The most important number to remember, when considering the evolving process of voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame, is the figure that remains constant: 75. That is the percentage candidates must reach to be elected by the writers, and it is truly an overwhelming majority.
For context from another arena, think of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide in the presidential election. In the popular vote, Reagan won 58.77 percent, easily the highest for any presidential candidate in the past 10 elections. In terms of the Baseball Hall of Fame, though, that percentage would leave Reagan roughly in Jeff Bagwell territory.
Bagwell, the former Houston Astros slugger, is a candidate for the sixth time as members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America cast their ballots for the Hall of Fame, which must be submitted by Dec. 31. Bagwell has polled from 54.3 to 59.6 percent in each of his past four tries — strong enough for the White House but lacking for Cooperstown.
“It’s extremely hard,” said Susan Slusser, a former BBWAA president who covers the Oakland Athletics for The San Francisco Chronicle. “Getting 75 percent of any group to agree on anything is difficult. Players have to have impeccable stats, and with the character clause — for many people — impeccable character, too.”
The character clause is a part of the material distributed with every Hall of Fame ballot. This is the wording: “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.”
Former superstars with ties to performance-enhancing drugs — like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Gary Sheffield and Sammy Sosa — have not been elected. Others dogged by speculation, but not by evidence, have come closer, like Bagwell and especially Mike Piazza, who had 69.9 percent last year. But they still have not made it.
This has helped create a ballot that, for many voters, seems stocked with strong candidates. It has also raised questions about the specifics of the voting rules, which are different this year, though only a bit.
There are still no formal guidelines for what to do about players suspected of using steroids. And voters remain limited to 10 selections per ballot, even if they believe more than 10 players deserve the honor. The Hall of Fame’s board of directors decided in July not to change that limit, despite a recommendation by a BBWAA committee to raise it to 12.
That decision reinforced an important distinction between Hall of Fame voting and annual award voting. The awards announced last week — Most Valuable Player, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year and Manager of the Year — are given by the BBWAA, which created them, distributes them and controls the voting process. The Hall of Fame asks the writers to vote for its honor, and its board can amend the rules at any time.
The board did so in July. Until then, writers had lifetime Hall of Fame voting privileges after serving 10 consecutive years in the BBWAA. Under the new rules, voters must have actively covered baseball within the past decade to retain their ballot. As a result, about 90 voters were removed from the rolls this year, when 475 ballots were distributed. (The New York Times does not allow its writers to vote.)
Jeff Idelson, the Hall of Fame’s president, said this past summer that the board of directors wanted “the most active electorate possible” to be considering the candidates. It also stands to reason that the board was somewhat embarrassed by the optics of writers no longer covering the game deciding the sport’s highest honor.
Larry Rocca, who covered baseball for The Orange County Register, Newsday and The Star-Ledger before leaving the industry, is among those no longer eligible to vote. Rocca had been candid about his decision not to support any players from the steroid era, casting a ballot last year for only Tim Raines and Alan Trammell — not Craig Biggio, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez or John Smoltz, who were elected.
No group of people in baseball, Rocca said, had more power to eradicate steroid use than the star players. By not pushing to do that, he said, they condoned the problem and helped mutate baseball’s hallowed records.
“The entire generation was guilty of complicity,” Rocca said. “I don’t want to play that game of ‘Who took what and who didn’t?’ I do know that the leadership and the players didn’t say, ‘Let’s test.’ The players are guilty of resisting the testing and not policing the game.”
So far, the writers as a whole have not come close to electing anyone with strong ties to steroids. Last year, Clemens had 37.5 percent, Bonds 36.8, Sheffield 11.7, McGwire (now in his final ballot appearance) 10.0 and Sosa 6.6. Palmeiro peaked at 12.6 percent in 2012 and is now off the ballot.
To some former voters, the new rules seem intended to nudge those types of players into the Hall. Steve Aschburner — a senior writer for NBA.com who covered baseball from 1978 to 1995 — lamented the loss of historical context provided by the newly ineligible writers. In a piece for the website The Federalist, he wrote that the Hall of Fame “could open its doors to known or suspected cheaters.”
Aschburner cited the 231 ballots made public last year, which revealed that honorary members — the classification given to him, Rocca and others whose votes have been eliminated — tended to be less forgiving to Bonds and Clemens. Only 25.3 percent of honorary members voted for Bonds and Clemens, who got more than double that support from other writers — 52.3 percent for Bonds, 51.5 for Clemens.
Those figures, of course, still fall far short of election, and the candidates’ chances are dwindling. Since 2014, players have had only 10 years to stay on the writers’ ballot, not 15 (provided they receive at least 5 percent of the vote). The current BBWAA president, Derrick Goold, who covers the Cardinals for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said steroid suspects still faced a challenging path to Cooperstown.
“I don’t think this alone will lead to more guys under the cloud of steroids getting in, because 75 percent is such a gargantuan threshold to reach,” Goold said. “There would have to be other factors, like a generational shift that was always going to take place, or a new view of these guys.”
Last year, 51 percent of voters used all 10 available spots on their ballots. That figure may fall now, after the elections of Biggio, Johnson, Martinez and Smoltz, and with fewer obvious inductees on the new ballot. First-timers include Ken Griffey Jr., Trevor Hoffman, Billy Wagner and Jim Edmonds.
But the limit of 10 could still hold back players suspected of steroids, Goold explained.
“If I have more than 10 deserving players, I have to cut down to 10 — so what tools can I use to do that?” he said. “On the ballot, it says to consider integrity, sportsmanship and character. I could use the tools the Hall of Fame gives me to settle a tiebreaker.”
There is no indication that the Hall of Fame would ever remove those tools from the voters’ box.
It would be naive to think that no current Hall of Famer ever took steroids, but officially removing the Hall’s core values — integrity, sportsmanship, character — would be hard to imagine.
As long as those words remain part of the process, the outcome of the elections seems unlikely to change very much. A player like Piazza, already on the doorstep of Cooperstown and with no evidence against him, could make it in soon. But even with a shifting demographic among voters, election for those presumed guilty seems impossible.
“I don’t get the sense that they’re all ‘pro-put the steroid guys in,’” Slusser said, referring to younger voters. “It only takes one of four, essentially, to keep them out.”
