If Baseball’s Hall of Fame Voting is a popularity contest how did Ty Cobb get inducted?
You may have missed it last week as on November 16 the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWA) announced https://www.mlb.com/news/2021-hall-of-fame-ballot-announced the 14 players on the 2021 ballot. In order to be voted into Cooperstown, a player needs to be named on 75% of submitted ballots. A recently retired player can remain on the ballot for 10 years as long has the player garners at least 5% of voter support.
NAME, # of times nominated (2020 vote total, percentage)
Curt Schilling, 9x(278, 70.0%)
Roger Clemens, 9x (242, 61.0%)
Barry Bonds, 9x (241, 60.7%)
Omar Vizquel, 4x (209, 52.6%)
Scott Rolen, 4x(140, 35.3%)
Billy Wagner, 6x (126, 31.7%)
Gary Sheffield, 7x (121, 30.5%)
Todd Helton, 3x (116, 29.2%)
Manny Ramirez, 5x (112, 28.2%)
Jeff Kent, 8x (109, 27.5%)
Andruw Jones, 4x (77, 19.4%)
Sammy Sosa, 9x (55, 13.9%)
Andy Pettitte, 3x (45, 11.3%)
Bobby Abreu, 2x (22, 5.5%)
Although I am very familiar with every name on the list, I had not realized that of the 14 names, 7 have some association with performance enhancing drugs. For me, 4 of the 7 (Schilling, Clemens, Bonds, and Ramirez) should be sure things for induction and the three others (Sheffield, Sosa, and Pettitte), have arguable cases, but are probably ‘Almost’ guys, a term my son Gordon and I have used as part of our podcast at AlmostCooperstown.com.
Fans of the game have heard and read a lot about the great Ty Cobb. The all-time MLB leader in career batting average (.366 or .367 depending on the source which is SO baseball), curmudgeonly for sure but also likely misunderstood, Cobb was never thought of as a popular player — even by some of his own teammates and fans from other teams! Many fans feel being voted into Cooperstown is in part or even largely a popularity contest with the writers. So how did Mr. Cobb manage to get himself inducted? Was it that he was just so darned good?
The statistician Bill James has noted that the majority of baseball fans would like to see the ‘Steroid Guys’, all inducted into the Hall of Fame. Fans also feel Pete Rose should ultimately be inducted. The writers collectively have proven themselves to be deaf to the wishes of baseball fans and have refused induction to one player who has the most hits in the history of MLB, another player who has the most home runs both for a season AND a career in MLB history and that’s just for starters. A pitcher who has won 7 Cy Young Awards (Clemens) not being in the Hall of Fame is nearly as crazy as not having the guys with the most hits and home runs. It’s interesting to note that Schilling, Clemens, Bonds, Sheffield, Kent and even Ramirez to varying degrees were not thought of as likeable and approachable when they were playing. We ask, why does this even matter?
The great Ted Williams in 1966 was voted in on the first ballot but was not voted into Cooperstown unanimously. There’s really no explanation for that. My son and I feel that eventually the ‘bad boys’ will (and should) have their day and be inducted into Cooperstown. If the Baseball Hall of Fame desires to put the lot of them into some kind of ‘corridor of shame’ it would at least be better than not having them be a part of it at all. They represent some of the very best players to ever take the field and if they are not card carrying members of the Hall of Fame is, well then that’s just wrong.
