Baseball Hall of Fame voting is a strange drug.
It causes reasonable men, high on the Hall, to wage verbal warfare on one another. The combatants doggedly defend their entrenched positions, blinded by the haze of the Cooperstown buzz.
In my own case, Jon Heyman's explanation last week on SI.com of why he did not, again, vote for Bert Blyleven's induction caused me to chase the dragon of Hall of Fame fury.
First, I will preface that this column is not designed to make the case for Blyleven's enshrinement. There are many sabermetric blogs that can weave (and have, repeatedly) sophisticated metrics into that case far better than I. Instead, I choose to put Heyman's backward reasoning on trial, as it demonstrates the kind of lazy sports writing that holds down the level of discussion, and in this case, would keep a worthy Hall of Famer undistinguished. In the middle of his column, Heyman gives the purpose of laying out his rationale (Heyman's words are in bold, mine are in plain face):
If [Blyleven] gets in, I will congratulate him and understand he is probably as deserving as a few pitchers already in the Hall. I just want to explain my vote.
And to be fair to Heyman, his piece is not an ax-grinding hatchet job telling you why Bert Blyleven should not be in the Hall of Fame. It is a hatchet job, though, with the blade firmly planted in the forehead of reason and logic, friends who rarely come around sports journalism anymore because of assaults like the ones below.
I feel compelled to explain my decision, which has been met with criticism from a small but stout and increasingly effective Internet campaign.
Ah yes, the haunting specter of the "Internet" crowd, facelessly lurking in the shadows. Heyman, of course, writes for a magazine that posts his stories on said Internet and even, gasp, tweets. But warm up the your-mother's-basement routine! Heyman leads with the ever popular suggestion that real baseball analysts use quill and parchment, chisel and stone, or whatever newspapers use these days.
While I don't think Blyleven merits inclusion in a museum that honors the top one percent of players all-time, I think he is at worst in the top two percent, one of many borderline cases who just happens to fall on the wrong side of the border.
Much of Heyman's argument centers on what he considers important in determining who belongs in the Hall of Fame. And given that Cooperstown's voting instructions are pretty vague, I have no problem with a man's criteria for voting ... as long as those criteria have something to do with the reality of playing baseball well and are fairly applied to everyone up for consideration. I bring this up because using "the top one percent" is pretty arbitrary, especially when a player in the next percentile gets left out. With that said, if the column ended there, a) it would probably be the world's shortest column and b) I could accept that the man has some kind of objective criterion on which he decides how to vote. But, mercilessly, it doesn't end there...
... the reality is that over 14 years of elections, he has received slightly less than half the votes. His supporters may think it is indisputable, but the voters seem to have been torn for 14 years.
Hopefully, you see the inherent conflict in that conclusion. "Because Blyleven has not gotten enough votes in previous years, he should not get enough this time." Of course, that logic would tell you that after the first vote, the player should be off the table. If the voters are "torn" through year three, why go through another 12 votes?
One Blyleven Internet supporter is such a zealot that he has guessed as to the motives for the non-support, and even on occasion taken to outing non-supporters or ridiculing them, perhaps in an attempt at persuasion.
This, of course, is a complete break in the treaty between "real" print journalists and Internet cyborg-bloggers. And we all know that zealot certainly wrote such nastiness because he is an unemployed, angry 35-year-old living in his mom's basement, right, Jon?
My "no" vote has nothing to do with the Internet campaign, which has only become apparent in Blyleven's final few years on the ballot, and appears to be effective, as Blyleven's totals have risen precipitously.
It is interesting, though, that I have gone from being in the vast majority in my non-support of Blyleven (he received only 17 percent of the vote his first year and actually dipped to 14 in his second) to the vast minority (only 25.8 percent voted against him last year).
I do not completely follow Heyman's insinuation here. Is he suggesting that while most of his fellow voters have taken into consideration new metrics they had not before and changed their votes, he has been able to keep his vote the same in spite of new analysis? Should anyone be proud of this?
In filling out my ballot, I go more by impact than career numbers.
Yep, we're finally on the outskirts of "You Had to Be There" territory...
Part of that is that I am old enough to have seen the entire careers of every single player on the ballot by this point.
This is where Heyman's rolling tumbleweed of nonsense starts picking up speed. Because, unless he has incredible genes or is a vampire, Heyman did not see any of the careers of the vast majority of baseball players. And if I may be so bold as to continue with the assumption of Heyman's mortality, he will miss out on quite a few more on the back end. But by all means, let the sliding scale of Hall of Fame worthiness for players from a few decades be determined by Heyman's infallible neurons.
There is nothing more insulting as a reader than when a writer asks you to believe his analysis because he has seen more than you or "just knows" some other way. Watching sports is not alchemy or mysticism. We watch games, think about the facts, and construct logical arguments. And those logical arguments can reasonably disagree. But those cases have to stand up to the scrutiny of reason. Treating your own brain as a black box that takes in games and spits out impeccable final judgments is misguided and lazy.
And part of that is that I don't think numbers define a player's career. Some players, such as Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, and Ozzie Smith, exceeded their numbers in my opinion.
Could you argue that the word "define" leaves room for some poetic license? Sure. But I have a feeling when you read Joe DiMaggio the digits "5" and "6" start coming up for air from your memory pool, and probably in that order. And even if we don't know from memory what the number is, Cal Ripken is the guy who played a large number of games in a row without missing one.
I can imagine [Bobby Abreu] becoming the next Blyleven, a very good player whose career numbers lead to an Internet campaign on his behalf.
You would think Heyman worked on John McCain's 2008 election staff, as burned as he sounds by Internet campaigns.
