Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 501: News from the Hall of Fame Front

Episode Date: July 28, 2014

Ben and Sam talk to Sports Illustrated’s Jay Jaffe about Hall of Fame induction weekend and the latest changes to the election process.

I've got a brand new set of rules, because I am your brand new fool. I've got a brand new set of rules, I've got to learn. Good morning, and welcome to episode 501 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com. How are you, Ben? Very well, thank you. We have a guest today.

If you were paying attention this weekend, you noticed that people were talking about the Hall of Fame, both for the inductions of some of our very favorite players of the last two decades, and also for some changes in the rules that will change how people are elected in the future. So we have, of course, the authority on Hall of Fame voting, Mr. Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated.com, and of course a legend of baseball prospectus as well for many years before that. Jay, how are you? Hey, I'm good. So can you just quickly go over the change in the voting rules and how you think that will affect, let's say, how will it affect Barry Bonds?

How will it affect somebody like Pedro Martinez if it does and how will it affect somebody like, let's say, I don't know, Larry Walker, a kind of a fringe guy who you can make the case for? Okay. Well, what the Hall of Fame decided to do was to unilaterally reduce the number of years of eligibility that a player could be on the ballot from 15 to 10. uh... the number of years of eligibility that player could be on the ballot from fifteen to ten uh... it would be one thing if they were to do this to all new candidates uh... but uh... instead they have decided to do this midstream

uh... and they're they're only grandfathering the three the three candidates of the fourteen holdovers who are uh... beyond their tenth year that's uh... uh... don mattingly who's headed towards his fif Don Mattingly, who's headed towards his 15th, Alan Trammell, who's headed towards his 14th, and Lee Smith, who's headed towards his 13th. None of those three guys are about to get in. Smith got as high as just a little bit over 50% several years ago, but has since fallen back considerably.

Trammell is a guy who my JAWS system thinks would be an outstanding addition to the hall, but he's never even gotten half the support that he needs. This is a surprising change. It would be one thing, I think, to tinker with the process on a few different fronts if you were to reduce the years of eligibility, but to allow voters to name more than 10 players on their ballots, I think that would be one thing. This essentially puts the squeeze on a lot of guys who are of the slow-growing support type, the type of candidates that we've seen several times in recent years, with Burt Bleileven getting in on the 14th ballot, Jim Rice on the 15th, and Bruce Souter in his 13th year. That's all in the last decade and the time since I've been

doing JAWS. Bleileven was a a great choice and I was definitely involved in supporting him. I was not as supportive of Suter and I was definitely not a proponent of Jim Rice, but when you look over the number of players who've been elected in their, you know, between their 10th and 15th years, there are some good ones. Ralph Kiner and Lou Boudreau come to mind, Duke Snyder comes to mind as well, some guys who are above the Jaws line. This is really, I think, of the guys who are hurt the most, the one who this is really kind of devastating to in terms of his chances of getting in via the writer's ballot is Tim Raines. He, in his seventh year of eligibility, he was at 46% this past year. He was as high

as 52% the year before. He's now got three turns remaining in a very crowded field instead of having eight turns. And I think most of us saw him as being on a slow and steady progress towards Scooperstown. Now there's some urgency to it. Guys whose careers I think are a little earlier in the process, Larry Walker, you asked me about, he's really screwed. I mean this is a guy who has peaked at 22.9 percent but fell back to 10.2 percent last year. He's never going to get in on this. the floor for carrying over on the ballot below from 5% to 10% because you'll clear space on the ballot more quickly if you do that. I think he's, you know, there's going to be a lot of guys in there who just don't build

up the support and are quickly cast aside. But I think the real aim of this is to get the PED guys off the ballot really quickly or more quickly so that we don't have these long, lingering discussions of dragging the Barry Vaughan steroid saga, the Roger Clemens steroid saga, the Mark McGuire steroid saga into the spotlight again. Again, McGuire is the most senior of the non-grandfathered guys. He's headed into, I believe, his ninth year of eligibility. This pretty much ends any hope that he's going to have a chance to build his support. Who else was there that you asked me about there? I've already lost track. Pedro or, you know, guys who – Oh, Pedro.

