Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1782: Six Plaque Confabs

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley talk to Adam Darowski, the baseball historian, Hall of Fame scholar, and Head of User Experience at Sports Reference, about working on the Baseball-Reference website, creating the Hall of Stats, the Hall of Stats vs. the Hall of Fame, the appeal of 19th-century baseball, the Hall of Fame elections of […]

🎵 Statistics, statistics, keep you up to date. Hello and welcome to episode 1782 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined as always by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. As we teased yesterday, we will be talking some Hall of Fame today. Not the BBWA ballot. Been there, done that. We'll probably do that again sometime soon.

But today, a brief reprieve from that conversation, that fraught discourse, to discuss a slightly less fraught Hall of Fame discourse about a bunch of new Hall of Famers. There are six new Members, new inductees Into the Hall of Fame Including some very well-known Ones, perhaps some of the most notable Excluded players prior To Sunday's election Of the early baseball

And Golden Days era Committee of the Hall of Fame And we wanted to talk about Those inductees and some General Hall of Fame matters with we wanted to talk about those inductees and some general Hall of Fame matters with someone who is an expert on those subjects. So we are welcoming in Adam Durowski. Hello, Adam. Hey, Ben. Hey, Meg. How are you doing? We're doing well. And I believe that this is the first time that we have had you on

this podcast somehow. Clearly, we have been remiss in not having you on to this point. So I'm glad that we are rectifying that oversight today And there couldn't be a better time to do it Because you have devoted a lot of time to thinking and writing And talking about all of the Hall of Fame candidates who got in And a lot who didn't And just the general way of thinking through the Hall of Fame But before we get to these ballots and these

candidates and these long-awaited inductions and continued snubs, maybe we could talk a little bit about you and how you got into this line of work and what it is exactly that you do, because you are, in addition to being a baseball historian and Hall of Fame scholar, the head of user experience for Sports Reference, namely the company that runs Baseball Reference, a site that means a lot to us and to a lot of our listeners. And my user experience with Baseball Reference has been great. So you're doing a bang up job, I think.

But what is it exactly that head of user experience at Sports Reference does? Oh, thank you very much for those kind words. Yeah, the head of user experience at Sport Reference does. Oh, thank you very much for those kind words. Yeah, the head of user experience at Baseball Reference does a lot of things like talking to users, such as you, Ben. We talked once about things that were going on in the site, and I just try to figure out what's working for users, what's not working for users.

And then I take all of that, and I try to turn that into designs for new features and share that with users as we're working on them and kind of repeat the whole cycle as we improve the site. So it's a lot of working with users, which I love to do. Yeah. And you've been busy during your time with the company. I know that there was a big mobile overhaul. There was a stat head overhaul. Maybe some of this isn't totally visible to someone who's just checking baseball reference every now and then and sees a lot of tables with stats, but under the hood, it has changed a lot,

and there are some new tables with stats. So what has been accomplished during your tenure? Oh, gosh. So I joined actually full-time only about a year ago. And kind of the biggest thing in that year was we had the Negro Leagues launch. We had the addition of some new stat head tools, such as the Span Finder. We had the additions of the advanced batting tables that has some new stat cast data and other advanced data that we had kind of been burying on some sub-secondary level pages. So we kind of bubbled those up to the top uh so some projects like that and uh yeah you mentioned some big ones before i was uh contracting with sports reference for about six years before joining full-time and it just over time it was

just like yeah let's do this 100 of the time because i love it so what's in the works if you're able to divulge what big projects are in the pipeline at Baseball Reference these days? I know that there's a lot of work going on on the non-Baseball Reference sites that maybe are not quite as well trafficked by our audience, but got a lot of other fans too. A huge thing I can kind of talk about is just it's a big standardization project we have going on in the background. We've had several sites, as many people know, and a lot of them do things very differently. And one thing that we're working on now that maybe isn't too visible to the user

is just kind of getting them all working in a very similar fashion so that we can start building features for all of the sites at once. Like we have ideas for all sorts of cool things that we'd like to launch, not just for the reference sites, but for StatHead too. And if we get the databases a little bit more in sync, we can do that much more rapidly. So that's kind of a behind the scenes thing going on right now, but it's going to lead to a lot of exciting stuff in 2022. Are there any like pie in the sky site features that you, before you were working full-time or

even consulting for them, hope to be able to see at Sport Reference someday? Something that when you were just a mere user of the site, an appreciator of it, that you thought, ha, it would be nice to be able to do that, but you haven't been able to just yet. Maybe a hilarious answer I could give is I always thought like when I was a user of the site, oh, the first thing that I would do if I was ever at Sports Reference is I would add the rosters of the pre-National Association players from the 1860s just so I could track the player movement from one team to the other. That is not something that I have moved forward on. It is still something that I'm interested in, but maybe one day I could do that. Make sure you have a little bit more complete story for

players like Joe Start and Ross Barnes. Yeah, I know that it's a job and there are probably aspects of it that can be tedious at times, but it must be a little like getting the golden ticket to some extent, right? If you were a baseball reference power user and you've had this wish list of features that you want and then suddenly you are the one in charge of or helping to determine the direction of the site and bring some of those things to life, that must mean a lot. I would think that must be kind of a cool job to have. Oh, yeah. You don't want to even know how many times I just kind of message Kenny Jacklin back and forth. And we're like, we get to do this like for a job. And we just kind of laugh about it and kind of feel like we're cheating a little bit. Yeah.

So I guess before you wound up at Baseball Reference, you created a site of your own, which is relevant to what we want to talk about today. And that's the Hall of Stats, which is an alternate Hall of Fame. today. And that's the Hall of Stats, which is an alternate Hall of Fame that is just the stats, just the math, who would be in, who would be out if we determined inductees purely on a statistical basis. So how did you come up with that idea and how did you go about implementing it? Yeah, that came out of a bunch of articles that I wrote about at Beyond the Box score many, many years ago. Gosh, probably over 10 years ago now because the site is nine years old now. So that came from feeling like my favorite players that I was rooting for were having a really hard time getting in the Hall of Fame. And some of it was for PED issues.