If you put Blyleven's lifetime numbers through a computer, the computer would probably determine that he (and Abreu, for that matter) is a Hall of Famer. But the game is about human beings, not just numbers.
These are the moments when I am most concerned about the newspaper and magazine industries in this country. Because to hear Heyman tell it, computers are some kind of cross between a credit card reader and C3PO, taking in numbers and passing judgment on their significance, probably with a condescending English accent. Can't those publications afford actual computers that just get bogged down by spyware and Flash games like the rest of us?
It's about impact. The Hall of Fame is about fame, and Blyleven's greatest fame came not while he was pitching well for five teams over 22 seasons but instead through his extended candidacy and the controversy surrounding it after he had retired.
And we've finally come to the lazy man's last stand: Rather than make a cogent, structured argument for an award, go for the most literal interpretation. If the Hall of Fame is about fame, shouldn't Mark McGwire be in it? Or Morgana the Kissing Bandit? If the Hall of Fame is about fame, shouldn't we just poll the public and see which names people have heard of?
A re-evaluation of his career upward, after the fact, has helped him grow in stature.
Yes, I completely agree! Blyleven played in an era before Ivy Leaguers populated front offices and our tools for evaluating players were restricted to what we could count on our fingers and toes. I'm so glad he came around. Oh, this was supposed to be a negative?
I, however, would argue that he was very good but not quite great. He assuredly dominated batters and games, but he never dominated even one season or certainly a series of seasons. He never finished higher than third in the Cy Young balloting and only four times finished in the top 10, meaning he was never considered among the two best pitchers in his league during his time.
This is the tip of an iceberg of context-less facts Heyman lists to suggest Blyleven was not considered all that great at the time. Do we learn how any other Hall of Famers or contemporaries of Blyleven faired in this same strangely assembled basket of metrics? Of course not!
Blyleven was never considered to be in the category of the game's best pitchers during his career. He simply outlasted almost everyone else and kept pitching effectively into his 40s. He never led the league in wins or ERA, though he did lead the league in home runs allowed twice and earned runs allowed once. He also led in innings twice, complete games, strikeouts and WHIP once apiece, which enhances his case but not quite enough in my estimation.
He only made two all-star teams, which may be explained in part by the fact that he was a slightly better second-half pitcher, but two is an awfully low number for someone who pitched 22 seasons. In other words, he was an all-star less than one of out of 10 seasons, or about average if players were picked randomly.
He only received MVP votes twice, finishing 26th in 1973 and 13th in 1989. According to Baseball-Reference.com, he ranks 936th all-time in MVP shares at 0.09.
... and this is the rest of said iceberg.
Blyleven's backers sometimes will also act astounded or even apoplectic over the fact that some, including myself, support Jack Morris over Blyleven ... with Morris, to some degree, you had to be there. And I don't mean just Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, which was indeed one of the more remarkable and important performances in baseball history, when Morris pitched all 10 innings to win 1-0 and deliver his hometown Twins a championship.
Blyleven is going to be inducted into the Hall of Fame next summer and has had thousands of fans, many of whom are too young to have seen him play much, come to respect his career through his Hall vetting process. It might have been frustratingly long, but Blyleven should feel satisfied with how well his career withstood some of the most intense HOF-scrutiny in recent memory.
The real victim in this debate is Morris, who by the misfortune of being on the ballot around the time of the great Blyleven debate, gets dragged into this without fail. When people like Heyman make the linked cases that Morris should be in and Blyleven should be out, the debate inevitably deteriorates into why Jack Morris, in terms of Hall-worthiness, stunk. Freed from his unwitting role in this referendum, I have a feeling Morris will be the life of the Blyleven induction party this summer.
Morris was arguably the best pitcher in the 1980s. He was the ace of three World Series-winning franchises, and while Blyleven also pitched very well in the postseason, he was never the ace. So it wasn't just sportswriters, it was his own managers who didn't appear to see him as one of the greats of the game.
To this point I have tried very hard not to cherry pick specific instances where Heyman's logic makes him look asylum-bound, but indulge me this one exception. So to be a Hall of Famer, a "great of the game," you have to start game one of your team's post-season series? Then let's start crossing off names. Mark Maddux/Tom Glavine/John Smoltz: which two do not belong? And looking to next season, Roy Halladay/Roy Oswalt/Cliff Lee/Cole Hamels: we have to discount three of their seasons, right? In summary, Heyman tells us that your Hall-worthiness is inversely proportional to the quality of the other pitchers on your team's staff. Oh, okay, Jon.
In the end, the best are not defined by being consistently good and sticking around long enough to post totals beyond their actual impact.
I had to read that closing sentence at least eight times before my brain stopped rejecting it like a mismatched kidney. It reads as if the "not" was accidentally included, right?
What I find most frustrating about Heyman's column is that I think there is a legitimate case hidden behind the improperly cited precedent and bungled evidence collection. What do we value most, long periods of "pretty good" or shorter peaks of "great?" What is the point of diminishing returns for longevity? These are real questions that Hall of Fame voters must consider, and in many cases, they are not easy to answer.
But this is not what Heyman chose to explore (If you have stuck with me this far, I encourage you to read his column in full to ensure that I have fairly represented his arguments). Instead, this piece meanders between his own personal crusade against specific other writers and haphazardly selected exhibits he submits to backup his "no" vote on Blyleven.
We can have high quality debates in sports writing. But we first have to shed these kinds of "old-school" (read: lazy and familiar) fallacies.
Corrie Trouw is the founder of Pigskinology.com.
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