The Most Exclusive Club
The Baseball Hall of Fame
December 11, 2017- With the election of Alan Trammell and Jack Morris by the Modern Era Veteran’s Committee, it is time to begin the annual yuletide tradition of people grousing about those who are successfully elected into the Hall of Fame. Nary an election goes by in which some voice, whether they have a legitimate journalistic platform or just like shouting from the soapbox of Facebook, claims that this year’s inductees are not worthy of being in the Hall of Fame. Often I hear them relegated to what my friend John Thorn calls, The Hall of Very Good. Arguments from both those who value traditional stats as well as sabermetrics are trotted out to show how Barry Larkin is no Honus Wagner and Ron Santo is no Pie Traynor. These same pundits decry that the Hall of Fame just “ain’t what it used to be” and that it has become too easy to get into the Hall.
I’m not going to use this space to support or decry Trammell or Morris or any other individual who has been elected to the Hall of Fame. I rarely weigh in on who does or does not belong in the Hall. That’s not really my forté or, frankly, my area of interest. Sure, over a pint I will lament the fact that Morgan Bulkeley was elected in 1937 but it took until 1995 to honor William Hulbert, but once you get past that I don’t spend much time complaining about the roster of the Hall. Why? Because no matter how you slice it, if someone is in the Hall of Fame there is a reason. It may not be a statistical reason. It may not be a reason that you or I value or even understand. But, there is a reason and far be it from me to question generations of Hall voters.
What I’m here to discuss today are the two points I previously mentioned. The first is the idea that the players elected today are not of the same caliber of those Hall members from yesteryear, men like Wagner and Traynor and Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. The second is the belief that it has become too easy to get into the Hall. I want to discuss both of these notions because they’re utter nonsense and, in the spirit of Festivus, it seems like a good time to address them.
Without a doubt, there are legendary men enshrined at the Hall of Fame whose exploits will live for all recorded history. There will never be another Babe Ruth. There will never be another Ted Williams. No one should expect there to be because these men were unique in their skill and persona. But, just how many legends are there in the Hall? Without doing a count, mainly because the criteria for lumping someone into the legendary status of Ruth or Williams is so arbitrary that any number I could come up with would be statistically meaningless, I would place fewer than 50 in that camp. How many of the 319 members of the Hall can you name? No peeking around the website to find the list. Can you come up with 50? I am sure most of you can’t name a hundred. Does that mean that the other 219 don’t belong, simply because their names aren’t retained in your personal store of baseball knowledge? Of course not. The history of the game is simply too broad and wide for any one individual to know it all (okay, maybe Thorn and a couple other savants I have met, but they are special men). They can’t all be legends at the forefront of our baseball minds, but that doesn’t mean that others didn’t have a significant role in the long story that is baseball.
It is also unfair, especially when considering the ultimate barometer for Hall voters, statistics, to measure a modern player by his forefathers. The tools have changed since 1871, as have the training techniques, the rules and the demographic makeup of the men who play it. What was “America’s game” now features players from dozens of countries, as well as African-Americans, whom Ruth never faced and Williams didn’t until the seventh year of his career. The talent pool has expanded to a level Cap Anson could never have imagined. The stats are going to be different, as will the likelihood of there being significant outliers like Ruth. There is simply too much skill in the modern game for that to happen. Pitted against the talent pool that today’s players must compete against, many of Ruth’s and Williams’s opponents would have trouble cracking modern triple-A. The issue isn’t that the skills of today’s Hall of Famers are so much more inferior to their earlier counterparts. The issue is that the skills of their opponents are so much more superior.
As for the idea that the Hall has become too loose with who they let it, I argue that it is actually the opposite. There is an anti-recency bias within the Hall that is well-documented. Part of that is the aforementioned idolization of our legends and part of that is, sadly, the side-effect of the steroids era. Again, I am not using this space to argue that PED users should be in the Hall. I am keeping my dogs out of that fight. But, the concept that the Hall has become too easy to join is not supported by the math. One need only examine the Halls of Fame of the three other major American sports to see the falsity of this claim.
In the long history of baseball, the oldest of America’s professional team sports, there have been 19,183 players who have participated in a Major League game. Since the foundation of the Hall of Fame in 1936, 65 years AFTER that first National Association game, 319 people have been elected to the Hall. From that 319, I am going to subtract the 34 men and one woman whose careers were primarily in the Negro Leagues and are not counted among those 19,183. That leaves us with 284 players, umpires and executives or, 1.48%. I recognize that this number is slightly skewed in that many of the umpires and executives do not appear in the player statistical register, but it’s actually a small sample that fall in this crack and does not detract from my larger point.
As of today, 10,544 players have appeared in the NHL and WHA. There are 398 members in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, which is the second oldest of the sport Halls of Fame, founded in 1943, seven years after the Baseball Hall was formed in Cooperstown. Seventy-nine more people have been elected into the Hockey HoF in seven fewer years at a rate of 3.78% of all players successfully being enshrined. The NBA and ABA have featured a mere 4,541 players since 1946 and their Hall didn’t open its doors until 1959. There are 382 inductees in Springfield, MA, or 8.41% of everyone who has ever suited up professionally.
The math on football, and the rosters of the NFL and AFL, is slightly different. Despite not being founded until 1920, 25,116 people have played for one of those franchises. That is just shy of 6000 more players than those who have appeared in baseball’s major leagues since 1871. The reason for this is obvious. The weekly team rosters are larger and the lifespan of an average career is shorter. Hence, the 312 members of the football Hall of Fame in Canton, OH accounts for only 1.25% of everyone who has played, which is a smaller percentage than baseball. However, the Football Hall was the last to open its doors, in 1963. In that time Canton has elected almost the same number of Hall of Famers (312 vs. 319) as Cooperstown, despite baseball having a 27-year head start.
The Baseball Hall of Fame remains the single most exclusive club in all of professional sports. Perhaps, too exclusive. There is a backlog of deserving players that have been held in limbo by the steroids era and the nearly impossible math of the various Veteran’s Committees. Don’t get me wrong. I’m more than happy for the Hall to keep their classes small until I am finished with The Hall Ball. I really would like to get this thing done and this time of the year brings me the warring emotions of joy at seeing the further expansion of an institution I admire, as well as no small amount of dread that my Sisyphean quest will never be complete. But, that’s an entirely self-imposed conflict. Today I celebrate the accomplishments of Jack Morris and Alan Trammell, just like next month I will celebrate the careers of Chipper Jones and likely one or two others. I am happy for their enshrinement and welcome them with open arms. Come on in guys. There’s plenty of room.