Balloting and Perfection

Sportswriter Joe Posnanksi reviews some of the history of Baseball Hall of Fame voting here, in light of the recent retirement of the great Mariano Rivera. The question is not whether or not Rivera will enter the Hall; he certainly will and almost as certainly in his first year of eligibility, 2018. But will he be the first ever unanimous selection?

Posnanski thinks no, because there are some members of the Baseball Writers Association of America -- those who vote on Hall selections -- who believe no one should ever be a unanimous pick. That belief has produced some bizarre results, which he outlines as he suggest 20 players who should have been unanimous selections -- that is, there is no logical baseball reason to vote against their induction into the Hall except for some sort of external-to-baseball ideas such as the aforementioned no unanimous picks rule.

For example, Hank Aaron won election to the Hall of Fame in his first year eligible with 97.8 percent of the vote. This means that nine people voted against the idea of one of the classiest players in the history of the game, a man who legitimately set an enduring record and who did it in the face of vicious hatred, opposition and bigotry, being in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Posnanksi notes these nine people, whoever they were, should be ashamed of themselves. I can't disagree.

Some players didn't get unanimous votes perhaps because they weren't quite as great as the greatest ever and since the greatest ever didn't get the lock, neither should they. Despite the fact that such a move might demonstrate that modern BBWAA members are smart enough to correct the mistakes of their predecessors, apparently that doesn't need to happen. Since 19 writers thought Ted Williams and 22 thought Stan Musial did not belong in the Hall of Fame, then 9 figured George Brett shouldn't be there either.

Posnanski notes that 54 people didn't vote for Bob Gibson and they would be afraid to admit so in public. I think it would have been neat to have forced the reveal and then allowed them to explain themselves to Gibson from a distance of 60 feet, 6 inches while he held a baseball. They would be given a bat and helmet to protect themselves during the discussion.

Of course, therein lies part of the problem. Those who have created ridiculous arcana like the "no unanimous picks" rule are not themselves baseball players, but the clucking clacks who click their keyboards about baseball. The most clueless batsman who ever lived and put on a major league uniform deserves the Hall more than any of the people who vote on him.

Posnanski leaves out the most egregious violation of Hall sensibility of all, of course, because his focus is on players who deserved unanimous votes. But the absence of Buck O'Neil, the man who through Ken Burns' Baseball film became the way much of America would learn about the history of the Negro Leagues, who was the first African-American coach when he worked for the Chicago Cubs and was instrumental in the development of the wonderful Negro League Museum, is a crime against the space-time continuum. It's the kind of distortion of reality that ought to disqualify a universe from supporting life, such as if gravity operated differently and didn't permit the formation of planets.

However stupid were the voters who thought Mickey Mantle shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame, or Carl Yaztremski, or Bob Feller, they have nothing on the members of a special 12-person committee who, meeting in 2006, voted in Effa Manley for helping her husband run the Newark Eagles and 16 others, but didn't vote in Buck O'Neil. Medical science has always posited that there is a certain level of brain activity below which the body's autonomic functions such as breathing and heartbeat can't operate -- that you can in fact have an IQ too low to sustain life.

I've got a dozen examples that say that idea's wrong.