Earlier this week, I began posting my thoughts on this year’s Veterans Committee Hall of Fame ballot, which includes Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, Steve Garvey, Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant. Those first four were covered in Part 1 (along with a general overview of the election rules), which you can read here if you missed it. Part 2 picks up right where that one leaves off.
Vic Harris: In my blurb on John Donaldson, I mentioned that the pitcher finished fourth place on the 2022 Early Baseball Ballot, behind eventual inductees Buck O'Neil and Bud Fowler. However, you may have noticed that I conspicuously did not mention the third place finisher. Top runner-up status went to Vic Harris, who finished just two votes shy of induction.
That seems like the type of thing that would set him up for an easy path to induction this year, but I’m really not sure how combining the Early Baseball Ballot into one big “Everything Before 1980” Ballot will play out. After all, you may notice that Harris and Donaldson are the only candidates here who would have come from that Early Baseball set; everything post-1950 would have been classified as either “Golden Days” or “Modern Baseball”. That seems like an easy way to spread the votes even more thin than they already are, and I don’t know how that will play out.
So, what makes Harris’s case so special? My elevator pitch for him would be “the Joe Torre of the Negro Leagues”, someone who had a strong borderline case for the Hall as a player, but whose managerial success would easily get him the rest of the way. He was a seven-time All-Star (across six different seasons) in left field, so obviously fairly good and quite popular with fans of the league. His career stats weren’t too shabby on the whole: 738 hits, 31 homers, a .303/.370/.428 slash line, a 112 OPS+, 10.6 WAR. If you play around with Negro League career stat leaderboards, he’s not usually at the top, but he’s almost always in the top 20s or 30s.
But in 1936, he took over as player-manager of the Homestead Grays, unquestionably one of the powerhouses of the scene, and in eleven seasons at the helm, led them to 7 pennants in the Negro National League (most in Negro League history, and tied for fifth all-time among major league managers) plus an additional runner-up season. He also added a World Series win on top of that in 1948* against the Birmingham Black Barons. His career record of 547-278 puts him behind just Candy Jim Taylor (955-991) for most wins by a Negro League manager, and his .663 winning percentage is behind just Hall of Famer Bullet Rogan (.698) for highest ever (minimum 315 games).
*It’s worth noting that, due to the more chaotic status of the Negro Leagues, there was no World Series for his first four pennants; winning the league the upper limit. There were championship series in 1942 and 1945 though, which the Grays lost to the Kansas City Monarchs and Cleveland Buckeyes, respectively. Additionally, the Grays won two more World Series in 1943 and 1944, but Harris was not managing those years, just playing part-time while working in a factory for World War II (although the aforementioned Candy Jim Taylor was who took over for him).
Like I said, the managerial stuff alone looks to be enough to get him in. If it happens, I just hope his playing days don’t go totally unacknowledged, since the Hall sometimes has a tendency to overlook multi-faceted careers. And Harris does seem to be the type of player to get inducted eventually, since the Hall seems to be willing to honor more Negro League stars… the real question is “will it be this year”, since again, we have just three votes to spread across a jam-packed eight-person ballot. And Harris has been dead for over four decades now, so he’s not exactly the most urgent case.
While I’m on this subject, though: there was a question that I had about Negro League players in the Hall of Fame that I was curious about, and I thought that the answer that I found was an interesting enough framing of the subject that I just had to work it into this column. The seven different Negro Leagues that were granted official major league status ran from 1920 to 1948, and in those 29 seasons, they produced 33 different players who are now in Cooperstown. And several of those 33 (like Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson) were clearly inducted for their time in the NL or AL, rather than the Negro Leagues themselves.
Meanwhile, the American and National Leagues, during that same 29-year time frame, are represented by no fewer than 100 different Hall of Famers. As above, there are some players who appear on this list who are mostly thought of as Negro League players (like Satchel Paige or Willard Brown), but there appear to be fewer of these exceptions on this list than the previous one. And if you try shifting this 29-year window, you find similar results: 1900 to 1928 saw 95 AL/NL players reach the Hall, while 1950 to 1978 sits at 92 (with a high chance to add a few more names this year).
I try to look at numbers when deciding Hall of Fame cases, and understanding how (often incomplete) Negro League stats translate over to American and National League numbers can be tough, but looking at a wider context like this is illuminating, I think. I don’t know that there’s a “right” ratio for voters to be aiming for here, but I do think that the sheer size of that disparity means that the current totals are undershooting Negro League representation by some amount. And Harris definitely seems like an easy pick for the type of guy you’d induct to give a fuller representation of those leagues.