Some of it was because the PED players were clogging the ballots. issues. Some of it was because the PED players were clogging the ballots. But I just really felt like the Larry Walkers, and even at the time, it was like the Craig Biggio's and Mike Piazza's weren't getting into the Hall of Fame. And I was super frustrated about it. So I wanted to create a way to show how the statistical record only stacks up, not only for the players that I had been rooting for, but I found that it was very interesting for like Deacon White was not yet in the Hall of Fame when I was doing that. And it was nice to show that he is a Hall of Fame level player. And luckily he got in in 2013. But I have interest in 19th century baseball too. So other players like Bill Dolan and Jack Glasscock came from that as well.

And I'm huge fans of theirs, but also the Dwight Evans and Bobby Gritches and Dick Allens of the world. It was great to have this measurement that was similar to war, but maybe I think it's kind of similar to Jaws where it combines the peak and the longevity skills. We're getting kind of a sense of it based on that answer, but I'm curious, how would you describe your sort of Hall of Fame philosophy in terms of its size, the selectivity that it should display, and sort of how long these guys should have to wait before they're inducted? Yeah, it's definitely evolved. When I started the Hall of Stats, I was basically like, this should be the Hall of Fame. Get rid of the other one. Mine is better. My numbers are better. I've really softened my stance on that over the years. I definitely understand what types of things make Gil Hodges a compelling candidate to some people or Tony Oliva, even if they don't have Hall ratings of 100. There were players that tested my own theory.

Like my son looked at me one day and was like, Dad, how can David Ortiz not have a 100 Hall rating? What the hell's wrong with this? So there are other things. And he made me help realize that as well. But in general, one thing that was really a theme of this year's Hall of Fame season was living players. Like these era committees keep putting candidates in after they've passed away. Yeah. And in many cases, like literally the next ballot when they're inducted, like Minnie Minoso, Ron Santo, Marvin Miller, I think had a couple of turns.

But it's a problem. And, you know, we're seeing it with more candidates. And we have the possibility of it happening with more. Tony Oliva and Jim Cott are good players that are headed towards the Hall of Fame. They literally are. It's more than 50% multiple years. They're going to get in the Hall of Fame. Why not do it while they're alive?

So it took my personal philosophy was like, all right, Ken Boyer should be in the Hall of Fame maybe. But he's not living. So maybe we take his votes and give it to Tony Oliva or Jim Cott. And just a little bit more strategic voting to get people up on that stage when they can actually enjoy it. Who would be some Hall of Stats members, some current inductees who are not Hall of Famers who you feel strongly about and wish were in the actual Hall of Fame? Well, I was hoping that Dick Allen was going to get the call this time. Unfortunately, he fell a single vote shy for the second cycle in a row. The last one being while he was still alive, which was particularly terrible. So he's certainly one off of the golden days. He was probably the top candidate left from that era, except maybe Ken Boyer. Ken

Boyer is up there as well. From the modern baseball era, we've got Lou Whitaker and Bobby Gritch, who hasn't even gotten onto one of the modern baseball era ballots. Dwight Evans is one of the top candidates as well. Louis Tiant on the pitching side. But then going back to the 19th century and early 20th century, you've got Bill Dallin, who is a 75 war player, and that just is not a number you can come by easily. Jack Glasscock is another one I've mentioned earlier, who's a 19th century shortstop, who, yeah, goofy name, but awesome stats.

He's just a wonderful player. You can keep mentioning him as often as you want. You can't say Jack Glasscock too many times on the podcast. You've discovered the real reason that we asked you on, Adam. I keep saying, if he was Jack Davis, he would have been in the Hall of Fame by now, but we wouldn't be talking about him today. Maybe that's... Would you still swap the hollow stats for the Hall of Fame, even though your thinking

has evolved? I mean, if you could have the version with the statistically approved candidates and kick out all of Frankie Frisch's friends and former teammates, would you snap your fingers and do it? Honestly, I don't think I would because I feel like the Hall of Stats is just a tool that gives me something to talk about now. If everybody that I wanted to get in just got in the Hall of Fame, I love to focus on the overlooked, whether it's baseball players, whether it's indie rock bands, whether it's low-level soccer teams from Austria. I love it. The unknowns, the overlooked that I always tend to get into. So

I think that having it this way probably means I have a lot more to talk about, which is good. Yeah. I have been wondering as I've been wrestling with how to vote or whether to vote with my first ballot this year about what the purpose of the Hall of Fame is. Not the Hall of Fame, the museum part, but the plaque part, the inductees. We need the museum, but I've been wondering, does the plaque part still serve the same purpose that it once did? If we have the Hall of Stats, if we have JAWS, if we have these pretty rigorous statistical systems that can give you a good sense of who the best baseball players were, and if that is what a lot of people think the point of the plaque part of the Hall of Fame is, well, maybe we have that substitute for it. And then does that mean because we have easy access to these very comprehensive stats now that the Hall of Fame should serve a different purpose, that it should recognize a different class of candidate like Buck

O'Neill, who we will get to, who is probably not a member of the Hall of Stats, but is now a member of the Hall of Fame. So that kind of candidate where the numbers don't make the case. So I wonder, because when the Hall of Fame came to be, of course, maybe there was more value in a sense to having a bunch of observers and chroniclers of the game come together and say, hey, these were the best players because there was no baseball reference. There was no baseball encyclopedia. You could not easily look up the numbers and say this guy was better than that guy. So maybe there was more value to just having a bunch of plaques in a room in upstate New York. And now there are perhaps

some substitutes for that. It'll be interesting as like, I'm curious what it'll look like even 20 or 30 years from now, because John Thorne had a quote in an article about Gil Hodges recently about like what a Hall of Famer should be. And it's just kind of sent me for a loop the last few days thinking about it. And it was, was he famous or given further scholarship, should he have been more famous? And I've been thinking a lot about that. Like Gil Hodges certainly was famous but then you've got like a player like bobby gritch who maybe wasn't as famous but given more scholarship he definitely should be you know you shouldn't just put in anybody that was remotely famous we don't want jose canseco in the hall of fame well maybe somebody does but fame can be the thing that

