Last week, we brought you the story that ESPN’s Buster Olney would abstain from voting on the Baseball Hall of Fame this year due to a backlog in candidates and the Hall’s refusal to remove the ten player cap on ballots. My general conclusion was that while Olney was going down the right path with his actions, they’d ultimately be meaningless unless more writers followed him.
Well, another writer has decided to abstain this year, and the Hall of Fame brass is probably starting to sweat a little bit. Long-time Detroit News columnist Lynn Henning is bailing on voting this year for the first time in 25 years, citing the same frustrations that Olney did. Henning had 13 names in mind for his ballot, and decided that arbitrarily removing three of them to reach the ten man limit was inane.
What an embarrassing, self-defeating boundary we’re governed by.
Until this ballot is given the essential breathing room it and any pursuit of integrity demands, there will be no vote cast here — not when irresponsibility in culling names trumps the accusations of irresponsibility that some will levy against a non-voter.
Henning also railed against the Hall of Fame’s leadership and their refusal to allow changes to the balloting system.
It was urged, personally in an e-mail letter to BBWAA officers, that the 10-man limit be expanded – this year – to avoid the very clutter and marginal chaos that voters now face on an unnecessarily restricted ballot.
Nothing has happened. Anyone understands change can take time. But there are Constitutional amendments that have been ratified in shorter time than would have been required to make the fair and reasonable expansion on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot.
The Hall of Fame also want ballots for voters to remain secret, which really makes no sense at all heading into the year 2015.
This is separate from another plea I’ve formally made – that all Hall of Fame ballots be made public. It would go a long way to ensure that better ballots and more accountability is made part of an increasingly unpopular referendum on those who ultimately crack Cooperstown.
I was told by BBWAA officials this year that the Hall of Fame bosses want ballots to be private. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why that would be helpful or necessary. In fact, it’s a policy as easily remedied as doing away with the 10-man limit. But we know how that urgency was met in 2014 and there is no real hope that public disclosure of votes will happen any time soon.
Congratulations, Baseball Hall of Fame – you’ve created a mess that you refuse to fix and some of your most active, respected members are railing against. But hey, as long as the guys from GolfersWest can vote, who cares about what people actually involved in the game today think?
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