Tommy John: I’ve talked a lot about how Hall of Fame voters have become way, way too narrow in their consideration of starting pitchers (I even wrote a whole mini-series of articles about this subject over the summer), and I think John is the type of guy they’ve overlooked. Maybe never unquestionably the best, but very, very good for a long time, which feels like the type of thing the Veterans Committee is built to recognize. A 288-231 record, 2245 strikeouts, a 3.34 ERA and an adjusted ERA+ of 111. Maybe he’s a compiler, but what he compiled was still above-average for almost all of his extraordinarily-long career, and so he compiled a lot, in a way that basically no one else does. And of course, there’s also the historic surgery that he’s become the namesake for. Even if I think his stats are good enough, I’d be silly not to mention that this is a pretty great tiebreaker, for those on the fence.
One interesting thing about John’s case, which I’ve really come to appreciate over the last few years as starting pitching has continued to transform into a short-term opener, is just how many innings he threw. His 4710.1 innings are 20th all-time in baseball history, and six of the guys ahead of him started pitching in the 1800s. The only post-1900 guy with more innings who isn’t in Cooperstown already is Roger Clemens; outside of Clemens and John, the next closest misses (guys like Frank Tanana, Jamie Moyer, and Dennis Martinez, all of whom I’ve seen thrown around as somewhat-misguided comps to John) were all still 500-750 innings shy of John, and posted noticeably worse adjusted ERA+ marks (106, 103, and 106, respectively), so I think it’s fair to say John actually kind of stands from any comparison apart here.
Baseball-Reference’s version has John at 61.6 WAR. Fangraphs actually likes him much more, to the tune of 79.4 Wins, mostly because John also did a good job of limiting home runs compared to the rest of the league (his career HR/9 rate of 0.58 was about three-quarters of the league rate over the same time). Given his long career, that had to be skill rather than chance, and it feels like another interesting quirk that raises my appraisal of him even more.
Tommy John spent fifteen years on the BBWAA ballot, topping out around 30% (and this was directly in the era I covered in my recent series, when I noted that voters turned to almost exclusively inducting pitchers with 300 wins and 3000 strikeouts). He’s made four Veterans Committee ballots since then, but never performed well enough to have his vote totals reported. And as I mentioned in Part 1, he’s the oldest of the three living players on this year’s ballot, by several years. I wonder if he’ll get a bump similar to the ones Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat when they were inducted back in 2022 (when they were two of the three living players on the eight-person ballot), or if they’ll continue ignoring John like they did Dick Allen and Luis Tiant (more on that in a second).
Dave Parker: To, once again, be rather direct: I think Dave Parker is definitely the second-worst player on this ballot. I’m not sure that I’d put him above the other six, but he very easily takes the direct comparison to Steve Garvey. Parker edges him in almost everything, from the most basic of categories to the more advanced: hits (2712 to 2599), homers (339 to 272), RBI (1493 to 1308), stolen bases (154 to 83), OPS and OPS+ (.810/121 to .775/117), bWAR and fWAR (40.1/41.1 to 38.0/37.8), Black Ink (26 to 12), even World Series titles (2 to 1). The only areas where Garvey leads are 4 points of batting average and in some award counts. Although even then, it’s easy to just chalk the latter up to Garvey’s extreme popularity at the time, which has not held up; Parker’s 1978 MVP, for instance, looks much more deserving than Garvey’s win, and his Gold Gloves make more sense (Parker was a great fielder in his early days, although his poor fielding as he aged gave a lot of that value back).
I don’t know that Parker would be a great Hall of Fame pick; you can see from some of those totals that he’s a little on the low side in a lot of stats, especially the value ones. But he’d certainly be an understandable one, especially for the Veterans Committee. You may have noticed that his Black Ink (which tracks times leading the league in major stats) is right in line with the Hall average, 26 versus 27. His Hall of Fame Monitor rating is also 125, well above the 100 mark that serves as “likely future Hall member”.
It’s also not hard to start dicing up the traditional stats in a way that reflects well on his Hall case. For instance, his 2712 hits are twelfth among eligible hitters not in the Hall, and the guys ahead of him include a few guys being kept out for other reasons (Pete Rose, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, and Rafael Palmeiro) plus Carlos Beltran (who seems to be on track to go in soon). He’s tenth in RBIs among the same group, and again, the guys ahead of him are largely guys going in soon (Beltran and Jeff Kent, who I imagine is a quick VC selection once he finally reaches the ballot) or PED guys who aren’t going in soon (A-Rod, Bonds, Palmeiro, Gary Sheffield, Manny Ramirez, and Sammy Sosa). His 121 OPS+ is high enough that it fares similarly (tied for 13th among unelected eligibles with 8000+ PA, behind Kent and the same half-dozen PED guys, plus a few more), and since Parker played so long, you can up the Plate Appearance limit to 10,000 and give him some more impressive results (he’s 52nd all-time in OPS+ and 27th among outfielders, with that higher PA minimum).