pushes you over the line but the further scholarship can also get you over that line as well so i've been really interested in that lately. But now given the focus on analytics in the game today, I've wondered if maybe in today's game, those are the same. Are you famous because of the statistics? So maybe there won't be as much of a divergence in future generations. Yeah, I wanted to ask you if you find yourself, I mean, I know that this particular BBWA ballot is thorny for the reasons that we have discussed at great length on this podcast. And so there's some idiosyncratic factors that are shifting the voting population sort of view of some of these guys, whether it's their connection to PEDs or their behavior off the

field or domestic violence. But I wonder just in general, over the last couple of cycles, if you have found yourself agreeing more often than you remember agreeing with the writers? Have you seen the sort of shift in terms of the electorate's sort of general appreciation for the statistical case really move dramatically? Oh, it's moved very, very dramatically. I remember a few years ago writing about how Larry Walker's case was dead in the water, like he was going nowhere. And then all of a sudden, he just skyrocketed. And same thing with Scott Rowland, like as soon as he was going to hit the ballot, I wrote this big piece on the Hall of Stats site, talking about how he should be a Hall of Famer. And I was afraid he was going to be one and done more than anything. But he has made serious gains too. So

there have definitely been, there's been a huge change, I feel, in these sabermetric candidates. And some of that was with culling the electorate and making sure that we still have people that are actually covering the game today. I'm sure a lot of it came from requiring the votes to be published, and a lot of it from Ryan Thibodeau's live tracker, too. I'm sure that there's a lot of public opinion interest that the voters have when they're about to submit their ballots, things like that. So all of that, I think, has contributed in some way. And yeah, just seeing candidates like Andrew Jones and Billy Wagner and Roland and seeing them climb up on their percentages is a huge change to what we were seeing years ago. develop your interest in early baseball and 19th century baseball because I think a lot of fans have their favorite era. And for most fans, it's probably either the present day or when they were

a kid and first got into the game. And I think for a lot of people, 19th century just seems so remote. It seems like a different sport. It seems like a different world. And maybe some people have trouble connecting with it. But there are obviously a lot of great stories from that era and a lot of great players in that era. And it is tainted in certain ways, certainly, and was a different caliber of play for many reasons, of course. But it was also an era when there was a lot of innovation going on and people were figuring out how to play baseball and what the rules were, which is kind of cool. So how did you get into that period of the game's history? Yeah, it started first what I mentioned Deacon White earlier, just early on when I was interested in stats, finding his stats and thinking, oh, why is this guy not in the Hall of Fame? of fame. And then my epiphany in baseball stats was when Rally Monkey or Sean Smith released the first war spreadsheet that he had years and years ago. It had to be, I don't know, 12 years ago now

or something. And just seeing that data go back to 1871, where you could actually take a look at these, basically, it was war, the same war that you find on baseball reference these days, but to see that type of framework that you could apply to players all the way from 1871 to the present. And we know the stats are not the same, but when you're comparing them to their peers, and you can actually extract their value above their peers, it suddenly becomes quite interesting. And when I did that, I just, along with it, started reading stories about the players themselves, like playing without the equipment

or what type of pioneering cases they had along with their statistical record. And it's the game that we love, so knowing how it was formed was of interest to me as well. And just over the last year or so, too, when we've added the Negro League statistics, just essentially doing the same thing there, like finding these incredible numbers from these players that I wasn't as familiar with, and then just digging into their stories and learning about them as well. And this really all led me to being more interested in the ERA committees because, honestly, it was a reprieve from the BBWA ballot because that one, I don't even know how I would vote because, you know, what is bad? What's more bad? There's steroids.

There's domestic violence. There's DUIs. I don't even want to deal with any of that right now. I'm BBWA. So, you know, I don't want to pick what's worse than these other things. So, you know, just moving to these era committees where we were focusing on the pioneers of the game

and the Negro League candidates was of huge interest this time around. And also just seeing players like Minoso and Dick Allen, who were a part of that first generation that came after the Negro League players, just was a huge interest to me. And it really, this is the most fun I've had in researching baseball since 2012 when I

launched the Hall of Stats. So this has been a great year. Well, perhaps then we can transition to this great year and get your general thoughts on the work that the committee did here. We'll remind our listeners that voters on these committees are only able to vote for up to four of the candidates on the ballot, which is perhaps an important factor in some of the results that we saw. So if you had to give them grades, and we'll do one for each committee, how would you grade the results that we saw on Sunday? All right, we can start with the Golden Days because it's the most

prominent one and the most recent one. And they inducted four candidates, which that is the first time four candidates have come from any era committee ballot. We've only had three happen on two occasions. And what's amazing is Dick Allen came a single vote shy, which would have given five inductees, which is almost mathematically impossible because you've got 64 votes because the 16 committee members can make four votes for 10 candidates. So to get 61 out of the 64 votes went to the four inductees and then Dick Allen, which they must have really been working together on this. It was rather amazing.

Dick Allen, which they must have really been working together on this. It was rather amazing. I don't know if I can quite give them an A because Dick Allen did miss by that single vote. And he was just an amazing candidate from the statistical side. And not only that, but I think you really have to consider what Dick Allen went through, how that impacted his reputation over the years, and how maybe through a modern lens, we look at that and say, maybe it wasn't like Dick Allen's problem there. And it was maybe the people that he was working for, or the people that were in the stands, it was their issue with not being able to accept who Dick Allen was. And I think Dick Allen was very brave in all the things that he did. And it was unfortunate to see him miss yet again by a single vote. But then on the good side, I think Minnie Minosa might have

been the single greatest candidate outside of the Hall of Fame at all. So seeing him get in finally was wonderful. I wonder if his Negro League statistics, which pushed him over the 2,000 hit barrier and things like that, might have played a small part in that. So that might be why it came this year when he had that stuff added to his statistical record. And then we got Gil Hodges, Tony Oliva, and Jim Cott. All three of those are not in the Hall of Stats,

but all three of them have been huge figures in the game and have all had really, really good showings on the Veterans Committee ballots and then the Golden Days era ballots. And they were all going to get in at some point. You don't get that type of support without eventually getting in. So with Gil Hodges, it was too late, but I'm glad that with Tony Oliva and Jim Cott, they were able to get them in so they can make that speech this summer. Right. Yeah. So Minnie Mignoso, I think, was just on the borderline at the Hall of Stats, but the Hall of Stats does not include Negro League's statistics yet. Right. So you would think that that would probably push him over the border.

