The first time I voted for the Hall of Fame I was a small-Hall guy, and I instantly regretted it. The second time I voted as a big-Hall guy. The third time—this time—I came to realize that it didn’t much matter how I define myself. The Hall simply is big. It’s built to be Big. It’s bigger than we realize, and its potential for Bigness is bigger than we can even imagine. It doesn’t matter if you believe in the Big Hall; the Big Hall believes in you.
This is my 2025 Hall of Fame ballot:
1.
Fifteen years ago, on the day that the 2010 Hall of Fame voting was announced, Orioles outfielder Adam Jones wrote a since-deleted Tweet:
this hall of fame thing is so much bullshit. all of them deserve to be in.
I doubt he meant ALL of them. I doubt he meant David Segui. Jones would later write that he, himself, was not a Hall of Fame player, and he was awfully good, so he had a standard. But the year Jones tweeted that, 15 players on the ballot got at least 5 percent of the vote, 15 players who as few as 1 in 20 people thought “yeah” about. Let’s assume he meant all of them deserve to be in, and let’s call them the Jones 15.
Only one of the Jones 15—Andre Dawson—was inducted that day. (“so much bullshit.”) But in the years since, you could argue that Jones has been proven basically correct. Eleven more players from that group have since gotten in. Of the remaining three, two—Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy—have seen surges in their Era Committee (formerly known as the Veterans Committee) support, and I’d be really surprised if they’re not both in the Hall by this time 2040. The last, Mark McGwire, is a steroids case, so who knows; otherwise he’d be in. There are even a couple players from that year’s ballot—Robin Ventura especially, maybe Kevin Appier—who didn’t get enough support to qualify for the Jones 15, but who will probably pop up on Era Committee ballots and, perhaps, someday, Hall of Fame Weekend podia.
2.
There are two players from the Jones 15 who have helped me understand the Hall of Fame better.
One of them is Harold Baines, who was elected by the Era Committee five years ago. Baines’ case (a DH who led his league in exactly one offensive category exactly one time) is extremely weak compared to other inductees; even his Hall of Fame plaque hardly mounts any enthusiasm for him until the final clause:
Ben Lindbergh wrote a piece called The Case Against Harold Baines, Hall of Famer, which imagined what the Hall would look like if everybody who exceeded the Baines standard were included. (Four times as many players would be in.) “Baines’ election is simply not a great day for the institution,” Jay Jaffe wrote at the time. Baines’ career WAR was way lower than the average Hall of Famer’s.
The other player whose induction changed the way I think about the Hall is Dave Parker, who was chosen by this year’s Era Committee and who will go into the Hall this summer.
Unlike with Baines, the public response has shown no anguish. At the Athletic, Jayson Stark asked not whether Parker deserves to be in but “how the heck could it have taken all these decades for that guy to get elected?” ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle, who is from the analytical wing of ball writers, wrote: “In my Hall standards system, Parker is over the threshold for his best five-year measure, but is a little shy in 10-year and career value. I'm thrilled for the Cobra that he's finally in.” The FanGraphs headline was “Better Late Than Never,” and Jaffe wrote: “While I was lukewarm on Parker, it’s impossible not to feel some amount of empathy for his hard-won wisdom.” The Parker Hall of Fame plaque, when it arrives, will look like a credible Hall of Famer’s plaque: Won an MVP award and finished four times in the top three; 38th all-time in MVP shares; back-to-back batting champ; baseball’s first million-dollar player; uncorked maybe the most famous throw home ever; hero on iconic World Series winner; earring trailblazer:
So Baines got in and we all worried about the precedent it would set for players of similar performance level. Parker got in and the response was relatively happy. I think we can conclude that most people think Baines negatively lowered the standard of the Hall of Fame while Parker didn’t. Also, Parker’s career WAR was way lower than the average Hall of Famer’s:
Baines’ career WAR (averaged from three main WAR sites): 40.0
Parker’s career WAR: 39.7
3.
There are two truths about the Hall of Fame revealed by these inductions.
The first (which we take from the Baines case) is that the Hall of Fame is designed to be huge, not by constantly lowering standards but by giving players so many chances to get in (and no way to get kicked out). A player only needs to be approved by one stakeholder group one time and he’s in forever. It doesn’t matter that baseball writers denied Bert Blyleven 13 years in a row; the voting pool in the 14th year overruled them all. It doesn’t matter that the writers denied Lee Smith 15 times in a row, until he fell off the ballot; the Era Committee overruled them all. It doesn’t matter that Ted Simmons got so little support from the writers that he fell off the ballot in one year, or that three different Era Committees made up of three different groups of baseball lifers all rejected him. A fourth Era Committee overruled them all. For that matter, it doesn’t matter than a group of writers voting today would probably reject Jim Rice; the writers who voted 15 years ago overrule all future generations.
As Jayson Stark wrote this year, it isn’t just that opinions change with voter pools, but that wholesale philosophies shift in and out of fashion: Baines got in because career counting stats had been dominant, while Dick Allen got in this year because of a value shift in favor of rate stats (and even era-adjusted rate stats). The general approval of Dave Parker’s induction pretty clearly reflects the emerging preference for peak performance over career averages. And once a philosophy comes into vogue, every player it sweeps in stays in forever.
Baines isn’t an accident, then. He’s the inevitable result of a system that basically just keeps asking the question until it gets the answer it wants. The Hall can only grow.
The second important thing (which we take from the Parker case) is that more players meet the standard than are currently in. I’m not just talking about the extreme cases, Bobby Grich and Kevin Brown or what have you. I mean that there are scores of players who were around as good as Dave Parker, who were memorable and outstanding in unique ways as Parker had been, who were historically significant enough for us to celebrate, who defined extended periods of time in the sport, and who—as Parker just showed!—could be inducted with absolutely no anguish. A lot of those guys have 55, 50, 45, even 40 WAR.
Back when Baines was inducted, Jaffe wrote: “The precedent it sets is nearly unmanageable, if future committees are to take seriously candidates of his level. Why battle over Dale Murphy or Fred McGriff if Harold Baines is the standard?”
But you could rephrase that now with Parker’s induction: The precedent it sets is tremendously liberating, if future committees are to take seriously candidates of his level. Why battle over Dale Murphy or Fred McGriff if nobody’s sad about Dave Parker?
McGriff, incidentally, was one of the Jones 15—one who Jones alluded to in a subsequent tweet: “i think players that had great careers deserve to be in the hall. how many people had 493 bombs 1500rbi. special?????” McGriff has since been inducted.
4.
There’s a third truth revealed when you synthesize these two truths:
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