Okay, so yeah, for a first ballot guy like Pedro, I mean this has a potential to suppress his percentage a little bit to you know, there's quite reasonably, there might be some people who, who see Pedro is likely to get in anyway and, you know, feel like I don't necessarily need to vote for him, but I do need to vote for Tim Raines, uh, or Jeff Bagwell or, you know, somebody, or Edgar Martinez, another person who I think is, is, is hurt very greatly by this thing. And because he was on the kind of the slow and steady progress train um you know i think it lessens the likelihood that say john smoltz is going to go in on the first ballot because i see him as a as a you know a bit more of a borderline guy than than uh greg maddox and and tom glavin who were inducted today um but mostly what i think this is about is the hall kind of trying to put its own stamp on

this, because if you get guys, and to take it away from the writers, because if you get guys off the writer's ballot in 10 years instead of 15, you make them eligible for the Veterans Committee ballot, which is now the expansion era committee ballot more quickly. They can stack the deck any way they want with that. They choose who's on that committee. They've learned it with Hall of Famers and old executives and old managers and crotchety old mofos who really, when the players one of the veterans may expand to include just the old hall of famers uh... the living hall of famers and speaking for the war recipients

they had a kind of a country club mentality where nobody was good enough for them literally nobody got in in the years that they have the vote arms and that's the danger with these with the smaller committees is that uh... nobody's ever good enough for them so uh... i worry this is a backdoor play to keep guys like Bonds and Clemens out of the Hall of Fame, even though I do think that others there do. So do you think that the writers' ballot was the best chance for induction for those guys that we're talking about? Or is it possible that getting them off this system, which has not worked for them so far, might actually be their best shot?

That's a good question. I mean, I think the thing you have to remember with the writer's ballot is that there is there is within the BBWA an effort to to clean up the voting rules, you know, to kind of nudge the guys who are now editing golf magazines or whatever, who are not covering baseball anymore to give up their votes. And I think that while it's not a full court press, there has been talk about it getting that kind of thing intensifying. And there's a lot of turnover with the BBWA. I'm still six and a half years away from the vote myself. But there's a whole generation of people like me who are waiting their turns. Christina Carl, another BP alum who's ahead of me in line. Keith Law, another BP alum who's ahead of me in line. than the people we would be effectively replacing within the BBWA who would be more receptive to, let's just say, the sabermetrically approved candidates and probably have a bit more perspective on the PED-related guys

because we weren't the ones who covered them directly. We weren't the ones who feel like we got burned because they were lying to us about what they were doing. We weren't the ones who had the wool pulled over our eyes, so to speak. So there may have been a way that given enough time, the Bonds' and Clemens' and whoever else, you know, built up enough support within the writers if they just, if the Hall had just left well enough alone. given enough time because there's no limit to how many times you can be reviewed by the expansion era committee uh... uh... you know thirty years from now there will be the right to read the

right next to keep personalities involved that will you know give bonds and clements and whoever else there do uh... i strongly suspect that's not the case because the whole always be able to stack the deck uh... against deck against those it doesn't want in. Look at the Marvin Miller stuff, the way they keep putting the second generation opponents of Miller, guys whose fathers were reserve clause era executives and things like that.

You know, the Hall, they can't guarantee an outcome, but they can certainly go a long way towards predetermining it. I've seen the idea circulated in many places that eventually the Hall will have to do something or would be best served by doing something to get those guys in because they are, for better or worse, the face of their era. They are some of the best players, certainly statistically, in baseball history. And there's this sense that maybe the museum about baseball history loses some legitimacy, loses some appeal if those guys are not in it, and that without them, people might stop showing up at some point. Is that true?

I mean, I think the first part is true. But are people actually going to cancel their vacation to Cooperstown because they can't see Bonds or Clemens? I can't tell whether that would actually dissuade someone from going or whether it might be an incentive to go if they are there. There was a very legitimate fear that the Hall of Fame has. There was a New York Times story this weekend that reported that they had experienced declining attendance in every year since 2005.

Obviously, the economic situation of this country had something to do with that. Maybe the steroid era had something to do with that. But the reality is the Hall of Fame, I think a lot of it is about one generation passing on the game's history to the next. The idea that you take your kids there, you show them the heroes of your youth, the guys you grew up

watching, and impart your own memories as you see them, while giving the kids a chance to learn about Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio and whoever else. And the theory goes that, you know, if, if, if Barry, if the Bonds is and Clemens is and the guys we watched, our generation watched, you know, don't get in sooner or later, the impetus, there'll be less impetus for us to go because we're not the ones who have firsthand

memories of Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio and whoever to impart to that next generation. So I think there is that fear. I don't think the hall really knows what to do. And I don't think they fully thought this through. I don't think the, let's face it, the law of unintended consequences has bitten them on the ass several times before, with the expanded Veterans Committee being one of the most obvious examples but hardly the only one. So I don't know if anybody really truly knows how it's going to play out, but I suspect that this is going to make it harder for those guys just by creating an artificial scarcity of votes on the ballot, making it harder for the mid-ballot guys, the guys who would not be automatic first ballot guys like Mike Messina and Curt Schilling, but who aren't connected to PEDs, making it tougher for them to get into the game, to get into the Hall of Fame.

