mindless circles.
DNA+, you said “largely independent”. Its at least the opposite, and largely dependent, as the year to year correlation of votes is very high, especially if you correct for time on the ballot. This is why we have a pretty good idea if someone is going to get in if they receive X% of the vote on their first year. Its because HOF voting is very predictable year-to-year even as the voting group changes slowly. And if we’re getting technical, there is no such thing as largely independent. Its a binary choice. Its either dependent or its not. And this is basically a time course series of data, so its of course its dependent and very heavily so.
“Second, the whole mindset about how to evaluate players is spread through community relatively uniformly until recent times.”
“You just made that up. There is no actual evidence for this is there?”
You’re joking right. This is why we have/had HOF benchmarks for so long, like 300 wins, 3000 hits, 500 HRs, etc. This is why we have 60 WAR now. To brush this point off by simply claiming there is no evidence for this is to burry your head in the sand.
“Many also don’t do that (compare to enshrined HOFers). …you are right about the mindless circles.”
I’d love to see one voters defense of their picks in which no current HOFers are mentioned…. I won’t speak for everyone, but I’ve never seen HOF voter that ONLY talks about current players, or players up for HOF voting, and NOT players that are in HOF or fell off the HOF ballot.
“DNA+, you said “largely independent”. Its at least the opposite, and largely dependent, as the year to year correlation of votes is very high, especially if you correct for time on the ballot.”
…We are not talking about year to year here. Dave broke it up into decades, I assume to make it more independent.
“And if we’re getting technical, there is no such thing as largely independent.”
…a significant R^2 of 0.01 is largely independent.
You really believe that until recently all voters went about the process pretty much the same?! …in the very least we can be pretty sure that the early voters weren’t comparing eligible players to HOF member, since there weren’t any… I think the “benchmarks” may be as much a descriptor of HOF members after the fact, rather than the criterion used for enshrinement. Lots of HOF members don’t meet any of those benchmarks. Players that do are generally the best of the best. The 60 WAR benchmark is certainly a descriptor rather than a benchmark. Almost no voters in history have cared about WAR. Hell, most of them didn’t even have it available to them…
Most voters are casting votes over multiple decades. The fact that it takes 10 years in the BBWAA to even get a vote should be giving you a clue to the time scale.
“…a significant R^2 of 0.01 is largely independent.”
Ha, that’s a very different thing from dependent or independent samples groups, as we’re talking about here. Seriously, this basic stuff. You have two groups (voters in decade A and voters in decade B) and they pulled from a pool of the same people, have overlapping members. Its not even a little bit independent.
“You really believe that until recently all voters went about the process pretty much the same?”
Never what I said and a horrible strawman. What I’m saying is that the populations of voters taken as a whole behave in roughly the same way year-to-year and that the voting process on each player in any given year is highly dependent on the voting of other players in different years. The words you’re trying to put in my mouth are a pretty gross exaggeration of that point. Of course any individual voter might be very different from another, but we’re talking about a population effect. Again, think compare this to market forces in the economy. Its a summation of individual choices we’re talking about, not each individual choice. Once you understand that, and how the two things are so totally different, it will help you understand why your points in this thread are so completely wrong.
“Lots of HOF members don’t meet any of those benchmarks. Players that do are generally the best of the best.”
I won’t run the numbers, but the HOF inductees by the BBWAA are going to hit at least some those important bench marks more times than not. Without some of them its been very, very hard to get past the BBWAA.
“The 60 WAR benchmark is certainly a descriptor rather than a benchmark. Almost no voters in history have cared about WAR. Hell, most of them didn’t even have it available to them…”
That wasn’t the point of bring up WAR. The point was that we create benchmarks based on the current HOF members. 60 WAR is roughly what it has taken to get a shot at the HOF and as time moves on and more and more new-stats minded folks are in the BBWAA 60 WAR will start getting treats a bit like 3000hits, 500HRs or 300 wins did in the past. It will be the foundation of the “is this guy worth talking about” question, because that’s the current standard in HOF and many people think you need better than current HOFers to warrent consideration….thus more of this dependence thing….