Plus all of the status as a trailblazer and a leader and an idol for a lot of Latin American players and all of the intangibles that come with him as a figure in the game. I think he was a pretty obvious figure and a snub that sadly did not get to see himself elected. And I know that was something that he was sorry about. And that's sort of the same story with Buck O'Neill who we will get to a little later here but what is the story with Gil Hodges because few players have had the consistent support that he has had over the years I think if you were to come up with the three players who maybe had the the most boosters or sympathies lying with them who were not actually in the Hall of Fame already, it might have been Buck O'Neill and Minnie Mignoso and Gil Hodges. And Hodges, if you look at the numbers compared to, well, Dick Allen, let's say, they don't quite

stack up. But Hodges has had the fame part and he's had the Boys of Summer mythologizing and he's had the managerial case added to his playing days case, I suppose. So what is it exactly that has kept him in the Cooperstown spotlight going on 50 years here, more than 50 years, almost 60 years since he retired and almost 50 years since he passed away. I mean, I have nothing against Gil Hodges, but isn't it bizarre? Like the, I was on so many podcasts talking about this stuff recently. And like, I've got, you know, 25 year old guys telling me about how passionate they are about Gil Hodges. How did this happen? Like you didn't watch him play.

How did this happen? Like, you didn't watch him play. I understand that he was a big part of a major team in this Golden Days era. Honestly, it might have a lot to do with the fact that the Golden Days era is pretty well picked over. And Gil Hodges is simply one of the best, most famous players left. Like, you don't have any Lou Whitaker's with like 75 war or whatever sitting out there in the golden days era ballot. It's, it's, it's pretty much like, uh, Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, like Jimmy Wynn is one of the best statistical candidates and he wasn't even on the ballot because he's certainly not famous. So I, I find it bizarre too, that like so much,

like even some of the MLB.com coverage, it was like, well, just as a manager alone, well, he was very briefly a manager. And he just happened to win a title for a team that was one of the most famous teams ever. So I think it was playing for that famous team and managing for that famous team. And I guess in the hall of fame sense of the word, like Gil Hodges is probably just about as famous as anyone. But in terms of statistical record, I mean, it just doesn't add up.

I've learned to let go of that and not worry about it as much. I don't want to sit here and say bad things about Gil Hodges. I don't think he was the player that a lot of people think he is. I don't think he was the player that Tony Oliva was even. I think Tony Oliva had just an absolutely sensational eight-year peak. His career numbers are short, but that eight-year peak is 42.3 of his 43 war. And he was an all-star in all eight years, three batting titles, just a ton of batting runs, a ton of fielding runs in that eight-year peak, but he just did nothing else. But I feel more comfortable that he was a Hall of Famer for those eight years, maybe

like a Dale Murphy type candidate. My theory is that enough people have read Jay Jaffe and his habit of noting the previous exception, Hodges is no longer the exemplar for this, although there are several members of the existing BBWA ballot who might end up filling his shoes, that everyone just assumed that there was a grave injustice that had been committed, that he was the only guy who had received as much support from the writers and was still outside the hall, that something had to be done, that it had to be rectified. I don't know if anyone actually looked as closely at his playing career as you may be

thinking. If this happens in 20 years for Steve Garvey, I'm going to be very worried. Yeah, it's funny. My mom grew up in Brooklyn and, you know, wasn't really aware of the Dodgers, I don't think, before they moved. She's not quite old enough to have really appreciated that World Series team and Hodges' prime in Brooklyn. But she will still recall how much he meant in the neighborhood and how he would just play stickball with the kids and everyone loved Gil Hodges. And so I haven't talked to her yet, but I'm sure she was pleased to hear the news.

So it seems like that Brooklyn Dodgers nostalgia just extends to people who are not like Bernie Sanders. They just inherited it somehow, even though they're not nearly old enough to have. So I don't know if it's Roger Kahn's doing or what, but I like it too. I like the whole Ebbets Field aesthetic and those teams were a ton of fun and incredible players on them. But maybe it's a little bit of a halo effect that comes from the other hall of famers that are on that team and hodges was like the one guy who wasn't in the hall who was a mainstay on some of those squads if it means we invoked the character clause for good character like for right

yeah yeah it should go the other way once in a while too i I suppose. But one of my very small complaints is that I hate that they call it the golden days ballot. That to me is like, A, I always have to remember what we are calling the golden days and what the golden days supposedly were. And then really, were those actually the golden days? And then it's sort of like a cell phone because we're saying that now this is not the golden days and those were the golden days which is kind of like baseball constantly looking back and valorizing its past maybe to the detriment of its present i guess i would kind of prefer that it was just like decades or or a period of years or something which i mean technically there is a period of years roughly right that defines these

things so if they just said what it was, then I'd have an easier time remembering it. And also we wouldn't be like mythologizing that period as the golden days. I guess it was golden in the sense that everyone really loved baseball at that time. And it was kind of the national pastime. So maybe it's people looking back and lamenting the loss of that. You mentioned that this era, the golden days as it were, is pretty well picked over at this point in terms of the obvious candidates and that several of them were kind of plucked for this induction. And I wonder what you think that does for Dick Allen's chances of being inducted when he does appear on the ballot again in five years. Because, you know, we can't now right the wrong of him being honored after he's passed. We wouldn't have been able to do that even if he had been inducted this year. But there are plenty of people who remember his career and his family

would like to see him honored. So what do you think his odds are when this group reconvenes? Yeah, I was honestly thinking that since four candidates have been plucked from this era, I was almost wondering if they were going to roll it into early baseball and maybe stop looking at it less often. But somebody reminded me that, no, there's a 10-year cycle for these elections. And that cycle ends after the 2026 election, I think. So this one will meet one more in its current state. And I think that Dick Allen has to be a 16 out of 16 this time. Seeing what's happened to him, both of these last two ballots and removing all of his competition, I feel like he has to be 16 out of 16.

