The Hall of Fame's induction process is broken. And I don't mean in the sense that you have a car with chipped paint or a flat tire or the brakes are squeaking loudly when you stop at the bottom of a hill. I mean broken broken in which the wheels are gone and there's a family of raccoons living where the missing engine used to be.
When talking about good arguments for inducting players into the Hall of Fame, one of the arguments that Bill James warned about using in "The Politics of Glory" was The Insult Approach. Using that, you argue that a player should be in the Hall of Fame because to do otherwise would insult him. The player in question at the time was Phil Rizzuto and, in the book, James addressed other borderline candidates, players such as Stan Hack or Ken Keltner or Ken Boyer, players you could argue one way or the other.
But today, rather than arguing about borderline candidates, we're arguing about the easy candidates. Jeff Bagwell ranks fourth among all first basemen for career WAR, per Baseball-Reference.com, in modern baseball history (starting at 1901 due to the variability of play quality in 19th century baseball). Yet it's taking until his seventh ballot to get around to honoring him, and that's assuming he does in fact get in this year. Mike Mussina is 19th in pitcher WAR, between Ferguson Jenkins and Bob Gibson; Curt Schilling is 21st, between Gibson and Tom Glavine. Neither of them are expected to get in this year, after appearing on multiple ballots previously.
Admittedly, WAR measurements are hardly perfect, but over long careers the problems with them -- the ERA vs. peripheral stats argument, the spotty defensive measures -- tend to iron themselves out. Mike Mussina's 82.7 bWAR might "truly" be 85 or 90 or 75 or 70, but it's not 40. Every single pitcher with 60 WAR in modern baseball that retired before the 1981 baseball strike is in the Hall of Fame. All of them. If you go down the list, you don't find your first exception until Jack Quinn at 59.0 WAR, just ahead of Chuck Finley and behind Mark Buehrle and Bret Saberhagen. In other words, if you retired before 1980 and were a better pitcher than Mark Buehrle, you're in the Hall of Fame.
The situation with the standards for position players is no better. If you track the percentage of plate appearances in a given year made by a Hall of Famer, you see just how under-represented baseball players from the past 50 years are. In 1929, 23.1 percent of all plate appearances were made by Hall of Fame hitters, nearly one in four. Flip forward to 1989, and only 6.8 percent of plate appearances were made by Hall of Fame hitters. It's not that players from the '80s haven't been on the ballot yet -- Omar Vizquel is the last position player to play in the '80s to qualify for the Hall of Fame ballot.
When you treat a group of players in a grossly different way than the generations that preceded them -- and not just the players linked to modern PEDs, because I haven't even touched on Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens or Mark McGwire yet -- then you do transform the lack of recognition into an insult, going back to the James argument. And that's what the Hall can't afford, to be defined by the players that are refused entrance into the Hall of Fame, rather than the players who are admitted.
This overflow of worthy candidates has caused a logjam in the induction process, resulting in many writers voting for 10 candidates and wishing to vote for more. The BBWAA pleaded with the Hall of Fame to lift the 10-man ballot so that we could start clearing the blockage of worthy players and return to a Hall of Fame in which players like Kenny Lofton and Jim Edmonds are actually discussed and debated rather than the easy ones. Instead of that, though, we've seen a reduction of the time on the ballot from 15 years to 10. Can you imagine an overloaded emergency room in a hospital deciding that the solution to having too many patients was to have security throw any patients being treated for more than two hours out onto the sidewalk?
To get an idea of the problems created by the 10-man ballot limit, I developed a simple model -- sadly, the data isn't robust enough for any machine-learning shenanigans -- to estimate the votes unleashed by lifting the 10-man limit. From the players added by the 10-man voters so far relative to previous elections and the correlation between votes between players (for example, an Edgar Martinez voter is more likely to vote for Larry Walker than a non-Edgar voter), I estimate that of the 107 ballots tallied so far with 10 votes, only 24 of the voters would have stopped at exactly 10, with a projected 83 ballots voting for 11-16 players (with only five going as far as 15 or 16).
The anonymous ballots are less likely to vote for 10 players than the public ballot, based on the difference between the public and private. Last year, there were 8.23 players on each public ballot and 7.28 per non-public ballot. All this data comes from Ryan Thibodaux's Hall of Fame Tracker, which you really should be following if you care at all about Hall of Fame voting.
All told, my model estimates that there will be 406 total player votes that writers wished to make, but were unable to because of the arbitrary 10-man limit. And that has a real effect on the results. Given those votes and the projected likelihood of a 10-man voter voting for specific players, my model estimates that there would be eight players inducted this year: Jeff Bagwell, Trevor Hoffman, Tim Raines, Ivan Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Vladimir Guerrero and Edgar Martinez.
Inducting eight players would fix the logjam problem by itself. If those eight made the Hall of Fame this time, the table reflects what the top of next year's ballot would look like, ranked by Jay Jaffe's JAWS, which combines career WAR with peak WAR.
All of a sudden, the problem of that overwhelming stack of Hall of Fame worthies fighting for a limited number of votes becomes a lot more manageable. With that ballot, we're debating players such as Gary Sheffield and Johan Santana, rather than guys who ought to be no-doubters.
The system we currently have perversely incentivizes BBWAA voters to game the vote in order to get the players they want into the Hall. Say you're a Hall of Fame voter and want to see Larry Walker in the Hall of Fame. (I do, but haven't been in the BBWAA long enough for a ballot.) The scenario that gets Larry Walker into the Hall of Fame involves voting for Trevor Hoffman instead of Larry Walker. Because Hoffman can actually be inducted into the Hall of Fame this year and Walker can't (given their poll numbers), voting for Walker over Hoffman actually reduces the chances that Walker gets into the Hall because some of the votes that would go to Walker next year will instead be repeated for Hoffman.
Even if we fix this particular issue, we still have the problems of the players we've already lost from the ballot due to the Hall of Fame's dysfunction. The Veterans' Committee is not a solution because, even though they added a Today's Game committee, many of the voters are the same people who failed miserably with these same players the first time around. Look no further than this year, the debut performance of the committee -- the only person they could induct wasn't one of the many overlooked players, but Bud Selig.
The end result of this mess is that many of the greatest players for the modern era are being shut out of the Hall of Fame. Mike Mussina's plaque being next to Bob Feller's is an honor for Mussina, but equally so, Mussina's plaque being next to Feller's is an honor for Feller as well. By having a process that inducts all the great players, you continue to keep Hall of Fame induction relevant, one that can connect the past with the present. If the Hank Greenbergs or Eddie Planks of today don't get into the Hall, then it cheapens the original ones, severs the link of the game's past with its present, and further reduces those old greats to names in the history books.
The Hall of Fame has a lot of soul-searching to do. If they don't bother, those of us who love baseball end up poorer by not being able to properly honor the game's great players.