And this I love:
“in the very least we can be pretty sure that the early voters weren’t comparing eligible players to HOF member, since there weren’t any”
Really? So you’re telling me at T=0 there is no dependence on the previous groups voting… thanks for clearly that up. I was really wondering about that…..Facepalm…
“Most voters are casting votes over multiple decades. The fact that it takes 10 years in the BBWAA to even get a vote should be giving you a clue to the time scale.”
…you are arguing about nothing.
“You have two groups (voters in decade A and voters in decade B) and they pulled from a pool of the same people, have overlapping members. Its not even a little bit independent.”
…actually you have 8 data points the way Dave set it up. Some sets will share voters some will not. …christ, you really are just looking for things to argue about. We all agree that it is not independent. But Dave set the analysis up in this way, I assume to make it as independent as possible.
“I won’t run the numbers.”
You and Dave share the problem of claiming to just know things without actually checking. Dave just knows that the rate of induction should remain constant, you just know that HOF members hit benchmarks. Here are the most recent players inducted. Ive starred the ones with a benchmark. You will note that it is less than half.
Barry Larkin
Roberto Alomar
Bert Blyleven
Andre Dawson
Ricky Henderson*
Jim Rice
Rich Gossage
Tony Gwyn*
Cal Ripken*
Bruce Sutter
Wade Boggs*
Ryne Sandberg
Dennis Eckersley
Paul Molitor*
Gary Carter
Eddie Murray*
Ozzie Smith
Kirby Pucket
Dave Winfield*
Tony Perez
George Brett*
“Really? So you’re telling me at T=0 there is no dependence on the previous groups voting… thanks for clearly that up. I was really wondering about that…..Facepalm…”
…so tell me again how the voters all voted the same until recently.
Look, if you really think that something changed in the voter’s behavior recently and that this needs to be rectified, then do a proper analysis that actually shows that something has changed and that what is going on now is actually out of the ordinary. The SABR community loves to criticize the “old school” for pushing narrative and not being rigorous. We need to get our own house in order. I’ve said my piece.
“…you are arguing about nothing.”
This is what you started DNA….so your point is nothing….
“…actually you have 8 data points the way Dave set it up. Some sets will share voters some will not. …christ, you really are just looking for things to argue about. We all agree that it is not independent. But Dave set the analysis up in this way, I assume to make it as independent as possible.”
I’m correcting blatantly false information. I can’t speak for Dave, but I doubt his idea was to make the groups independent, it was to demonstrate a trend. Some sort of binning was needed, but bins don’t make time course data independent.
“Here are the most recent players inducted. Ive starred the ones with a benchmark. You will note that it is less than half.”
But which benchmarks did you use? There are several. RBIs, SBs, Ks, BA, ERA. My point was never to say those 3 that mentioned where the only ones. Just because I only mentioned 3 numbers, doesn’t mean those are the only three HOF benchmarks. For example 3000H and 500Hrs has never been the standard for middle infielders…. Instead they are compared to benchmarks set by other previously inducted middle infielders.
You failed to see the larger point. Focusing on the tree rather than the forest. Voters use these benchmarks to judge players across generations, thus making the voting process dependent on past events. Nothing you’ve said has changed that or even challenged it. I guess I shouldn’t bring up examples with you because you get lost in them. You choose to pick apart the example rather than engage in the point the example was being used to illustrate.
DNA+, you’re just going in mindless circles.
Of course there is a reason to think HOF election should remain roughly the same from decade to decade. And that reason is that we have a very large population of possible players and no reason to think the talent distribution should change with in that population over time.
Leaning on this crutch that its a human process is silly. If you apply your argument to anything human then there is simply no reason for anything to happen as it does, nor no reason to try to understand why it happens like it does. Basically, you’re argument would dissolve enter fields of study such as economics (an example I used before and see you haven’t responded).