I would love to see some of the more sabermetric candidates like Bill Freehand or Jimmy Wynn or Willie Davis actually get on this ballot before they restructure everything. But yeah, Dick Allen has to be 100% this time, I would think. What do you make of Jim Cott's candidacy? I guess he's probably best known to contemporary fans as someone who came close to winning 300 games and won a gazillion gold gloves. And probably people look at some of those minuscule strikeout rates he had and their minds reel looking at it through the lens of today. Of course, it wasn't so out of the ordinary back then,

but he would get grounders and field them himself and not walk a lot of people. And it worked for him for a very long time. He pitched forever. And I guess you could call him a compiler if you wanted to be uncharitable. I guess you could call him a compiler if you wanted to be uncharitable, but he was a great pitcher, just someone who had been barely passed over before. Yeah, Jim Cott, I mean, this is baseball reference chatting with fan graphs here where it's like, is he a 45-war pitcher or is he a 70-war pitcher? Yeah, makes a big difference. There are pitchers like Jim Cott in the Hall of Fame, and I think that it's fine to put him in. I probably wouldn't have, but I feel better about it since he's alive.

I find him to be in that spectrum between Jamie Moyer and Tommy John. He's right in the middle. Tommy John, I would probably say, is much more of a Hall of Famer. He's on a much deeper era committee ballot, though. The modern baseball is very deep. And Jim Cott, I think, lucked out with the fact that his era is pretty well picked over. Probably the best pitcher in that era left is Billy Pierce, and he has absolutely no momentum. And he was a baseball lifer, and he's got the broadcasting career, too. And yeah, guys like this get in the Hall of Fame.

So I'm not too worried about it. I found myself not worrying nearly as much as I thought I would when like Lee Smith and Harold Baines got in. Like guys like that just kind of get in sometimes and I think it's okay. You mentioned Boyer and maybe Wynn. Was there anyone else that you would have liked to see appear on the ballot who did not? Definitely Bill Freehand.

Oh, yeah, right. Going into that, I had my top four candidates from a merit-based perspective as Minoso, Allen, Boyer, and Freehand. But Freehand didn't make the ballot. Plus, all of them are deceased, unfortunately. Now, three of them recently. So that's when I decided, you know, I would, you know, as if I had a vote, I decided I would throw my support to the living candidates, you know, not that it really meant anything. I do think that Willie Davis would have been a nice addition because he was never put on a BBWA ballot for some unknown reason, the only 60 war

player who's never appeared on a ballot. There may have been some confusion about whether or not he was still active because he was playing in japan and then they just kind of never put him on one and that's that's kind of unfortunate and he's also passed away actually right around the time when all of the sean smith's war stuff came out because i remember discovering him at that time and being like oh my gosh he was such an amazing player uh one more that um in all of my podcast interviews a guy that kept coming up over and over again, has a similar career to Manny Munozo in that it started in the Negro Leagues. And then he kind of got stashed in the minor leagues when he was already an all-star quality player in the Negro Leagues. And that was Jim Gilliam. And he was a player that I

hadn't given much thought before all of this, to be honest. But the more I dug into them, the more interesting he was. And he played along with Maury Wills, who has gotten a ton of support on the Golden Days ballot outside of this past election. But I think he might be the better player. And it was really interesting. I don't know if he's a Hall of Famer, but it was really interesting to see him come up

kind of on every single episode that I did on my podcast, like in some way or another. So, yeah, that's a few more of the guys that I thought would be interesting to see. What would you do long term? Would you have these committees keep meeting over and over? I mean, it's every 10 years, so it's not too often now. But at a certain point, you're going to reach the point where everyone who should be in is in, essentially. And if you keep sifting through those same candidates over and over again, and maybe they haven't exhausted all of the deserving ones yet. We've talked about some of them.

But someday, maybe Dick Allen is in and Boyer is in and Freon is in. I mean, we get to that point. Do you just retire it or do you expand the years that qualify or say you meet every 20 years now or something? Because you do end up with basically two different processes and two different standards. You have the writers' votes and then you have the veterans veterans committee or whatever we're calling the current committee votes. And it's really different classes of players. And certainly there are some who slipped through the BBWA ballot that should not have. And it's a good thing that there was some sort of stopgap to catch them and get them in via an alternative method. But then you have the Harold Baines type cases. I hate to pick on anyone in particular, but he is the name that comes to a lot of people's minds where you end up with a small group of people who perhaps have some kind of connection to a certain candidate and feel strongly about him and see something that others don't. And then you

end up with a very small group making a decision that a much larger and still pretty well-informed group never would have made and had the opportunity to make. So it's always a strange thing when someone, I don't want to say sneaks in that way, but they had their hearing and then suddenly a small sample says yes. Yeah. In terms of it's so different because like, let's take the Negro League players. Like they shut the book on the Negro League players, but then all this research happens. Right. And they finally put them back on the ballot this year. Interestingly enough, they didn't induct anybody based on their Negro League statistics this time around.

