National League’s Barry Bonds, of the San Francisco Giants, runs during the All-Star baseball game in San Francisco, Tuesday, July 10, 2007. (AP Photo/ Jeff Chiu)
Copyright 2007 AP. All rights reserved.
Ah, the good old days. For years and years, player flow into the Baseball Hall of Fame slowed to a trickle, as the Hall and its primary electing body, the Base Ball Writers Association of America unintentionally conspired to keep some of the game’s inner circle greats out of the Hall citing their alleged use of performance-enhancing substances.
The words “unintentionally conspired” were used very intentionally there. It was a combination of the Hall’s induction requirements and rules – 10-year induction eligibility period, no more than 10 players selected per ballot, selection on 75% of ballots submitted necessary for induction), along with the writers’ voting patterns that created a monster. With players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens – two of the game’s 10 best players ever by any measure and arguably the greatest position player and pitcher of all time – on the ballot but tainted by their connections to steroids, a domino effect ensued. They got votes, but not enough to be inducted, but their presence cut into the vote totals of other players on the ballot, keeping them out as well. To make matters even worse, some potentially deserving players (like Kenny Lofton, for example) didn’t even get the 5% of the vote in their first year of eligibility necessary to keep them on the ballot due to the logjam. It was such an absolute mess that the main route to Hall entry is only now just recovering years after the departure of Bonds and Clemens from the BBWAA ballot.
But there is another road to the Hall of Fame. It used to be called the Veterans Committee, and its body of work actually made the BBWAA look good. It has now been split into three parts, the Contemporary Baseball Players, the Contemporary Baseball Managers/Executives/Umpires and the Classic Baseball Players Committees. These committees each vote once every three years – this December 7, the Contemporary Baseball Players Committee will announce the results of its latest vote.
Eight players appear on this year’s ballot, with 75% of the Committee’s 16 voters needed to induct a candidate. (Candidates who receive less than five votes will not appear on the Committee’s next ballot in 2028. Such candidates can appear once more on the Committee’s ballot, but receiving less than five votes a second time results in permanent omission from the ballot.)
I do believe that the powers that be are well intentioned and simply want the most deserving players to be considered for such a lofty honor. But the whims of the voters could soil this system as it did with the steroid era BBWAA voting. Plus, it would help if the people assembling the ballot picked the most deserving uninducted players. Here are the eight player on this year’s Contemporary Baseball Player Ballot:
Barry Bonds
Roger Clemens
Carlos Delgado
Jeff Kent
Don Mattingly
Dale Murphy
Gary Sheffield
Fernando Valenzuela
All were great players, who left a mark upon the game. But they are not the same.
WAR (Wins Above Replacement) is not the be-all and end-all, but when it comes to comparing players across eras, it is very helpful. Baseball researcher Jay Jaffe is arguably the leading authority of Hall of Fame voting and standards, and his arbitrary marker for Hall of Fame-worthiness is 60 WAR. Only three of the eight players on this ballot exceed this mark, and one – Sheffield – is barely above, at 60.5 Baseball Referance WAR, and Kent isn’t far off that mark at 55.4 bWAR.
The other two such players not only exceed 60 bWAR, they have over twice as much. Bonds has 162.8 bWAR, Clemens 139.2. You want to attribute some of their success to steroids, go ahead, but you can’t take them below a Hall-worthy WAR level in the process.
The other four players on this ballot, Murphy (46.5 bWAR), Delgado (44.4), Mattingly (42.4) and Valenzuela (41.4) are way below that 60 WAR mile marker. You can create a case for any one of those guys – Murphy was at one time arguably the best all-around player in the game, Delgado was an elite power hitter obscured by some who were slightly greater, Mattingly was on an express train to the Hall before injuries intervened and Valenzuela was both a dominant young pitcher and a cultural icon from Southern California through Mexico. The Hall would not be sullied by the presence of any one of them.
But they’re not Bonds or Clemens. Barry Bonds had 43.4 bWAR in the FOUR SEASONS between age 36-39. You want to write those years off due to steroids? Sure, go ahead. What are you going to do about the 44.8 bWAR he accumulated in the FIVE SEASONS between age 24-28, when he still had the sleek figure of a supermodel? He was peerless.
And then there’s Clemens. Sandy Koufax was great, no question, and some think he was the best pitcher ever. Well, Clemens had almost THREE TIMES as many career WAR as Koufax’ 48.9. In Clemens’ FIVE BEST SEASONS alone, he racked up 49.2 bWAR, and all but one them occurred by age 29, before any steroid connection was alleged.
So maybe Bonds and Clemens will finally gain induction. I hope they do. But I do not think they will. The voters, I fear, are again going to make this all about themselves, and serve as some sort of purity police, preserving the sanctity of the Hall. They will more likely elect nice guys who treated them well, like Murphy and Mattingly. Guys who while they will belong and arguably make the Hall a better place, are nowhere near the stature of a Bonds or a Clemens.
Furthermore, I think the Big Two will get enough support to stick around on the ballot, and clog up the induction process of this committee as they did with the BBWAA previously. Rinse and repeat.
And I have one other question. What does Lou Whitaker (75.1bWAR) have to do to get in the Hall? He was one and done on the BBWAA ballot in 2001 and fell short in his first appearance on the Contemporary Players Committee ballot in 2020. He didn’t even make the ballot this time. Maybe the Bonds-Clemens ballot-clogging has already begun.