The basic point here boil down to:
1) What are the effects of a set of individual choices acting on a single process?
2) How has that changed over time?
3) Do we like it?
Those same questions will apply to just about anything not natural sciences or math. To which your response is basically, “what’s the point?”
Cheers, mindless circles are my thing.
“Of course there is a reason to think HOF election should remain roughly the same from decade to decade. And that reason is that we have a very large population of possible players and no reason to think the talent distribution should change with in that population over time.”
Well, it is demonstrably false that HOF election rates are the same decade to decade, so, you are almost certainly wrong. The question is why? And is it interesting? I note that it is not surprising that the rates vary considering the human element of the voting process and the quite strict election criteria.
“Leaning on this crutch that its a human process is silly.”
It just acknowledges the actual voting process. I don’t think it is silly to consider the actual process.
“If you apply your argument to anything human then there is simply no reason for anything to happen as it does.:
No, randomness is the null hypothesis in science. We always prefer the simplest explanation until we can reject it.
“The basic point here boil down to:
1) What are the effects of a set of individual choices acting on a single process?
2) How has that changed over time?
3) Do we like it?”
1) …very complex.
2) We don’t yet know if it has changed over time, because we don’t know what should be expected if it hasn’t changed over time.
3) The question is premature in my opinion.
“Those same questions will apply to just about anything not natural sciences or math. To which your response is basically, “what’s the point?””
…i’m a natural sciences professor. My research is focused on humans specifically. That is not my response at all. This stuff is just really shoddy. It was written to support a narrative that was decided ahead of time.
The only logical conclusion that can be taken from your comments on this article is that you’re a troll.
Ok, natural science prof, and judging from you name, we’re in the same field. I too have a Ph.D. and work in human genetics. Your lack of understanding of statistics is concerning for someone with a Ph.D. in our field. Especially if you can’t understand dependent sample pools….
Wally,
Sometimes even stupid people like me get proper jobs. Human genetics isn’t that big a world. Wouldn’t it be funny if we knew each other, or knew each other’s work?
Cheers,
DNA+
I don’t know why people here are giving DNA+ such a hard time. His response here was the first thought I had while reading Dave’s two articles. (I.e. Why are we automatically assuming we need to “correct” for the present based on the past? Why aren’t we correcting the past based on the present?) In fact, one (not I, necessarily) might argue that with more practice over a longer period time, voters have gotten better at voting (A rookie voter in his first year doesn’t have as refined a thought process as the same voter in his 10th year), so we should use the more recent percentages as the more correct ones (I assume that there is more aggregate “voting experience” among voters today than twenty years ago). and if we were looking for a trend, we’d say that there should be less and less HOF level players as time goes on. After all, history based on HOF voting shows that baseball players as a whole have been getting worse and are less and less worthy of induction.
I can see the forest but not each individual tree. By this I mean so many advances happened in parallel to this shift in voting % falling off the table.
The microprocessor revolution allowed SABRE and sites likes this to blossom. ESPN and 24 hour Sports brought more replays into our homes than the prior era of ‘Game of the week’ and TWIB. Bill James growing influence going the route of outsider to legend. Modern sports medicine and yes – PED. I could add item after item that were concurrent to this downward shift in % of players going into the Hall.
And what i do not know is the demographic makeup of the BBWA (ages, location, etc) to get a precise sense of the era they grew up in (the above comment of looking at baseball as 10 year old seems spot on).
We had ‘Old School” writers voting based on eyeball tests and thinking often 20+ years behind the era.
All of these create a cocktail, an algorithm that worked in the past but no longer works now.
And I find it very fitting that you, Dave, here on Fangraphs, address this logjam with this historical perspective no one else picked up on.
I suspect it will be you, Wendy, and more of the baseball ‘progressives’ that will eventually sway the Hall to create a better process that blends the special nature of Baseball’s Hall vs other sports AND address the need you point to: honoring these men while alive.
I do not, myself, want a ‘Cattle Call’ Hall for Baseball like … say, Football.
