To build a bigger & better Baseball Hall of Fame all it would take is 1/3 of 1%
I am a card-carrying ‘Bigger Hall’ baseball fan. I maintain that adding 30, 40, even 50 players to the Baseball Hall of Fame would still have the total at less than 1.4% of all players who’ve ever played. This post was early in my Substack publishing and got little attention. Given the HOF voting in progress I thought I’d post it once again.
To build a bigger & better Baseball Hall of Fame all it would take is 1/3 of 1%.
December 2021. With the recent actions of the Golden Days Era Committee, Buck O’Neil, Minnie Minoso, Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva, and Bud Fowler are all now to be inducted into Cooperstown. This brings the total players in the Hall-of-Fame to 267. There are also 40 executives/pioneers, 22 managers and 10 umpires for a grand total of 339 members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The 267 represents 1.1% of all 22,564 players who’ve played MLB all-time according to Baseball-Reference.com.
The 22,564 includes some but not all Negro League (1920–1948) era players as statistics are continually being reviewed and updated. By some counts, the statistics of as many as 1,000 additional Negro League players could eventually be included. Each year about 250 freshly minted MLB players are added to the total.
Why all the focus on numbers? Well for starters, baseball has always been about numbers. And fans like me talk about those numbers all the time. It isn’t that other professional sports don’t have interesting numbers, it’s just that baseball has more numbers, and it’s been about those numbers for a much longer time. Right now, MLB remains in a work stoppage in advance of a new CBA being negotiated. So, talking about the Hall-of-Fame and the upcoming vote on January 25, 2022, is all we have! (Full disclosure — My son and I host a podcast at www.almostcooperstown.com)
How many players (not total members), should be included in the Hall-of-Fame? What’s the ‘right’ number? Other sports exceed MLB with the NFL being closest:
178 NBA players out of 4,374 through last season — 4%
346 NFL players out of 26,682–1.3%
289 NHL players out of 8,000+ — 3.6%
I’ve heard plenty baseball ‘purist’s talk about a ‘1%’ number. That the HOF should only be for the ‘best of the best’ and the top 1% would seem to address that. Yet we’re already at 1.18% if using the 22,546 number, and it slides a bit to 1.13% if adding about 1,000 players to 23,500. Since there’s not much call to kick players out of the HOF for being voted-in ‘undeservedly’ (I agree with that but there are a fair number of players with dubious credentials), the 1% argument must go out of the window.
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Having been a baseball fan for more than fifty years, I’ve lived through how baseball numbers are evaluated differently today than they were previously. For a long time, any career that totaled 3,000 base hits, a .300 career average, 400 career HR’s almost assured a player of entry into Cooperstown. But as we know, the ability to use data to a greater degree has caused a re-evaluation of what really makes a great and high contributing player.
Even under today’s more sophisticated analysis, The great Joe DiMaggio’s career more than stands up even though he does not have 400 career HRs, nor does he have 3,000 career hits. He only played 13 MLB seasons losing three in the prime of his career to military service. Take note of the .325 career BA, .398 OBP, 3 MVP’s and 155 career OPS+ (which means he was 55% better than the average player which actually seems kind of low!). The point here is that Hall of Fame players are by and large the greatest players to ever take the field by today’s OR by yesterday’s standards. Tony Oliva only checks off the career average box with .304 over his 15-year career (although three of those seasons total only 26 games due to injury), as he has ‘only’ 1917 career hits and 220 home runs. His past evaluations of being an ‘almost’ guy centered on what he didn’t do as opposed to what he did. Perhaps his ascension is a sign that voters are accepting the nuances of individual player candidacies?
My son and I decided to try ‘add’ 36 players. We could only come up with 35 before Hodges, Oliva and Minoso were finally selected, and we missed on Jim Kaat but are happy about it. The now 33 that are not the Hall-of-Fame have been cast aside for all sorts of reasons. Our premise was and is — How much worse would the HOF be if there were 300 players included instead of 267? Out of more than 23,000? How would actually adding players ‘ruin’ the Hall of Fame as some fans would argue? 300 out of 22,564 is 1.33% — about 1 1/3% of all the MLB players. This is versus the current 1.18%.
I have not been to Cooperstown in a very long time. The pandemic has not made it more attractive to go in the past couple of years however I am looking forward to a trip to Cooperstown together (thanks to my son) next spring. While we are there it would be great to be able to see plaques for:
Keith Hernandez, Lou Whitaker, Bobby Grich, Vern Stephens, Albert Belle, Lance Berkman, Jim Edmonds, Kenny Lofton, Reggie Smith, Dwight Evans, Graig Nettles, Thurman Munson, Kevin Brown, Curt Schilling, Dale Murphy, Wilbur Wood, Dick Allen, Andruw Jones, Bobby Abreu, Bill Freehan, Buddy Bell, Ken Boyer, Bill Dahlen, Jack Glasscock, Orel Hershiser, Joe Mauer, Pete Rose, Joe Jackson, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, William Bell, Bill Byrd, John Beckwith
Sadly, we will not be able to see those plaques and remember their individual contributions to the game we love — good and bad. And that’s just unfortunate. There are the careers of many players that have been passed over that make for good arguments. Players like Jimmy Wynn, Sal Bando, Kevin Appier, David Cone, Gary Sheffield, Rick Reuschel and Bret Saberhagen all merit discussion and consideration. It’s fine to argue for or against and we’re always happy to talk about it as baseball fans. It’s one of the many things that makes America’s Pastime so special.
A slightly bigger Hall of Fame, would that be such a bad thing?
For those interested the two podcast episodes we did on adding 36 players to the HOF can be found here.
