Hall of Fame Voting Needs Fixing from New Commish

Editor’s Note: This is the ninth in a 10-part series commemorating baseball’s new commissioner with advice for his tenure. To read more about this series, click here.

Theoretically, the process of Hall of Fame balloting and the anticipatory buildup to the announcement of the annual Cooperstown class is designed as the prologue to a celebration. For the voters—a group of 550 or so members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who receive the privilege of a ballot following a decade of dutiful beat coverage and press-box confinement—the primary reason to consider the 35 or so accomplished ballplayers on the ballot is to responsibly narrow the list to a chosen few worthy of induction.  It’s an awesome responsibility by any definition, and the vast majority of those with a precious vote take it seriously, many to the point of admirable, explanatory transparency.

The secondary purpose of the Hall of Fame voting is smaller but relevant too, particularly regarding the big picture. It’s a reminder that the rich and enduring history—and the irresistible this-guy-was-better-than-that-guy banter that connects fans through generations—remains baseball’s lifeblood.  Baseball-Reference’s Oracle tool delivers linear connections between players through decades, and it’s a swell way to kill a couple of long innings during a midweek afternoon in the cubicle. Hank Aaron played with Sixto Lezcano on the 1976 Milwaukee Brewers … Sixto Lezcano played with Glenn Wilson on the 1984 Philadelphia Phillies … Glenn Wilson played with Barry Bonds on the 1988 Pittsburgh Pirates. Well, hell, they were practically teammates then. Let’s see how Babe Ruth connects to Bonds …

The discussion of these players—the masterful legends but the mediocre journeymen too—the conversation and debate and beautifully exaggerated recollections and shared experiences, is what baseball is all about. The sport traffics in nostalgia and the sweet sentiment of a summer day spent at the ballpark.  It does so unapologetically, because no apology for warm reminiscence should be necessary.

The Hall of Fame voting—both the anticipation and revelation—is supposed to strengthen this essential thread in baseball’s fabric. For the most part since the first Hall of Fame class was elected in 1936—yes, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson and Honus Wagner made for a decent inaugural quintet–the electorate has done dutiful work. There were occasional BBWAA bewilderments (start with Rabbit Maranville, 1954 and work from there) and the veteran’s committee proved masterful purveyors of cronyism. But for the most part through the years there was a collective and conscientious effort to elect the players who–and here’s a novel concept–were the most deserving of election.

That is impossible nowadays. Impossible. It cannot be done with any rhyme or reason or consistency of logic. But the signal to noise ratio regarding the Hall of Fame is as out of whack and eardrum-piercing as it has ever been, and for this reason: The museum’s leadership offers no guidelines whatsoever in how to consider candidates who have been linked to performance-enhancing drugs. All it has seemed to do is try to alleviate its own headache as soon as possible, but with a lobotomy rather than ibuprofen.

In July, the Hall of Fame’s board of directors truncated a player’s stay on the ballot to 10 year from the longstanding 15. The news of this was greeted with howls of righteous (and rightful) indignation by a vast majority of fans who recognized that it would affect and even abort the Cooperstown chances for gradually appreciated candidates such as Tim Raines or Edgar Martinez. Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson told Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci that the “steroid issue” had nothing to do with the decision and that the topic never even came up during the board’s discussion. Idelson noted that only three players since 1980 had been elected after their 10^th year on the ballot and thus so many candidates without much hope of election had been left to “twist in the wind.”

Verducci noted that the change may help some PED-linked candidates get earlier consideration from the Expansion Era committee than they would if they remained on the ballot for a full 15 years. It’s a fair point, albeit one tinged with speciousness. Mark McGwire, forever paying for his co-starring role during the inauthentic magic of the summer of ’98, is likely to fall off the ballot in two years rather than seven. That will put him in front of the Expansion Era committee, which meets every three years in rotation with the Pre-Integration Era and Golden Era committees, in 2019 rather than 2022. One suspects he doesn’t see the tradeoff – get lost soon, we’ll see you in four years—all that favorable.

This feels like an attempt to wipe the PED-era players from the conversation since they cannot be wiped from the record books. Idelson and the Hall can explain reasons for cutting candidates’ stay on the ballot to 10 years with enough plausibility that there is no choice but to accept it. But that does not change the fact that the reluctance—refusal—to offer counsel and enlightenment in how consider players who dominated with real or perceived pharmaceutical advantages has caused chronic chaos with the voting.

Home-run king Barry Bonds—self-proclaimed purists and Henry Aaron admirers may not like that title, but it’s true—and Roger Clemens, whose resume confirms he could compete for a spot in the starting rotation of any all-time team, did not receive 75 percent between them in the Hall balloting this year. The conclusion to be drawn from that is that the consensus of voters do not believe they belong in the Hall of Fame. OK. Except that their judgments are based entirely on their own personal beliefs regarding PEDs in baseball rather than any guidance from baseball on how the era should be regarded.

Because there is no guidance from the Hall of Fame, let alone enlightenment, the voting process has become a moralistic free-for-all in which too many voters allow haphazard logic and their own visceral perceptions to determine who is worthy of a checkmark. It’s a process both broken and marked with contradiction, something Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Brandon McCarthy articulated so well in a recent column for The Players Tribune.