But Ron Santos posthumous election was … well, it saddened me. It was so important to him and to have missed the opportunity to address the crowd in front, but more importantly his peers sitting behind him, was tragic.
I’ve now heard you, Rosenthal (I think it was him) and others suggest means to address this. If it is only Maddux that gets the nod this year then I suspect there will be momentum to fix this process.
Thanks, as always, Dave for this ‘good thinking’ on a topic important to those of us who love the game.
Most of those “bad calls in the past” are simply cases where the standards applied were not those we’d use now (or at least the HOF voters wouldn’t). It’s not just the players who are operating in a particular historical context.
I’d prefer a general percentage target to constant retroactive application of changing statistical standards.
Aren’t both the Hall and the BBWAA headed for unavoidable embarrassment without a rules change? THe sheer number of worthy, currently eligible and near-eligible candidates, combined with the 10-player limit and the 75% threshold will combine to make it virtually impossible for any but no-questions asked candidates to win election.
Zero players elected last year; most seem to think it will be only one player this year. If the trends continue within 10 years we’ll have added only a handful of players while the group of deserving but unelected candidates continues to grow.
I’m guessing the sheer embarassement and absurdity of the situation will eventually lead to some changes to the system. Otherwise, the entire enterprise loses credibility (it already has with many of us).
The strangest thing I found while researching the history of the ballots (available at B-R)is that, given the fact that there are almost twice as many teams than there were in the 50’s and earlier decades, one might expect that the number of qualified MLers only in the sense that the player had 10 ML seasons and had been retired for 5 years would be expected to have grown by about twice- i.e., I was operating under the premise that the BBWA writers had to wade through twice as many players as they did in the 50’s. In fact, the trend has gone quite markedly in the opposite direction: there are, on average, a lot fewer qualifying players on ballots in recent decades than there were in the 50’s and 60’s, with the 70’s and 80’s falling somewhere in between.
the only way this can happen is if a much smaller percentage of MLers are managing to play a minimum 10-year career. This flies in the face of all the trends we tend to believe are true: that athletes are in better shape and can be expected (especially during the years that are now appearing on the ballot- the PEDS years) to age slower and play longer than in the past.
Perhaps there is just a much larger pool of ready replacement level players to choose from? I don’t know the answer to this, but it’s a conundrum to me.
Not every player who is eligible to be on the ballot actually gets to the ballot. There’s a screening committee that removes obviously inferior candidates first.
Hence, the middle relievers and backup infielders and average-ish players who hang around for a decade don’t get there. You may find that the quality of players on recent ballots has gone up even as the overall number has gone down.
The All time Hits Leader, the All time Home Run Leader, the All time CY young awards leader, and the single season HR leader ( pre steroids era) are ALL not in the Hall of Fame..tits not even a museum anymore it’s a useless arbitrary good old boys club preaching their moral standards, and using useless data to justify it…the Hall of Fame is a joke..has been for quite some time now
Is it really an issue that Roger Maris isn’t in the Hall of Fame? He had one year when he hit an arbitrarily large number of home runs – a terrific achievement, no doubt, but there’s a strong case to be made he wasn’t even the best player in the AL in 1961. He had another MVP season and a few other great seasons, but he didn’t have a Hall of Fame career.
Bonds and Clemens haven’t been on the ballot for long. Odds are good that they’ll get in eventually.
As for Rose, well, he broke baseball’s existential rule. He knew the penalty for doing so was a lifetime ban. I tend to think he should still be in, but I don’t think his omission makes the Hall a joke.
Why cannot we have a “Big Hall”? Its a big game, played on a big field, in big stadiums before big crowds, for a big season, with a big amount of teams, with big organizations that pay big bucks to deliver big stars to big viewing audiences including big sponsors to play in a big series of games for a big trophy, and have repeated this process for over a big century.
