The first time I walked into the Hall of Fame Gallery was magical.
The entire Cooperstown experience was surreal, of course, but the Gallery simply took my breath away. I took a picture of the bronze plaque honoring Theodore Samuel Williams. Same with the plaques honoring Jack Roosevelt Robinson and Stanley Frank Musial and Willie Howard Mays and Mickey Charles Mantle and maybe a dozen others. I couldn’t help myself.
These were the legends I’d read about my entire life, the giants who shaped the game and captured the imaginations of baseball fans across the country. These were the plaques I had come to Cooperstown to see. I was completely in awe of those larger-than-life stars of my favorite sport.
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What I didn’t do while in the Gallery was take a picture of the plaques honoring Jim Bunning or Rabbit Maranville. Didn’t take a picture of Lloyd “Little Poison” Waner or Kiki Cuyler or George “High Pockets” Kelly, either. But they were there in the Gallery. Their plaques were the same size as the ones for Teddy Ballgame and Jackie and Stan the Man and The Say Hey Kid and The Mick.
They’re Hall of Famers, even if seeing their plaques didn’t take my breath away.
And that’s the thing. They’re all Hall of Famers. Every year when the Hall of Fame vote rolls around — this year’s class will be revealed Wednesday — we hear baseball lovers talk about “Small Hall” and “Big Hall” philosophies.
And that’s cool. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion.
Truth be told, I love the romantic notion of the Small Hall. Make the exclusive club truly exclusive, where Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson and Roberto Clemente are enshrined but Dizzy Dean and Andre Dawson and Catfish Hunter are on the outside looking in. Sign me up.
That’s not the reality of baseball’s Hall of Fame, though.
That truth really hit home for me over the past couple of months, as I set about the task of submitting my first official Hall of Fame ballot, after 10 years in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. It was a monumental undertaking and a distinct honor, but I won’t bore you with those details again here. Talked about those in a different column.
I heard all kinds of feedback about my ballot, of course. Most of it was just conversation, pros and cons of my choices, and I loved it. Debate is awesome. Heard a lot of things like this, too: “No way Mike Mussina is a Hall of Famer. You’re an idiot.” Or “If you have to think about whether that guy’s a Hall of Famer, he isn’t.” Or “It’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Very Good.”
Clever folks. But they’re wrong.
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As voters, we’re asked to judge the players on the ballot against all the players in the Hall of Fame. So Mussina isn’t being compared solely to Cy Young or Bob Gibson or Randy Johnson. He’s being judged against those guys AND Jesse Haines and Herb Pennock and Waite Hoyt. Mussina’s being judged by the the best and the “worst” of the Hall. And he easily meets that standard. Even though it makes one segment of baseball fans dry heave, comprehensive advanced metrics like WAR — and, specifically to the Hall of Fame, JAWS — help provide the necessary context.
So it doesn’t matter that Mussina wasn’t the second coming of Christy Mathewson. And it doesn’t matter that Tim Raines wasn’t as good as Rickey Henderson. It doesn’t matter that Vladimir Guerrero wasn’t as good as Hank Aaron.
Some folks like to look at how 314 Hall of Famers who are already enshrined arrived in Cooperstown, and they use those methods of election as an imaginary line of delineation. For example, 51 players are members of the “first-ballot” club, a result of being elected to the Hall on their initial time on the BBWAA ballot. That group, by the way, excludes Joe DiMaggio (who somehow wasn’t elected until his fourth year on the ballot), Cy Young (second year) and Yogi Berra (second year), to name a few. So lend that idea whatever credence it deserves.
A total of 119 players have been elected by the BBWAA and the other 195 Hall of Famers were elected through various veterans-type committees. Of those 195, 35 are executives, 23 are managers and 10 are umpires, which means 127 players have been elected through secondary means. Lots of smart baseball people will try and convince you that matters.
I wanted to know what the Hall of Fame thought about all this, so I emailed Jon Shestakofsky, the Vice President of Communications and Education at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. This is what I asked him: “Does the Hall of Fame acknowledge any difference between players elected by the BBWAA and players elected through any of the other various committees? If so, how is that acknowledged? And, if not, why isn’t it acknowledged?”
Shestakofsky’s response: “Each of the 314 plaques in Cooperstown represent members of the same elite fraternity — the National Baseball Hall of Fame. From Induction Ceremonies to how the plaques read and are displayed, those elected via the BBWAA ballot or any other committees receive the same treatment once they are selected. In short, all Hall of Famers are created equal.”
Huh.
The Hall of Fame treats all 246 elected players the same. That’s good enough for me. I’ll use my ballot to vote for the players I feel meet the standards of those 246, not just the 51 first-ballot guys or the 119 elected by the BBWAA. That’s why I voted for the maximum 10 players on my ballot this year, and I’ll continue to vote for as many as I feel meet the standard of the 246 (or whatever that number is from year to year).
The results in Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame ballot tracker show most of my colleagues are taking this approach, too. Of the 206 voters who have publicly released their ballots as of Monday morning, 118 voted for the maximum 10, and another 45 voted for either eight or nine players. Another 37 voted for five, six or seven players, and a quick scan through the Tracker shows a lot of those folks are in the “keep the PED guys out” club, so that makes sense. We’ll tackle that debate in a different column.
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Then you get to the other ballots, the 12 on the tracker who voted for just two, three or four players (and don’t even get me started on Murray Chass, who submitted an intentionally blank ballot). Again, every voter is entitled to their own opinion and every voter can use their ballot to vote according to that opinion. It’s their prerogative. But a vote for two or three or four players, with this year’s class overflowing with qualified candidates who meet the standard of the 246, is a vote that reflects some misguided notion of what the voter wants the Hall to be, instead of the reality of the Hall.
I’ll choose to vote for what the Hall actually is.