So how many times has the Hall of Fame changed the voting rules in its history? Is this something that every decade or so they try to engineer something to make it perfect? No, it's been fairly scarce, actually. I mean, the 75% rule has been in place since the first class in 1936. The 10 men on a ballot has been in place since the 1936 inception. The 5% rule did not develop until the late 70s and was revised a couple of times. The five-year waiting rule was not even put into place until the 50s, I believe. For a while there was annual voting, then there was biannual voting and triennial voting and back to annual voting.

It's gone through a few different permutations there. In 1985, the Modern 5% Rule was put in place. In 1966, the writers returned to voting every year. In 1991, the Pete Rose ruling that only those in good standing in terms of not being suspended for life by baseball were eligible for the Hall of Fame. The Pete Rose rule was put in place. That was the last change to the voting rules. Now, since then, they've rejiggered the Veterans Committee 74 times, but that's sort of separate. With regards to the writers and the recently retired candidates, as they call them, those rules have been pretty solid for the last 20 years.

retired candidates, as they call them, those rules have been pretty solid for the last 20 years. Is it at least in the abstract, I guess the reduction from 15 to 10 is not a bad thing, right? I mean, right now, it might be because of the crunch of candidates and because of the guys who have not been allowed in for one reason or another that probably should have been and maybe won't be now. But in the future, whenever that backlog clears, maybe it's not a bad thing that we don't have to rehash the same guys 15 times. Maybe people will reevaluate more quickly when they know that they don't have as many years to do that. I think that the, yes, I think in the abstract, reducing the waiting period from 15 or reducing the eligibility period from 15 years to 10 years is not a bad thing. but they just couldn't do it.

You can't just do it without making other changes to accompany that and still have it be an equitable process. You can't change it midstream for so many guys. If you're going to grandfather, I think you've got to grandfather, everybody who's, who's got, uh, uh, more than five years on the ballot. Maybe it's a sliding scale. Maybe you have to achieve X X percent, you know, 25% by your fifth year and 50% by your 10th year. But I don't think you should be shut out, um, uh, you know, of it. Uh,

if you achieve certain, uh, levels of support, uh, at certain points in the process, if we're not going to do a full grandfathering of everybody who's on the ballot. But yeah, in the future, I don't think 10 years is a bad time. The problem is we've got such a backlog of qualified candidates. I had 14 guys that I would have voted for if I had a real ballot on this last round, guys who were fully qualified via Jaws, and that didn't even include Craig Biggio, who's got 3,000 hits and who has a very good case,

but you have to sort of consider the time that he played at catcher as well to really get him above the Jaws line. And when you look back over, uh, the last several decades, uh, the writers have not been keeping up with levels of representation that were that, that, uh, previous, uh, generations of writers were, we've gotten very stingy, uh, with who gets into Hall of Fame. And part of that is the absence of the steroid guys, but part of that is just the glacial process and this tendency to just defer, defer, defer, keep kicking the can down the road on some of these guys. And the other change to the process was that Hall of Fame voters will now be required to complete a registration form and sign a code of conduct that will say that they shouldn't sell their vote to deadspin i assume uh yeah that's i mean this is pretty small stuff i mean you know uh dan levitard

was was uh stripped of his vote uh by the bbwa and suspended uh for a year um stripped stripped of his vote lifetime and suspended uh from otherWA privileges for a year for his actions. I think what the hall wanted to do, though, was to create a mechanism where it could punish a voter for an infraction, whether or not the BBWA sanctioned him or her. And that's what they've done. I don't see that as being a particularly drastic move. It just codifies, I think, a process of consequences for abusing the privilege of voting. I think the registration thing, I don't think that has much effect. I don't have a problem. I certainly don't have a problem with the publication of every name of a voter

who cast a ballot. I'm in favor of more transparency. I think their entire ballots should be public. There are a lot of people within the BBWA who are with me on that, and most of them aren't the retired ones. It's the retired guys who are voting for only two or three candidates, and I have a get-off-my-lawn attitude towards the more recent players, particularly the players from the so-called steroid era that are, I think, some of the problem voters, guys who are sending back blank ballots and such. At the very beginning, when you were answering the first question, you sort of tucked into your answer the word unilaterally. The Hall of Fame unilaterally made this move. Is that part of the problem, that the Hall of Fame has as much power as they do, do you think?