I think your data shows that the HOF committed DID adapt. They recognized that the inclusion of 250-300 more players per year who otherwise wouldn’t have been in the majors at all doesn’t make the guys who would otherwise be mediocre in comparison any more worthy of the Hall. If 25 players out of 100 good players used to be hall-worthy, it makes perfect sense to me that the same 25 out of 350-400 would also be hall-worthy (and that standards should rise overall since the hall-worthy players are no competing against players who would otherwise not be in the majors at all).
From the way I look at it, that’s a false assumption. The population pool that these players are pulled from is several times larger than that back in the early 90’s.
Furthermore, the biggest issue Dave’s commenting on is that at the current rate, only half a dozen or so former players will be elected to the HoF per year. The voting standards of the BWAA are completely broken.
I read something interesting at Tango’s about this and expansion.
With the 1st big expansion, the additional roster spits were filled by black players post-segregation.
In the 2nd, more recent expansion, the additional roster spots were filled by Latin and International players.
In other words, there’s basically the same number of “white players” now as there was then.
Meaning there is not a dilution of talent, but an expansion of the talent pool, which should lead to MORE HoF inductees, not less or the same number.
Don’t forget there’s twice as many people in the country in general since the 50’s! And 4x as many as the early 20th century!
Wow, I actually have an imposter. I rarely post anymore so for someone to want to do that I think is flattering. *grin*
Ironically, I actually agree with your overall points, whoever you might be.
I’ve posted here for a couple years using the same account.
We must both be super studs.
Yet again we are excluded from the party.
lolwut
Begin with the premise that the number of people who could turn into a hall of fame baseball player if discovered and groomed properly remains constant.
With each added team, there are more resources put into finding these players, and with more roster spots, opportunities for them to demonstrate their ability.
Regarding the rate of new HoF players added with new teams, more resources etc, I assume it’s not linear, because there are systems in place for the best rising to the top that don’t increase at a constant rate with new scouting + opportunity.
I think however that the influx of talent from increasing the pool with more international scouting, better scouting/more resources put into scouting counterbalances that potential dilution from adding roster spots. I just don’t have a grasp on exactly how we should treat the increase in players putting up worthy stats due to expansion. Is it fair to try to account for talent dilution, or should one’s stats relative to era be the only deciding factor?
It should be how a player performed among their peers that is most important.
Comparing stats among players of different eras is what causes the biggest problems for various reasons.
I mean, full integration was not achieved until the late 1960’s. There are 45% of players today who would not have been eligible to play in the MLB before 1948, yet more than half of all HOF members are from the segregated era. Population is almost 3 times what it was in the 1930’s and talent from Latin America and Asia is being drawn from. WWI, WWII and the Korean/Vietnam Wars severely reduced the talent pool in those eras. The talent pool today is much bigger than it was, and expansion has not really matched the increasing talent.
Higher salaries (allowing players to train in the offseason and not work), better travel, better equipment, better conditioning , medication like cortisone, toradol, antibiotics, weight training, etc make players better than in past eras.
I think there is a pretty good argument that more players from this era (from the 1990’s) should be represented.
Thanks, Dave, for generating lots of interesting debate!
Looking at the voting results, it is clear that most of the challenge is cultural, but that part is only going to change if someone is able to articulate and spread a convincing argument for how to gauge era-dominance in a way that rings true for the traditionalist as well as the sabermetrician.
As for the procedural part of the issue, I think Dave is describing a real problem (players who were dominant in their eras should be electable in BBWA voting), and I think there is a real (and simple) solution, at least to the procedural bottleneck part of the problem.
The argument for recognizing some impact of the expansion of opportunity is clear, based on the expansion from 16 teams to 30, integration of Negro Leagues into MLB, and increased immigration of foreign players. The base of high quality impact players has expanded, even if the expansion of quality is not proportional to the expansion of longevity displayed on Dave’s chart. Even if the definition of dominant player limits the total to about 15-20 per decade, something is wrong with a voting system that only identifies a few of those players.