As it stands, the baseball writers are trying to have it both ways: they are acknowledging the existence of the steroid era by leaving obviously deserving candidates out of the Hall, while at the same time slowly giving them more votes as each year passes. To the Hall of Fame voters it may feel like progress, but to me it reeks of denial. This moral grandstanding under the auspices of being linked to steroids raises the concern that over time the buck will be passed to a younger generation of voters who will bear the responsibility of deciding on the Hall-worthiness of the great players from the steroid era.

The passing of that proverbial buck to a younger generation is hardly an appealing solution. It’s probably no solution at all. But it beats the hell out of a status quo in which absurdities such as Jerry Green’s ballot can be allowed to happen with a trademark Bud Selig what-can-we-do-this-is-what-we-wrought shrug. Green, a longtime Detroit News baseball writer, did not vote for Bonds, but did vote for Clemens, McGwire and Gary Sheffield—Bonds’s former workout partner and fellow flax-seed oil connoisseur—on his Hall of Fame ballot. It’s hard to square the logic of such a ballot, and there were other ballots like it. At least two others voted the other way around—for Bonds, but not Clemens.

Until voters are given some semblance of direction and recommendation on how the larger-than-life stars of the PED era should be considered, there are no easy solutions to the variance in perspective among voters. I worry that voting will remain an annual anarchistic free-for-all until the PED guys have all fallen from the ballot and become either the Expansion Era committee’s chronic quandary or the sole responsibility of a yet-to-be-formed special committee tasked with revisiting and reconsidering the era. That certainly would be the Selig way of handling it: Wrap it in another layer of red tape and look away until—voila!—a generation has passed and it’s someone else’s problem.

But that’s the catch here, and perhaps a reason for hope too. It has become someone else’s problem—and that someone else might just be capable of negotiating and navigating with a purposeful deftness that delivers an actual solution. Rob Manfred, who will become the 10^th commissioner in baseball history when he assumes office this month, has a smooth, serious manner publicly. But behind the scenes, he is known as a ferocious and masterful negotiator—some may say manipulator, and many do–with a knack for fulfilling and even exceeding the expectations and demands put upon him by Selig. In a recent profile, Grantland compared him to Tom Hagen, the essential consigliere in “The Godfather.”

Manfred’s greatest achievement in that role? He was crucial in turning Major League Baseball’s see-no-needle, blind-eye approach to PEDs into arguably the most stringent in professional sports. As chief negotiator with the players’ union, he pushed successfully for human-growth-hormone testing and established rigid punishments for those caught using PEDs. He relentlessly pursued the Biogenesis investigation in which 14 players were ultimately suspended, among them habitual self-disgracer Alex Rodriguez.

Some of Major League Baseball’s methods in gathering evidence for the Biogenesis scandal came into question, including such ethically dubious tactics as allegedly paying for information. Rodriguez, whom Manfred suspended for the 2014 season, appealed, claiming he was unfairly targeted. But an arbitrator upheld the punishment, vindicating Manfred and, in a sense, justifying his tactics.

It’s not as if any of the punishments—or Manfred’s process in determining them—were anything less than thorough. As the Grantland profile noted: “By the time he testified in Rodriguez’s arbitration, Manfred could speak confidently about testosterone-epitestosterone ratios, carbon isotope testing, the secretion of doping substances from a player’s body, and masking agents used to foil testers. Once he becomes baseball’s commissioner, Manfred may be the first de facto doping expert to lead a major American sport.”

It makes sense, does it not? The man who led the crackdown on PEDs, who learned the subject to the point of true expertise, who knows where all the syringes are buried, who even determined the scale of punishments … well, isn’t he the ideal candidate to help us find perspective and perhaps even consensus on how the PED era should be addressed in the Hall of Fame voting?

Manfred knows how PEDs affected baseball’s recent past as well as anyone. That should make him an incredibly valuable resource in the thus far haphazard quest to determine how that recent past should be regarded in the present and future.

How will he do it? Well, I’m not entirely sure of the how, honestly. Major League Baseball’s relationship with the Hall of Fame is not exactly a linear boss/underling partnership. The Hall of Fame is a privately operated non-profit with its own board of directors. It is of mutual benefit if their interests run parallel with Major League Baseball’s, but is not necessarily required. It could require some nuanced and savvy navigation from Manfred to cajole the Hall of Fame into establishing some clear and helpful guidelines regarding the PED era so players like Bonds and Clemens can escape this purgatory one way or the other.

Threatening to, say, ban the Hall from presenting its annual FanFest exhibit at the All-Star Game probably would not be the way to gain Cooperstown’s cooperation. But something must be done. This has to be remedied. No, not necessarily today, and not tomorrow, though either day would, of course, be cool.  We can be patient. We know Manfred has more pressing–and lucrative–matters to deal with in his inaugural months as commissioner, as this series has illustrated.

But expecting a clear solution well before the deadline for writers to submit their Hall of Fame ballots in late December? That is reasonable. The way to make sure it happens is the way Manfred has made far more crucial and complex deals happen in the past. He needs to summon the Hall of Fame’s leaders—perhaps Idelson and those board members identified as the most vexed by the flawed legends’ stagnancy on the ballot—and request, with a deadline attached, that they provide guidelines for how to address this era.

Should they resist, well, that’s when consigliere-turned-commish should wield his upgrade in power, his request becoming a loud demand. If the Hall won’t offer guidance, Manfred must make the Hall accept his. Sure, Cooperstown isn’t technically under his jurisdiction.  Like that’s stopped him from getting what he wants before. The doping dopes of Biogenesis can tell you all about that.