Troy Percival's Hall of Fame Candidacy Hurt by East Coast Bias, Writer Suggests

If you played rotisserie baseball in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, you’re quite familiar with former Angels closer Troy Percival. For about a decade, Percival was always listed around the Top 5 relief pitcher options when you set up to draft your team. Eight seasons with 30+ saves meant that more often than not, Percival didn’t disappoint if you used a relatively high draft pick on him. He retired after the 2009 season with Tampa, finishing with 348 saves.

Percival’s name appeared on the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot for the first — and final — time last week. The man who recorded the ninth-most saves in baseball history received four votes, which kept him far under the five percent threshold needed to retain a place on the ballot. One of the BBWAA members to vote for Percival, the Orange County Register‘s Jim Alexander, wrote a column explaining why he used one of his 10 available votes on a guy who likely had no chance of election. Following the vote, Alexander detailed some of the anger it caused both in interviews and online.

In his defense of the Percival vote, Alexander makes mention how in 2003 Percival talked about his (save) stats being similar to those of Mariano Rivera — considered now to be a sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Fame lock, while the then-Angels closer was brought up after Billy Wagner:

"““And they had a special on TV (saying) that he was already a guaranteed first-ballot Hall of Famer. And then they had the lefty … Billy Wagner, as a probable first ballot and he had 240 or 250 at the time. I didn’t quite crack the list and I’m going, ‘Wow, OK. I see where it’s at.’”"

After this quote, Alexander surmises succinctly, “Eastern bias, perhaps?”

Four votes is a dose of reality, not bias. Bias isn’t really even necessary when it comes to the career of Rivera (652 saves) vs. Percival, either. If there’s any sense getting mad about any of the first-timers on the ballot dropping off, it’s Carlos Delgado mustering 21 votes (3.8 percent) when he finished with a lifetime .929 OPS.

If an East Coast media bias by the Hall voters existed, wouldn’t John Franco have lasted more than one year on the ballot? Side-by-side Franco’s numbers (424 saves, 2.89 ERA, 24.2 WAR) trump those of Percival (307, 3.17, 17.5). Beyond that Franco, a Brooklyn native, was one of the more media-friendly athletes and played in New York most of his career — and he only got 27 votes (4.6 percent) and fell off the ballot after one year in 2011.

Percival aside, judging the contributions of relief pitchers will come under more and more scrutiny given their rise to prominence in modern baseball history. Unlike other positions on the field, relievers don’t seem to have an arbitrary statistical benchmarks (i.e. 300 wins). As it stands, the list of relievers in Cooperstown is short: Dennis Eckersley, Goose Gossage, Bruce Sutter, Rollie Fingers and Hoyt Wilhelm. Lee Smith, third all-time with 478 saves, got 30 percent of the vote on his 13th year on this ballot. Where do guys like Trevor Hoffman or Wagner rank? Saves hardly tell the whole story of a relief pitcher’s worth.

Percival himself is quoted in Alexander’s column saying, “It wasn’t a Hall of Fame career, (but) it was a good career.”

The ballot only allows you to select 10 players. Worthy candidates are backlogged at the moment — Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson and John Smoltz each got in on their first vote this year — saying nothing of players with the PED cloud hanging over their candidacy. In some years, sure, throw a guy like Percival or Terry Puhl a token vote and it’s not a big deal. When you have a ballot that includes so many worthy candidates such as Alan Trammel, Mike Mussina, Tim Raines, Fred McGriff, Curt Schilling, Mike Piazza etc., using a vote to show your gratitude toward Percival or Darin Erstad is a little less defensible.

The blame lies on the BBWAA’s glacial-like ability to change its voting process, less so individual writers for expressing their own personal opinions.