There is clearly a procedural bottleneck: Expansion plus the recent emphasis on team parity has cluttered the landscape with a larger number of near-decent HoF candidates while reducing the likelihood of any team assembling a Murderer’s Row lineup, which is how many great players were able to compile great statistics and demonstrate dominance in their eras. This means each decent candidate today is less likely to wind up on any particular voter’s ballot under the 10-vote limit, leading to a lower likelihood that the lower tier of HoF-worthy candidates will garner the needed votes.
A simple solution to a logjam created by the dilution effect of expanded opportunity would be to expand the vote limit. This would open the door for voters who are currently unable to vote for the number of players they deem worthy of votes, without reducing the 75% standard for inclusion or opening the ballot to the potential over-correction of no limit at all.
Why not simply expand the vote limit from 10 to 15 and see what happens?
This simple change should push a few worthy cases over the top (at most Craig Biggio and Jack Morris in 2013, according to my calculations) without forcing the inclusion of anyone who fails to reach 75%. I don’t think it would inflate HoF numbers anywhere near the 1% level, but it would eliminate the procedural logjam of the dilution effect and allow a few more great baseball players to enjoy the celebration of their own HoF induction.
Okay, today’s graph is better than yesterday – pitchers don’t have a chance, got it.
But the decade percentages are best understood more anecdotally through the history of the times, events like World War II, and then for like 20 years before the Canseco era, the HOF had developed and settled into its own standards – 500 home runs to punch one’s ticket and so forth.
Dave is still attempting bs nuancing by asserting that there are more players in more recent history because of the ‘modern styles of roster creation.’ Really, it’s easier than that – there are many more teams now, and therefore many more players.
There’s no getting to the bottom of this – it’s all just an unrelated to the vote construct (‘gotta get the HOF numbers up!’) – but another way to approach the depth of the HOF talent over time would be by marking say:
How many guys hit 30 homers per year, by year or decade. Or even how many guys had 5+ fWAR seasons, by year, by decade…
the high WAR seasons thing is hereabouts, if I understood you correctly:
http://makenolittleplans.net/the-hall-is-getting-smaller/
I’d like to see this done looking at players voted in by the BBWAA only. Take out some of the Veterans’ Committee/”Whatever the hell you call it now” craziness from the 1930s, and also the fact that recent folks haven’t been given a shot on the VC yet.
Dated as it is in many ways, you all really need to go back and read Bill James’s Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame. Key point from the book–the biggest problems in establishing the Hall were always caused by people trying to make massive changes to the voting process because they mistook short-term, narrow problems as some sign of catastrophic, systematic failures.
For all Dave is whining about how the Hall admitted so many players once upon a time–look at the 1950 election. Mel Ott was on the ballot. Jimme Foxx was on the ballot. Paul Waner, Dizzy Dean…tons of no-doubters eligible. And NO ONE was elected. Joe DiMaggio didn’t get in until his THIRD try. But they all got in, and no one remembers or cares now it took a few years to get it right.
The current situation is not about any horrible systematic problem in the voting process(though I’d be happy to raise or remove the 10-man limit given the larger body of candidates). It’s because all legislative bodies sometimes run into short-term gridlock, and when they do it takes them a few years to clear it up.
Maddux is going to get in this year; Biggio is going to get in a year or two, as is Glavine, and Thomas, and Bagwell, and Piazza, and Schilling, and several others.( And, eventually, Bonds and Clemens.) There will be some debate over specific cases–whether it’s ok to let in a corner outfielder without any real power or defensive ability, like Raines, for instance–but these will be relatively individualized. This too shall pass.
Great comment DJ and I agree. I feel like an old man warning kids not to play with fire but the truth is the system is not the problem. It has actually worked very well over the many years and I think if left alone will continue to work quite well.
I think a bump up to 12 initially and maybe 15 down the road would be the kind of fine tuning that is warranted and something I would support because it doesn’t change the system fundamentally but adjusts for population.
How any of this addresses the problem of PED use and HOF voting is beyond me and isn’t that the real problem here?