They didn't induct anybody based on their Negro League statistics this time around. It was Buck O'Neill and Bud Fowler who were kind of independent of this whole Negro Leagues or Major Leagues effort that went on. And now, unfortunately, by the current rules, the book is closed again for these players, which I think that there's probably about 20 Negro League players that we could induct because that has been a much slower process to get negro league players inducted yes so i was wondering like would they split off the negro leagues players into a different era committee would they instead maybe roll the golden days into early baseball and just basically meet every five years to discuss all of baseball before 1970. That could be a way to do it. That way, you're not closing the book, but you are making it difficult. You're not going to get a ton of inductees that way. If you're looking at 120 years of baseball every five years, there's not going to be this inundation of candidates. So, I mean, that's a way that they could do it. I do think that the Hall of Fame's focus is on more modern players, which I get it. That's who people want to see. But we need to keep a process in place for bringing in these older candidates. Because if you close the book,

you're basically telling researchers, okay, you can stop. There's nothing more to do here. Like you want to give people an incentive to do this research. I mean, Bud Fowler, who got in Right. is definitely a deserving induction. He was the very first African-American professional player. He lasted 10 years in the integrated minor leagues. And the reason why he didn't go to the major leagues and the reason why he exited the integrated minor leagues at the same thing, it was the gentleman's agreement to not employ any African-American players at either the higher level and then later in the minor leagues. And he just took that and he just went on and formed some of the major barnstorming teams in the early black baseball days and just as a huge pioneer. And it was a great thing that he got in. Obviously, Buck O'Neill, we've waited years and years to get Buck O'Neill in. So keeping this process open, I think shows that we're getting Hall of Famers like Mignoso and Buck O'Neill and

Bud Fowler, when we're also getting, you know, Jim Cott and Tony Oliva and Gil Hodges, which they're famous and probably deserve induction into a Hall of Fame. Maybe they're not the best statistical candidates, but you can see why people love them and want to see their plaques when they come to Cooperstown. I think that's okay. That raises sort of a related question for me, and I think maybe a good way for us to transition to talking about the early baseball committee vote, which is that as I was editing the work that Jay Jaffe and Shakia Taylor did in profiling the guys who were on that ballot, the thing that

I was mostly struck by, especially with the inclusion of Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues black baseball candidates who are getting this very necessary and sort of overdue historical reappraisal based on the new research we have, is that there were more guys on the ballot worthy of induction than voters really had room for. And so I wonder if part of the solution here is to, and this is something that we saw the writers try to enact on the writer ballot side, but the hall said no, a broader ballot. Say if you think that more than four guys on this ballot are Hall of Famers, you can vote for them. It seems like part of our issue here is trying to find the right

balance between the institution being sort of appropriately selective, but also not delaying induction on worthy candidates, because I think philosophically, like you're either a Hall of Famer or you aren't one, right? And so the idea that we have to limit it to four guys on the ballot when you could make an argument, you know, just on this one for Donaldson and Redding and Harris and scales, in addition to the guys who got in, like you, there's just just there are more worthy candidates on some of these than there are space on your piece of paper right they did the the large induction of negro leagues and black baseball players in 2006 when they inducted 17 at once and then they closed the book and then just this year they finally considered them again I want to avoid a situation where we get such a backlog that we have to do another mass election again. Because I feel like in 2006, it was just like the headlines were 17 Negro League players are getting in. Where the headline should have been one year, Mule Settles is getting in. The next year, it should have been, you know, we should have had a player or two every year. So we can spend a year talking about mule settles. Like right now,

like all seven candidates on that ballot that came from the Negro Leagues could have gone in. And on one hand, I would love to have seen that happen, but it's not possible. But I would also love to see, you know, the Negro Leagues on another ballot in two or three years. So, you know, maybe we can get Tubby Scales and maybe even somebody that wasn't on the ballot in two or three years. So maybe we can get tubby scales and maybe even somebody that wasn't on the ballot, like a John Beckwith or a Dick Lundy, and spend time digging into their cases and talking about them rather than having this mass induction where I feel like we don't get to celebrate the individual candidates. Yeah, we're planning to talk soon to some representatives from the effort to move up the next voting for Negro Leagues and early

days candidates, particularly Negro Leagues candidates, the 42 for 21 group that is advocating on behalf of those candidates and some of the players who weren't even appearing on this ballot. So we will, in an upcoming episode, get into some of those names, but you talked a little bit about Bud Fowler, and I think everyone is pretty familiar with Buck O'Neill. And of course, Buck O'Neill had a plaque, not in the same place as the plaque that he will have now, but after he did not get in, narrowly missed induction in that 2006 process that you mentioned when he was still alive and, of course, hoping to get in. And he handled that the way that he seemingly handled everything. But after that, the Hall kind of came up with an award, just the Buck O'Neill Award.

It's basically a lifetime achievement award. And they gave that award to Buck O'Neill posthumously. And they've given it subsequently to some other candidates. And I guess he is in as just everything. He's in as a Hall of Fame person. He's in not specifically as a player. You can't say he was a Hall of Fame caliber player or probably even manager. I guess you could say he was to some degree a pioneer and he was, of course, just one of the best baseball ambassadors there's ever been. So maybe this is a case of it's and say, well, he was good at this and good at that. And if we put it all together, it adds up to a Hall of Famer. But he's just such a special case.

And I guess if you want to invoke the character clause ever to get someone in, it would be Buck O'Neill. But he just meant so much to so many people and did so much for baseball that it felt like a wrong. And I don't know what his plaque will say. I don't know how it will describe him or whether it will specify what he is going in as, but I don't know that anyone could not be pleased that he will be going in as something. Right. According to the Hall of Fame's website, he's going in as a pioneer slash executive. Okay. I mean, he wasn't an executive i don't know unless he was technically an executive for the the new york league's baseball museum i don't know if

that would be something that they would consider he was certainly a pioneer i think as a coach and a scout as well as a player and manager so technically in the rules they are on their committees allowed to consider all facets of a candidate's contributions okay so but they are forced to pick one main one to to pick to categorize the mess and for him it should be a builder or contributor or something like that that they don't have that so so similar to candy cummings who uh is a pioneer of the curveball, he's listed as a pioneer slash executive, that type of thing. But Fowler, I was surprised, is listed as a player, where I definitely would have seen him as being a pioneer, not only for he was a pioneer as a player, but also with the teams that he started and the barnstorming that he did. So I was a little surprised to see him listed as a second baseman on the Hall of Fame's website, but I don't think it really matters too much.

Who of the guys on the early baseball ballot do you think they maybe missed the mark on? Who was a snub here? That sounds more purposeful than I imagine was meant by any of these voters, but who do you think was a worthy candidate who wasn't inducted? I mean, I strongly feel like you would be better off with all seven in the Hall of Fame than without any of them. The most difficult one for me to assess was probably the one that is the most popular that didn't get in, and that's John Donaldson. I think the issue is when he did briefly play in the Negro Major Leagues, he didn't do all that hot. He was actually a bit better of a hitter.

