By Steve Sailer
01/15/2024
Next week, the Baseball Hall of Fame will announce the results of its 2024 voting. The way it works is that a large number of baseball writers get presented a ballot of names and vote yes or no on each one. If a player gets 75% yes votes, he’s in the Hall of Fame. If he gets less than 5% yes votes, he’s kicked off the writers’ ballot forever (although there are various alternative routes in for overlooked old-timers a few decades down the road). If he gets at least 5%, he stays on the ballot for another year. But he has to get to 75% within 10 years or he gets superannuated off the ballot.
A subtle problem is that there has emerged a higher honor than just getting into the Hall of Fame: getting voted in your first year of eligibility. The 58 players who were immediately inducted form an informal inner circle of Hall of Fame of Guys You’ve Heard Of: Ty Cobb, Willie Mays, Tom Seaver, Cal Ripken, etc.
So, writers considering whether to vote for a player appearing on his first ever ballot have two contradictory responsibilities:
Does this player deserve to be one of the First Ballot immortals?
Does this player deserve to be kicked off the ballot forever?
If you don’t think he’s worthy of being a First Round Legend, then vote No. But if you don’t think he’s so bad he deserves to be a one and done, vote Yes.
You can see the problem
So, what happens is that a fair number of players who aren’t all time greats but who deserve more than one year’s evaluation get booted off the ballot after a single year of voting. For example, here are the eleven post-1900 players whose career totals are above the 60.0 Wins Above Replacement stat usually considered the rule of thumb for Hall of Fame membership and who got booted off after the first ballot and still haven’t gotten in through the Veterans Committee:
Lou Whitaker, Bobby Grich, Rick Reuschel, Kenny Lofton, Buddy Bell, Kevin Brown (PEDs scandal?), Willie Randolph, Reggie Smith, David Cone, Sal Bando, and Jim Edmonds.
In fact, I count only 8 players who are above the 60 WAR threshold and didn’t get in after more than one ballot (leaving out 19th century players, and gambling or PEDs scandal players like Joe Jackson, Pete Rose, Roger Clemens, and Barry Bonds): Curt Schilling (10 years and he didn’t get in because of blatant political prejudice against him), Graig Nettles (4), Dwight Evans (3), Luis Tiant (15), Ken Boyer (15), Tommy John (15), Keith Hernandez (9), and Wes Ferrell (6).
So, I would propose that everybody get a minimum of two years on the Hall of Fame ballot. That way, there’s not a conflict of interest between not wanting to honor somebody who doesn’t deserve to be a first ballot hall of famer and trying to keep somebody’s candidacy alive who deserves more arguing over.
Granted, these 11 who got booted out on the first ballot aren’t the most storied players in baseball history, but they are really good. Give me these 11 guys at age 25 to 30 and 15 replacement level players and I’d win 90 or 100 games per season.
I don’t see much in the way of patterns of who got shut out of the voting after only one year. There are three second basemen (Whitaker, Grich, and Randolph) who all played for fine teams (1980s Tigers, 1970s-80s Orioles/Angels, and 1970s-80s Yankees, respectively). Second basemen need to be wiry guys to turn the double play, so they don’t usually hit a lot of homers, and they get injured a lot by baserunners, so you need to put a thumb on the scale of their statistics, the way you do with catchers and shortstops. For some reason, less than 5% of sportswriters recognized that these three guys were outstanding second basemen whose candidacy for the Hall at least deserved more consideration.
Rick Reuschel is a little more explicable: he was a slow-throwing fat guy control pitcher who mostly pitched for bad teams so his career won-loss record was only a little over .500. His 1977 20-10 season with a 2.94 ERA for the Chicago Cubs in slugging-conducive Wrigley Field was one of the great pitching seasons of the 1970s, not quite Steve Carlton’s 27-10 but up there with Ron Guidry’s 25-3 and Vida Blue’s 24-8. Still, you had to know a lot about stats to recognize how good he was. Reuschel’s 1977 season is immortalized in the often-revived play Bleacher Bums, which launched the careers of Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz as two of the eight Cubs fans watching Reuschel pitch from the stands against the St. Louis Cardinals. But even that didn’t quite make The Narrative.