Or is there anybody that you'd rather have the power? Well, it's interesting you bring that up. I am part of the BBWA committee that has been in the process of recommending some changes. We've been debating. We spent a lot of time in the spring debating exactly what those recommendations would be. And I think that those are going to go,

eventually make their way to the rank and file membership, I think probably just first via a survey to take the full temperature because our committee was designed to not reach a quick consensus, but to instead debate the issues, including the 10-man rule, the 75% rule, a few other things. Anything that that committee comes out with, all we can do is recommend it to the hall. We can't make the change unilaterally ourself, but we could recommend it to the hall, which would then consider it and act accordingly. I think I would like to have seen the writers consulted on this one.

I would like to have been able to give my input on this before it happened. But our efforts have not ended with this change. I think this probably actually could strengthen the movement to increase the ballot size, you know, as a counter to what the hall has done. You know, I can't do, I can't go into too much more detail there, but I think that that is probably the, you know, one of the more lively things. And I think it would not have happened in time for this year's vote anyway, but down the road certainly is a possibility. So this was induction weekend. This was the feel-good weekend of the year, the year when everyone's in Cooperstown,

everyone's watching Cooperstown, and yet we've been talking about these rule changes for the first 20 minutes or so of this interview, which maybe is our bad interview skills. I don't know. No, I think it was, to interject here, I, this was a PR mistake by the hall to put this out front of the ceremonies instead of do it when everybody's leaving town. Um, you know, because this really over, I mean, you know, it overshadowed this, this, this announcement came on Saturday morning and I think it overshadowed, uh, the spink and frick, uh, and Frick and O'Neill award stuff and I think has spilled into the coverage of the six Hall of Famers. That's not your fault. That's not my fault. That's the Hall's fault.

I consider my job to be reporting on what the Hall's doing this weekend, not simply to blow smoke up the butts of the six inductees. And was there anything notable from the ceremony itself? I mean, I watched Roger Angel's induction speech, which was great, of course. And it seems like almost an afterthought. I mean, we spend months arguing about who's going to get in, and then the guys get in and they give their speech and, and people, people care more, it seems about who's, who's going to get in than when they actually do get in. But was there, was there anything that, that you saw from this weekend, uh, that was worth sharing?

Well, you know, I've, as, as, as we speak, sorry, as we speak, I'm actually in the process of, of, of watching today's induction ceremonies. I had a few other things going on and so got to it late. Part of that was strategically because I could fast forward through the ones I didn't want to listen to and fast forward through the commercials. I thought Angel's speech was good. They chopped it up into three separate blocks, which it wasn't that long a speech, but they mutilated it for TV.

But I thought it was a very poignant speech. I thought Greg Maddox's speech was pretty funny. I thought Tom Glavine's speech was dry as a bone. I skipped Bobby Cox's speech. That's where I am in the broadcast right now. I still haven't heard Frank Thomas or Joe Torre yet. I think I'm probably most looking forward to Torre's because I watched so much of his managerial career with the Yankees and the Dodgers. And, you know, he's somebody who means a lot to me, even though I certainly have my differences with how he handled certain issues.

You did an exercise on the 75th anniversary of the first induction. You ranked the top 75 players in the Hall of Fame. Was there anything enlightening that came out of that? Anything surprising? It was interesting. I mean, the editors, my editor asked me to do a top 75 list, but he wanted it to be something Jaws related because Jaws has become obviously very popular when it comes to the Hall of Fame. And anybody can do a top 75 list, but nobody could do the Jaws 75. So he wanted me to stick with an objective methodology.

And the one I came up with was one where, as it turns out, there are exactly 75 players in the hall, including two of the three inducted today, who have above average career peak and Jaws scores relative to their positions across the board, clean sweep. And if you build that list and you rank them accordingly, you still wind up leaving off a number of players who, for most of us, I think the Hall of Fame is not truly the Hall of Fame. Jackie Robinson, for example, had an above-average peak, according to Joss, but a short career because he didn't make the majors until he was 28 years old, due to the color line. So he's not on the list.