Upping the number of people you can vote for won’t change anything. It’s not like ten guys are getting elected every year. NO ONE got in last year. You could allow the voters a 1000 person ballot and they’d still do nothing different.
The Hall is a car. It needs new drivers, not a new engine.
Upping the number MAY help keep some folks on the ballot longer and give others the final few votes they need to get in but yes I agree I say MAY because I don’t know how they vote currently. Are there a large number of voters using all 10 slots? Are they going to change the way they view the PED issue?
I have yet to see a good case for the “change the drivers” argument. Are you pissed because they seem to be weighing the PED issue too much or their average age or what exactly? I’m frustrated as well because I have a different opinion(than the voters) but I’m not seeing any rational arguments to throw the voters out or tear down the system.
Why did the Democrats take 103 ballots to nominate a presidential candidate in 1924? The same reason the Hall of Fame is so tough. Get rid of the 75 percent supermajority.
Could this be redone to exclude Veteran’s Committee inductees? I know the VC has a bit of a history inducting people that have no business being in the halls, but the later years also don’t have the benefit of VC inductions. I don’t know if it would make a significant impact on the overall percentages, but it seems a bit shifty to blame the BBWAA for something that is also aided by the VC panels. It is also unlikely that he VC groups ever induct members so shamelessly in the future as well.
It’s interesting, and telling, that a post like this garners hundreds of responses…people invested in the game are invested in the maintenance of the history of the game, which is certainly a good thing.
The numbers are telling, but to me they tell on story: too many players elected pre-WWII. I don’t like a big Hall, I like the pinnacle of greatness being celebrated and anything beyond that dilutes the field. Just because 25% were elected in 1910 doesn’t mean 25% should be elected in 2010.
That said, I think the BBWAA has lost their way with recent candidates, and the steroid era will result in dozens of truly deserving players not getting in unless something is done. If Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens aren’t slam dunk first ballot inductees then something is broken with the system, and neither was even in shouting distance on their first ballot. The holier-than-thou writing community need to understand that their votes constitute a maintenance of baseball history and greatness, not a moral pejorative, and that a Hall with baseball greatness–however flawed–is one that better maintains the history of the game than one that’s more exclusionary.
Many of the same writers also knew that steroids were rampant in the game but never reported on it until an AP writers blew the whistle on McGuire (and many of them supported McGuire) and Balco was broken but a couple of SF business writers. It was only when MLB buckled under Congressional pressure that writers joined the crusade against steroids.
Guys from way back when are still being elected to this day. There was also sort of a problem in that blacks were not allowed to play, and rectifying that by including a host of Negro League players adds to the numbers. If you account for these two things, do things change much?
There also just is a bigger history, which grows every year, for the VC. Is the Hall actually putting in significantly fewer players than in was in the 60s?
all of the greatest players of baseball history are from the past 60 years, yet few of them are in. Why do we even look at pre-integration baseball as legitimate anymore? It wasn’t until the late 60s that baseball was even fully integrated, so why do we even have to compare the players of today to the pre-integration players? They were playing completely different levels of competition, and had unfair advantages that no players of today could dream of having.
Someone somewhere suggested an old-timey hall of fame which would satisfy all the dying baseball white-supremacists, and the rest of us could have our own hall of fame where the greatest players are celebrated and have the place in the game they deserve.
This confuses me. Generally our discussion here is in regard to what players accomplished in the AB and IP that they accumulated. Now we are looking at simply accumulating AB/IP. A more useful approach might be to look at players who played long enough to accumulate those counting totals but achieved something useful in them (say an average of 6 WAR per full season). It doesn’t seem to make sense to just look at players by volume as opposed to players by quality. There is a chance that, through advances in medicine and positional needs (both due to expansion and position scarcity) that there may be more players who hang on and collect those benchmark appearances, but fail to produce any quality in the percentages of past decades. The definitive approach would seem to be to take those players already identified then see what percentage of those achieved at least 60 WAR and which percentage of those made the HOF.
I will be honest ans admit I didn’t read all of the comments so what I am about to say might already have been covered. If so, I apologize.