Reggie Smith was a power and walks right fielder quite like his contemporary Reggie Jackson, who absorbed 90% of the attention. Smith wasn’t as good a hitter as Jackson, although he wasn’t far off when healthy (in 1977-78, Smith outhit Jackson by quite a lot in the regular season, but Mr. October prevailed in both World Series). But Smith was a better defender and teammate than Jackson, whose tabloid wars with Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, manager Billy Martin, and catcher Thurman Munson provided a crucial life lesson to Donald Trump: that there’s no such thing as bad publicity as long as they spell your name right. In contrast, the only scandal I remember Smith being tangentially involved in is that the 1978 Dodger locker room fistfight between current U.S. Senate candidate Steve Garvey and Hall of Famer Don Sutton started when Sutton complained that the press treated Garvey as the best player on the team, when Smith deserved to be the star.
In general, though, I don’t see much of a pattern in these superb first-round rejects. They mostly failed to get a Narrative in their favor, but I can easily imagine alternative timelines in which these players become hugely famous: e.g.,
Whitaker and Alan Trammell played beside each other at second base and shortstop for 1,918 games over 19-major league seasons, making them the longest running double play combination in major-league history.
I can remember that when I was driving to a Rolling Stones concert at Angel Stadium in 1978, I tuned in to the Angels playing the Tigers in Detroit and the Angels announcer raved about 21-year-old Whitaker and 20-year-old Trammell. They went on to play together through 1995. That seems as worthy of fame as, say, Tinkers to Evers to Chance.
Lou Whitaker belongs next to Alan Trammell in Cooperstown. Not sure anyone was ever shafted worse by the writers. 2.9% of the vote and off the ballot in one year is a goddamn joke that must be rectified. pic.twitter.com/GEr79fxTvD
— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) August 2, 2023
Similarly, I could make up narratives about how Grich was the center of the defense for two of the most brilliant managers, Earl Weaver and Gene Mauch. Or how Willie Randolph stabilized a great Yankees team that otherwise would fallen apart due to its contentious personalities.
Weirdly, Willie Davis, the Dodgers centerfielder who helped put Koufax, Drysdale, and Sutton in the Hall of Fame by chasing down so many would-be extra base hits to Dodger Stadium’s 410-foot fence, never even appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot despite his 60.7 WAR compared to 45.3 for his contemporary, first ballot Hall of Famer Lou Brock. The two played in all six World Series from 1963-1968, with each winning two of three.
Granted, I’d probably vote for Brock over Davis for the Hall of Fame: Brock was famous, for various not bad reasons: hitting .391 with power in the World Series (Davis is most notorious in the World Series for making three errors across two consecutive plays), setting the single season and career stolen base records, and being part of the most famous bad trade in baseball history.
On the other hand, Brock was a remarkably bad left fielder for a speedster. I can sympathize: like Lou Brock, I could never figure out where a fly ball was going to go either. The problem was beyond my cognitive ability. On the other hand, Brock was a first-ballot Hall of Famer and I was a youth baseball right fielder.
But Brock was good at devoting his cognitive abilities to hitting and baserunning, while Davis was kind of a knucklehead on offense. When Dodger catcher John Roseboro suggested to Davis that he could teach him how to use his speed to bunt for base hits, Davis scoffed.
This is in contrast to when second string-catcher Norm Sherry suggested to erratic pitcher Sandy Koufax that in 1961 he try walking fewer hitters. But when Koufax asked how, the Dodgers’ Jewish braintrust was momentarily stumped. So Sherry asked Roseboro what Koufax should do, who suggested that Koufax not try to throw every pitch a million miles per hour. Sandy and Norm thought that was a brilliant suggestion and… it worked!
If Willie Davis had been allowed to appear on the Hall of Fame ballot, he likely would have been the 12th one-and-done.
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