Sandy Koufax, because of his short career, isn't on the list. Ralph Kiner isn't on the list. There's a whole bunch of guys who don't make that list because they may be a little bit below average on career, a little bit below average on peak. Tony Gwynn, below average on peak, for example. So I actually preced the Jaws 75 list with a baker's dozen omissions, guys who literally chafed me not to be able to, maybe not literally, okay,

it chafed me not to be able to include them because I could hear the objections to that in my mind. Once I did the 75, I think I was a little surprised and maybe frustrated at how high the 19th century pitchers from the pre-60-foot-6 era, which is to say pre-1893, just how many of them there are that just kind of wind up climbing the ranks. John Clarkson, Tim Keefe, Pud Galpin. Everybody loves old Hoss Radborn, so I'm not going to say a bad thing about him. But there's a lot of those guys, and they all look kind of alike from disadvantage 125 years later.

And there's certainly a lot more modern guys that I would like to have included on that list. more modern guys that I would like to have included on that list. Maybe if I was going to just draw up my top 75, I think I would have gone about it slightly differently. So that was, I don't know if I'm surprised. I've been looking at these numbers for so long that not a whole lot really surprises me that much about it. So this is slightly off topic. I think this is the last question. It's Hall of Fame related, but just barely. We get a version of this question every few months.

So if you imagine that Mike Trout at some point in his career just suddenly became basically a league average outfielder like somewhere between maybe Bernard Gilkey and Brian Jordan, you know, until the end of his career. How many more years of this Mike Trout do we need to get to before that happens for him to be a Hall of Famer? You know, that's a good question here. Let me, I could probably answer this more easily if I have his baseball reference page in front of me. So give me a second here. you mean you don't just all the time like well you know i have it tattooed on my arm but i'm wearing sleeves right now um trout would need about oh let's see here trout already ranked 95th among centerfielders for three three years and changed

in his career for less than less than three full major League seasons, actually. He is... He is... He's got a peak score of... Rounding up, he's got a peak score of 26. The average Hall of Fame center fielder peak score is 44. He's got four more years, a minimum of four more years, to get to that peak score, because the peak is the player's best seven years.

So four or five win seasons would get him to the average peak score. That doesn't sound right, does it? Yeah, I guess that's about right. The bar for center field is kind of high, skewed by the Mays, Cobb, Speaker, and group. And one of Trout's – one of the three you're counting for Trout is only in July. Is only in July, yes. And the other one missed April. That is correct.

So we're – yeah, so literally we've probably got three and a half years. So I think – it's tough to do math in the middle of answering a podcast question. But, you know, I do think that Mike Trout could probably be about a three-win-a-year player for the remainder of his career. And his Hall of Fame numbers would not look too bad. Let's just say if he had 15 years times three war, that's 70 war. That's the average Hall of Famer at his position. 70 more that's that's the average hall of famer at his position let's just say uh assuming there's no variance there um you probably have uh a slightly below average peak uh but career but solid career and probably assume he gets to some you know some reasonable counting stat numbers for

hits and home runs and whatever um Maybe that's a bit much, but I think he probably only needs a couple more real all-star caliber years before he downshifts into a more average-type career. That said, you look at, say, the career trajectories of guys like Cesar Cedeno and Andrew Jones, who certainly looked like they were on hall of fame paths, uh, as centerfielders early in their career and then flamed out pretty quickly

once they hit 30 or so. Um, there are no guarantees. Cedeno didn't make it. Uh, I still think Andrew Jones might have a better shot just because he was part of a winning brave scene for so long. Um,

but, uh, his career certainly fell off the table there. All right. Well, thanks, Jay, for the mid-year Hall of Fame update. Sure. My pleasure. Before you take a few months off and then dive right back in.

Yeah. Actually, I've got a little project going that means that I won't actually take that off. project going that means that I won't actually take that off. But I will speak more of that soon. Okay. And how can people find your stuff at the redesigned SI site? Good luck. The best way to do that is to go to si.com slash MLB. That's where my stuff is. And look for me on Twitter at jay underscore jaffe because I am prolific with my tweets promoting my work. Yes, that's the only reason to be on Twitter, really, at the heart of it. All right, well, thank you, Jay.

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