'Mad Dog' reminds us why Baseball Hall of Fame voting is flawed
The Baseball Writers Association of America has asked the Baseball Hall of Fame to change its balloting protocols in the past.
On one occasion, the BBWAA asked the Hall of Fame to raise the limit on the number of players we could vote for from 10 to 12. We proposed a "binary ballot" — putting a simple yes/no next to each name listed. Each time, the Hall of Fame said no.
So it is that the process by which players are elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame remains unchanged, inspiring complaints from all corners of the baseball ecosystem.
The latest rant came Tuesday from Christopher "Mad Dog" Russo in a guest appearance on Jon Heyman's podcast.
"Scott Rolen’s first year of eligibility, only 10 percent of the writers thought he was in the Hall of Fame,” Russo said. “Somehow he got to 75 percent? Isn’t the idea of a Hall of Famer right away you know who a Hall of Famer is by eyes, saying ‘that’s a Hall of Famer’? Willie Mays, did he get 10 percent? Did (Hank) Aaron get 10 percent? Did Sandy Koufax get 10%? How about Lefty Grove? How about (Babe) Ruth? How about (Lou) Gehrig? How about (Ted) Williams? How about (Joe) DiMaggio, (Mickey) Mantle, (Stan) Musial, these guys get 10%?”
Russo doesn’t have a Hall of Fame vote, but he’s precisely the type of person who should know how voting works. He watches a lot of games. He has a large audience of astute baseball fans. Explaining who gets into the Hall of Fame, and who doesn’t, and why, is precisely the kind of public-service task that falls to people like him in the sports media world.
Russo should know, for example, that the "steroid era" produced a number of players whose statistics were Hall of Fame worthy, but whose drug-test results weren't always clean. Was David Ortiz's failed drug test in 2003 a false positive or not? Who knows. He's in the Hall of Fame now. Mike Piazza admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs that were not banned at the time, but were later, so he's in. Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds never failed an MLB-issued steroid test, but they are out because there is overwhelming evidence they used steroids. It's a mess.
I'm lucky. I got my first ballot two years ago, after the majority of PED-era candidates were termed out of the ballot. In 2018, Rolen's first year on the ballot, he shared space with seven other players who would ultimately be enshrined in Cooperstown, plus Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez and Gary Sheffield — Hall of Famers on the merit of their statistics, but not in Cooperstown due to varying degrees of association with PEDs.
So of course Rolen wasn't a popular candidate in his first year on the ballot. This was not an issue for Ruth, or DiMaggio, or any inner-circle Hall of Famer a Baby Boomer can conjure with his imagination.
Again, Russo should know this. Yet this shouldn't have been a dilemma for Hall of Fame voters in the first place, either. Cooperstown could have excluded PED-linked players from the ballot altogether. They could have eliminated the 10-player limit, changed the ballot to a binary system or a ranked-choice system, or not let Joe Morgan send Hall of Fame voters a letter saying PED users "don't belong" in Cooperstown.
This year, Billy Wagner might well be voted in to the Hall of Fame. The longtime closer needed three appearances on the ballot to crack 11 percent. He debuted in 2016, a horrible time to be on the ballot because of all the PED candidates crowding him out.
If Wagner makes it in, rather than wringing hands about flip-flopping voters, just remember the Hall of Fame handed writers a flawed system to work within.
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