Let’s all admit it, there might be MORE guys in the Hall of Fame who do not deserve it. I once read that the people on the Veterans Committee would go into a smoke filled room and bargain with each other to get their buddies voted into the HOF. So, if that is true, then the VC weren’t really voting in guys on merit but because of who they knew.
I think that is the EXACT reason why the VC rules were changed and more people were added and involved in the election process. Because of these tougher standards, you aren’t getting in as many marginal guys as was voted in in the past.
So, I say to remedy this for this study, you need to remove the marginal guys voted in by the VC from the list and THEN look at the totals.
To me, there should be two Halls of Fame for baseball, the IMMORTALS building with guys like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams and then another building for everybody else.
Also, if the HOF is NOT going to kick guys out who were marginal choices by the VC then they should loosen the standards and allow some more of the marginal Post War players to get voted in.
With two buildings, Babe Ruth wouldn’t have to share space with Dave Bancroft but Jim Rice would.
I wonder how many HR the Babe would have hit if he had to face pitchers like Pedro, Bob Gibson, CC and Price
The HOF should be as exclusive as possible. One way of doing that is to establish a rigorous minimum criteria for each player put on the ballot. If the player was not in the top decile for his positions for the era he played he would not be on the ballot. Fielding categories could be given more weight for defensive positions such as those up the middle. Categories for statistical ranking and minimum games played for a position would be established by a committee chosen by the commissioner and the the players union. Election could continue to be by the writers but the rankings of each player eligible would be published so fans could see how the election mirrored the facts. To be elected a player would continue to need 75% of the votes cast but there would be no set number of players a voter would need to vote for. There would be no need for a veterans committee as a players achievements would stand for themselves in each election and would bring to attention omissions not explained by the data. The writers could than explain why a player who should qualify by his achievements as measured against his peers is not getting elected. A process like this would be transparent and engaging of fan interest to be sure fairness is applied.
One way to make it more exclusive would be to remove the likes of Rabbit Maranville, or Jim Rice.
Rice was one of the most feared hitters in his day and most people who watched him in the day considered him a future HOF.
Players got paid for HR and RBI and/or BA in those days. If players were told they had to have a good OBP to get a big pay day many would have taken more walks, but they were not, so judging such players by today’s standards seems silly. Ted Williams got booed for walking, but he walked to preserve his BA, not to increase his OBP, a stat he never heard of in his playing days.
Maybe I missed this but when counting HOF players were all players in the HOF included or just those voted in by the writers?
If it was all players these numbers wouldnt surprise me at all. BBWAA has always been slow getting players into the hall and Veterens Committees have added many players the writers missed. The last VC flood ended with Rizzuto getting in and changing the ways VC put players in. The VC never got to fix the missed guys from the 60’s-80’s cause they went to far with their 30’s-50’s selections. If the BBWAA doesnt start putting guys in the HOF will make committees to do it.
I’d love to see the breakdown by players voted in by the writers and see if there is a change.
And yet, some writers will return a blank ballot, and will give a reason like there are no good players, or Pete Rose isn’t on the ballot, or all players took PEDs.
Happens every year, and yet that person will get a ballot next year.
Doesn’t this make sense? Won’t ever HOF have the same thing happen? Get a pool of players voted in, then at some point (now, I guess, for MLB), you look at the average HOFer and want all new inductees to be at least that good. As you vote fewer and fewer players in, that average is better and better, and thus, fewer and fewer players are voted in as time goes on.
Makes sense to me. Not wrong or right, but I bet the other pro sports HOFs will deal with this in the future (as they’re younger than MLB, with the stats n such).
btw, look at the list of eligible HOF candidates not in the HOF right now. It’s dumb. There are multiple top-5 all-time players out of the HOF. I don’t care about PEDs, lying, or grand juries, just put the best players in already.
Change the voting to HOF. Let HOF’ers vote in the HOF’ers via secret ballot. To hell with everyone else.