Who Votes For The Hall Of Fame?

When Roberto Alomar came from that team in Cleveland to the Baltimore Orioles, I smiled. Lot of fun watching Alomar at second and Cal Ripken at short stop.

Baseball Hall of Fame Voting Needs to Change

Jan. 8 2010 - 6:13 pm

Posted by Peter Schwartz

It’s usually high praise for a baseball player to join the company of Joe DiMaggio. Not for Roberto Alomar, who earlier this week missed the cut for this year’s class of inductees to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Not since Joltin’ Joe was passed over by baseball writers in his first two years of eligibility has an obvious choice been snubbed so badly. This was Alomar’s first year on the ballot.

The Hall of Fame has been marred by voting irregularities from the start. In 1936, 5% of baseball writers actually left Babe Ruth off their ballots (he finished second in voting to Ty Cobb). Astonishingly, no player has ever been elected unanimously (except for a special election held for Lou Gehrig shortly after he retired due to illness). It boggles the mind that 5% of voters deemed Willie Mays not worthy of enshrinement, 7% thought the same of Ted Williams, and, to more than 13% of voters, Sandy Koufax wasn’t good enough to make the cut.

Some Cooperstown voters hold the misguided view that, except for a small sub-set of legends, everyone on the ballot ought to wait a year so that they’re not elected on their first try. This surely cost Alomar, who played in 12 consecutive All-Star Games and, by many accounts, is the best defensive second baseman in history. He missed the cut by eight votes.

A better way: instead of having 539 baseball writers pick the inductees by secret ballot, how about a rotating 12-person panel, with each member appointed to a fixed, multi-year term? It can be composed of four Hall of Famers, four writers, two historians and two statisticians: a mix of backgrounds and viewpoints that’s currently missing from any of the Hall of Fame’s committees. They’d meet at the beginning of each year to debate and discuss the merits of eligible players before deciding on their consensus selections.

In a sport already panned for its slow pace, there’s no excuse for a player like Alomar to have to needlessly wait around another year before he’s called to the Hall.

http://blogs.forbes.com/sportsmoney/2010/01/08/baseball-hall-of-fame-voting-needs-to-change/