But I think a lot of that is because his arm was already probably mush at that point, just from his decade plus of barnstorming, winning his documented 400 wins and 5,000 strikeouts. You know, a lot of those came against against you know town teams or or farm teams or or uh semi-pro teams but you know that that's what he had available to him at the time and he made a career out of it he was absolutely famous so i think that while he may not have been on the quality of some of the other candidates we could be looking at like if he had been a major negro league player from the very

start. But I think what he did is still very much Hall-worthy. I think Vic Harris, he missed by two votes. I think he's just kind of an obvious one, the more you look at it, because as a manager, he now is the top Major League manager outside the Hall of Fame in winning percentage and pennants and playoff appearances and all that. Plus, he was a very good player. So I think that if you look at his stats through Eric Shalek's MLEs, they have him as about a 40-war player or so, which is a solid player if you had a very, very good Hall of Fame managerial career on top of that. Tubby Scales is another one. He had like a 20-year Negro Major League career at second base with 147 OPS plus.

Like these are really good players that we have outside the hall still. And then Home Run Johnson played, started in the 1890s, actually with Bud Fowler on the Page F fence giants, and just had a very long career. I see him as a very similar player to Alan Trammell, where he's a great hitter for a short stop, good defender, long career, also played some second base later in his career. And Cannonball Dick Redding, I think was one of the very best pitchers outside of Smokey Joe Williams before the Negro National League was founded. So I think they were all tremendous candidates. I think there's still many, many more that haven't been considered yet on this ballot. My favorite four I keep mentioning are Dick Lundy, John Beckwith.

Those two I was shocked to not see on the ballot, to be completely honest, because they actually have a lot of momentum. Oscar Heavy Johnson, though, is another one that I really like. And one was an interesting short career player who started his career playing in the military in Hawaii, but then came over and was an absolutely amazing shortstop for the Monarchs for a few years before, unfortunately, his career was cut short when he was shot. And that's Dobie Moore. Just a lot of great players, a lot of great stories. So yeah, there will be many, many more interesting ballots to come out of the Negro League candidates as well. And I think we've got a couple dozen Hall of Famers here still. Yeah. And I know Rap Dixon gets mentioned a lot. He has a bunch of boosters. I'm sure that we will get into all of them and maybe others next

week with 42 for 21. And just looking at even the non-Negro Leagues players on the early baseball era ballot, there's still some kind of confounding results there, like Allie Reynolds getting six votes, right? And Bill Dolan getting fewer than three, which is kind of confounding, perplexing, I guess. Reynolds has been on the ballot a billion times, right? And he's still getting some level of support, but seemingly he has had his hearing and it's hard to see how he still has significantly more support than Dallin does, if you look at the stats, at least. Right. I think that that ballot had nine Hall of Famers. No offense to Allie Reynolds, but I think there are nine Hall of Famers on there.

What would you do about this process, not just opening it up to more candidates and also having more frequent voting, but just mathematically speaking, it's so hard to get anyone elected. And you alluded to this earlier, which I really didn't appreciate until Joe Posnanski pointed it out several times. But you really have to have all the stars align or some kind of collusion among the voters if you actually want to get people elected. And I don't know whether that's intentional because they think it's a feature, not a bug, that I don't know whether that's intentional because they think it's a feature not a bug that they don't want too many players to get on from these ballots because they figure if they're on there maybe they're borderline candidates to begin with or

something or whether they just didn't really realize the implication of you only have this many votes to go around and so it's really, really hard to get a lot of players in. So it seems like even if you were to say it's every 10 years and you have the same number of players on the ballot, like there must be some sort of process improvement that you could come up with. Like, could it not just be a yes, no vote on everyone? I mean, could it not just work the way the BBWA ballot does or more like that, where if 75% of people say yes, then it's a Hall of Famer? Yeah, I don't think I have a perfect solution to propose here. I do think it was very interesting that this year when we might not get any bbwa candidates at all suddenly they they found a way to work together and get four and almost five from the golden days i think they might have

been told you know don't be afraid to you know get a little get a little uh excited about voting right or maybe you know take a little time maybe do a second vote you know maybe that's what happened and they they decided although it would be very upsetting if they did a second vote and still came up one vote shy for Dick Allen. That would have been very sad. But they definitely were working together. I don't know if the early baseball team was working together quite as much because the vote was far more split. But it just may have been much stronger opinions about candidates in there.

But I don't know. I'm just glad that we got six. I don't know if we need to have six all the time i think that uh you know a slow and steady process would work but it seems like what happens is you go several years without uh many inductees and then you get a whole bunch to make up for it and then it slows down i think in an ideal world you get just kind of get a steady flow of two or three each time around i know there was one non-Negro Leagues related figure who a lot of people were sort of upset not to see on this ballot, and that's Doc Adams, who really seemed to have a lot of

momentum behind him and then dropped off the ballot entirely. And I think we did an episode quite a while ago with John Thorne about Doc Adams, but it seems like he has a heck of a case as a pioneer. So where did he get to here? This one was kind of stunning. Because I've worked with his great-granddaughter on her case to get Doc's Hall of Fame case essentially heard. And she started banging the drum for it. John Thorne was a part of that too, through his work. And he was one of our, I think it was 2014, he was the Sabre Overlook legend for the 19th century. And in 2016, he made it to the ballot.

That was absolutely wonderful. And he was the top vote getter, but he came two votes shy. That was absolutely wonderful. And he was the top vote getter, but he came two votes shy. And then after that, the laws of baseball that he crafted was essentially the first winter meetings. John Thorne calls this baseball's Magna Carta. It was him crafting the rules of the game, much how they stand today. And that document was released after the release to auction and then auctioned off after that election. So all of us who had been fans of Doc Adams' case thought, oh, well, he came that close.

