The Baseball Hall of Fame Voting Process Remains Totally Flawed (But You Already Knew That)

Sports, correct me if I’m wrong, are supposed to be fun. Following sports, watching sports, talking about sports, hell even writing blogging about sports is supposed to be an enjoyable way to spend your leisure time as a human being. Granted, often it’s difficult to remember in the 24/7, 365 world if sports are still actually fun rather than exhausting, self-perpetuating machine taken way too seriously by far too many people.

Today Craig Biggio, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz were elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame where they will be immortalized with plaques in Cooperstown, N.Y. The entire process and debate leading up to (and after) this election by the Baseball Writers’s Association of American was decidedly non-fun.

Look, I’m a baseball fan and take rooting for the Detroit Tigers way too seriously. The Tigers are the only team left in my life that cause me to lose sleep or take long walks down by the ocean after they get swept away in a playoff series by the Orioles. That said, we’ve reached the point where instinctively I react much like Kramer to the sound of Mary Hart’s voice whenever anything about the Hall of Fame comes up, and it has nothing to do with my favorite childhood player, Alan Trammell, never coming within spitting distance of the 75-percent voting threshold.

Perhaps I’m in the minority. The amount of column inches and digital space compiled each year about the Hall could reach to that weird wormhole around Saturn in Interstellar eight or nine times, as people like ready-made debates and arguments.

Without being too overtly negative and cynical, a tip of the hat and congrats to quartet for their election. I’ll hold out hope for Tim Raines, Mike Mussina and other worthy candidates. Otherwise here’s some issues with everything and anything that is the Hall of Fame debate.

Issue No. 1: The arbitrariness of the Steroid Era: 

There is no concrete way to know which players did or did not use PEDs– and that dates back well before the accepted period of the late 1980s with Jose Canseco. Congress, shocker, couldn’t get to the bottom of it. Few ex-players are going to take the Canseco route and write a book, detailing at length all the times they stuck a needle in their buttocks in a stadium bathroom stall.

Point is, nobody knows who was or was not taking something during the so-called “Steroid Era” and as a result the voting has become a completely strange process full of innuendos and hearsay. Barry Bonds (baseball’s career home run king, mind) and Roger Clemens have aspersions on them due their legal troubles and appearance in the Mitchell Report. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are under the cloud of suspicion, too, so they’ll likely never get in — at least in the foreseeable future. But players Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza have made voters totally random arbiters when it comes to PEDs. Google their names and you can run your own detective work and form an opinion.

Perhaps the only way this entire thing falls apart and we get a fresh look at this era of baseball is if a someone already enshrined in Cooperstown comes out and says in no vague terms: I did PEDs. (I’ll raffle off some tickets to my sports/Internet-free panic room on the day this happens.)

ESPN’s T.J. Quinn, who gave up his vote, made a great series of points that is hard to argue against before the vote on Tuesday morning:

As always, it’s worth remembering baseball didn’t adopt The Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program until 2006.

Issue No. 2: Opinions

What’s that old chesnut: everyone has opinions and thinks theirs don’t stink?

Maybe this goes against the previous “issue” but if you’re a Hall of Fame voter, why even have an opinion or express it publicly? Someone is just going to disagree with you or rip you or call you names.

It’s probably a good thing, a healthy thing in fact, if people have different opinions on something as trivial as the Baseball Hall of Fame. Lightning bolt strike me down, but it’s okay if different writers view different players merits and qualifications differently. A good, healthy debate on the Hall of Fame used to be a lot of fun (if only on talk radio) before it devolved into ideology and name-calling, as if someone who dares disagree with YOUR opinion is no longer a valid human being.

If you decide to vote for Darin Erstad or Aaron Boone, well, at least you might have a sense of humor.

Issue No. 3: The ballot itself/first year/etc. 

The Hall of Fame ballot, an actual paper ballot, mind, only allows voters to vote for 10 players in a given year. Numerous voters have railed against that this year given how many worthy candidates there are — Johnson, Martinez and Smoltz all got in on their first ballot, much like Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and Frank Thomas last year. It might not be an issue, but players drop off the ballot if they receive less-than five percent of the vote.

A lot of good ideas have been bandied about in recent years, such as switching to a binary yes/no system.

Issue No. 4: Lingering logical loopholes

Quick question: given his prickly interactions with the media during his playing career, would Ted Williams have been snubbed if he’d played a little bit later in the 20th century? This logic almost kept Jim Rice out of the Hall.

Why, for instance, is Mike Piazza not worthy enough to gain the needed 75-percent today (he only received 69 percent) but he’ll probably get enough next year? Same thing for Craig Biggio, who missed by two votes last year. Barely 365 days later — he’s magically good enough to be immortalized in Cooperstown. Hooray! 

While I’ll trumpet and defend anyone’s right to their own opinions, some of the arbitrary standards the voters have cooked up such as who does and doesn’t deserve to have “first ballot Hall of Fame” status or why nobody should garner 100 percent of the vote (will the BBWAA hold a lottery to see who’ll have the distinction of leaving Derek Jeter off their ballot?) is just myopic and silly.  

You may have your own individual standards and ideas for a Hall of Famer, be it the eye-test or traditional stats or advanced metrics or whatever system you deem to fit your personal paradigm, but some of the methods used just don’t make sense from a logical standpoint. What exactly are you proving by waiting a year to vote for someone?

That’s my spiel. As I stated above, I’m a baseball-lover and the Hall of Fame stuff drives me battier and battier each passing winter, which is too bad because the actual brick-and-mortar Hall is a nice little vacation in upstate New York (at least it was when I was in sixth grade). I get the sense I’m not alone in this feeling toward the entire process, either. Considering how many voters and writers were publicy unhappy this year, from Buster Olney on down, perhaps we’re inching closer to change because right now the current system isn’t fun in the least bit for anybody … except the four guys who were elected today.

RELATED: Darin Erstad Received One Hall of Fame Vote, Aaron Boone Got Two