And then this came. So he's obviously getting in next time. Since then, Marjorie, his great granddaughter, has passed away. And I don't know if that was just kind of the like maybe without her banging the drum as much. They were just like, no, we're going to leave him off this time. Or maybe with the addition of the Negro League players, they thought maybe he was too strong of a candidate that would pull too many candidates away from the Negro League candidates. And they wanted to see votes go in that direction. It's really, it's a head scratcher. And it is, I think he was just a victim of the math problem,

where if there's so many great candidates on these ballots, they're going to end up splitting the votes, unless you get the golden days, and then it's going to be another 10 years if they keep the rules the way they are now which i don't think they'll keep the rules that way for the negro league candidates i don't know if that means they'll they'll change the early baseball to to meet more often or not but take them 10 years i mean it's not even like it's the negro league players it's duck adams but it's also like Bill Dolan. And we're going to throw his name out there again, Jack Laskock, Charlie Bennett, like these, these players, like they were Hall worthy players. And I thought, am I going to be in my fifties the next time they get a chance? Like, I'm worried about that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there is a utility to having these conversations. And I know that there are a lot of people who are just sick of the conversations about the Hall of Fame and I understand I'm sick of some of them myself but I think when people dismiss the plaque part of the Hall of Fame not the museum part and just say well what's the point of doing this because a you can just decide yourself if so and so is a Hall of Famer and you can present the nuanced case and

it doesn't have to be a binary yes or no you can say here are the good things that this person did here are the bad things that this person did and that's all well and good and i know that some people think that maybe there are players we overlook because they are not hall of famers and if we weren't so fixated on who's the hall of Famer all the time, then we would have more oxygen to talk about some other overlooked players who are not part of that little club. But I have to think that the fact that the Hall of Fame exists provides some impetus for researchers to dig into these cases and bring them back to light. And would we be doing this episode and talking about Bill Dolan today if he were not a candidate for the Hall of Fame? Probably not.

I'm not saying he'd never come up, but it seems like having this process, imperfect as it is, it does keep bringing up these names and these accomplishments and it supplies a reason for us to talk about them. So if you were to do away with that, and I do have mixed feelings about the whole process, but it does seem to me that there is some value in just giving us a reason, really, to bring these players up and not just let them fade away into history. Right. And Amal, for a bigger—erald it is a big hall like that i don't understand the people that debate like whether they're a small hall person or a big hall person

because it's a big hall and who goes into a museum and says this museum sucks there's too much to learn from here like i would rather have more plaques of these important figures in history that you can learn about the game and preserve the game like i don't understand like getting upset about celebrating more players especially when i don't think any of the people that got in this they were definitely worthy in in some way or another it's not like they were terrible selections that are decreasing the value of the hall of fame the funny thing is like the two camps like gil hodges is probably the lightning rod where like you literally have half the people saying like the hall of fame finally is more

worthy because it has it has gil hodges in it like he was a huge glaring omission whereas the stat people are like why the heck is gil hodges here like so you're never going to make everybody happy so i don't know maybe we need to just have g Hodges Plack in there so we can read it and learn like why was this guy so famous why was everybody so interested in him like that we have 25 year old people making his case and in 2021 and keep learning I love it all right well are there any names we haven't mentioned that you want to plug or any other aspects of the process that we haven't talked about that you think are worth shedding a little light on? Well, the error committee process has been my favorite now

because it has so many fewer politics and things like that. But, you know, next year, today's game ballot is going to have any of the crew of Bonds, Clemens, Schilling, and Sosa who don't make it this year. So I had this year to enjoy it, and boy, was it a fun ride. Yeah, but Ben won't have to worry about it then. Yeah, it won't be my problem anymore. But the bad pennies will keep turning up.

They always do. Whatever we do, I guess. Yeah. I'll just make a plea to get all four of them in so that we never have to talk about them again. Like, it's just like just clogging up the whole system. No, I don't worry about it. It's interesting because these conversations about character claws are taking place at the same time as the cases of players from early baseball are being considered.

And I'm sure that many of them had character claws concerns that we may or may not know about. You'd be less likely to know about them because they wouldn't have been reported on at the time and they wouldn't have survived to today. And geez, I mean, if you were to use the standards of today, you could disqualify just about everyone probably in white baseball at that time. Oh, he played in a segregated league. We can't let him in. So there has to be some sort of era adjustment, which is a pesky problem. And there were players who spoke out about those things even then, of course. But it has to be strange where we just know more about players now, and we don't always know everything. And sometimes someone will get in like Kirby Puckett and then something else will come to life and oh we did not know that about Kirby Puckett or at least most people didn't so you never really know whether someone is a good guy or not but when you're thinking about players from the 19th century let's say I mean maybe some of them are obviously not good guys and some of them you'll just never know, really, right?

And so it's, I guess, in a way, almost a relief not to have to think about it in some of those cases, even if who knows what you're sweeping under the rug if you don't. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, during this process this year, I came across an old newspaper article about Bill Dolan's domestic violence issues. So there are no heroes yeah no that was uh certainly not less common at that yeah i think so all right well on that somewhat depressing note you can follow adam on twitter at baseball twit and of course you can enjoy his work as the head of user experience at Sport Reference at all of the sports reference sites, including Baseball Reference.

And you can find the Hall of Stats on Twitter, at HallofStats and at HallofStats.com. We will, of course, link to all of those pages on our show page. And if you are not having enough of Adam's podcasting today there's plenty more where this came from because he has been hosting his own series of podcasts about the hall of fame called building the ballot which you can find wherever podcasts are found as everyone knows where to find podcasts so we will link to that too but adam this was long overdue so thank you very much for helping us stop snubbing you at least in our conversations about the hall of fame mag ben thank you so much this was a blast

thanks all right that will do it for today thanks as always for listening you still have time to sign up for effectively wild secret santa if you are interested in participating in our listener gift exchange of baseball-themed inexpensive presents. I'll link to where you sign up on the show page. Meg and I will probably resume our recaps and discussions of Stove League next time toward the end of the week. So if you haven't caught up yet, episodes 9 through 12 is what we will be covering. Remember to watch on Viki if you can for the best subtitles. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going,

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Talk to you soon. Lately I've been close, but I'm up to trouble. Those golden days keep you hanging on.