This marks Parker’s fourth Veterans ballot, after 15 BBWAA ballots where he never quite reached 25% of the vote. He last appeared in 2020, taking fourth place with seven votes (just over halfway to induction), behind just the two inductees and runner-up Dwight Evans (who did not make this year’s ballot, for some reason). In addition to setting Parker’s highmark in Hall voting, it was interesting to see him outperform ballot contemporary Steve Garvey for the first time. Like Garvey, Parker’s vote totals were likely hurt for off-the-field reasons, as he was a major player caught up in baseball’s cocaine scandals in the 1980s.
Unlike Garvey, Parker’s off-the-field life post-scandal has looked a lot less pitiful, which probably makes people more willing to give him some extra credit. He would pass his drug tests post-scandal, and bounced back from that and a rash of injuries to revive his career in Cincinnati (including a runner-up finish in the 1985 MVP race that was… probably a little aided by his comeback story). Since retiring, he’s done a lot of work fundraising for Parkinson’s disease, which he was diagnosed with in 2012 (in addition to some coaching around the league, and also owning multiple Popeyes Chicken locations for several decades; that latter one’s probably more unique or interesting than actually relevant to his Hall case, but I still wanted to share that factoid).
I don’t know that I would vote for Parker right out of the gate, but I also wouldn’t mind him going in. It probably helps that he’s definitely not the worst player on the ballot, but I also think his strong early career and impressive late career comeback are a compelling story, although there’s probably a little bias there (my dad grew up rooting for the Pirates of Parker’s era, and I lived in Pittsburgh for a few years). And really, if I were a part of the actual Committee’s in-person discussions this year and it looked like Parker could build some support, I wouldn’t mind switching my vote to help him get over the line. I’d rather vote for other players on this ballot, but I’m ultimately fine with him getting inducted, and if there was a chance to clear up the Veterans logjam a little and give another player a chance to celebrate while he’s still alive, then even better.
Luis Tiant: There was a brief time, between the induction of Bert Blyleven in 2011 and Roger Clemens joining the ballot in 2013, where Tiant was arguably the best eligible pitcher not in Cooperstown. Even now, he’s still towards the top of that list: a 229-172 record, 2416 strikeouts, a 3.30 ERA and 114 ERA+ over 3486.1 innings, a 1.199 career WHIP, 66.1 bWAR, and 54.8 fWAR. He had a solid peak, albeit one broken up a little by injury and having to rebuild his delivery, and wound up leading the AL in ERA twice (1.60 in 1968 and 1.91 in 1972). Basically, in any way you try and break down Hall of Fame pitchers statistically, Tiant looks more or less like the median one or just a hair below, which makes him a stellar Veterans Committee candidate. The actual voting hasn’t played out like that for him, though.
I recounted this during my “Rethinking Hall of Fame Pitching” series, but Luis Tiant might have had some of the worst luck in ballot history.* Tiant debuted on the 1988 Hall of Fame ballot, which was fairly standard for its era: one new big name, Willie Stargell, who was elected on his first ballot, plus a half-dozen eventual Veterans Committee selections sitting around down-ballot. Your average freshman class of Hall candidates each year would be one big star who’d get voted in, maybe a second one on a good year, but also maybe the rare dry year with nobody. And with most induction classes being one or two guys, that would leave some space for other players to build momentum for their cases over several years. Tiant topped 30% of the vote in his first election, which was not a bad starting place for being one of those kinds of guys.
*Back in those articles, I applied that title to Jim Bunning, but I’ve wavered on this since; after all, Bunning’s support slammed into a wall in his 12th year on the BBWAA ballot, but at least he was close enough to 75% that the Veterans Committee could get off their rears and induct him in a somewhat-timely fashion. Tiant, meanwhile, saw a reasonable amount of support on his first ballot, but it was all immediately burned away, and his case has never really improved on that opening performance.
You might also remember in that series that I proposed Cy Young Shares as a Hall metric; I did so in part to help Tiant (and guys like him) with more statistical arguments for their case. But unfortunately, Cy Young ballots weren’t really an option for him until he was in his 30s. Before that, each voter just picked their one single Cy Young winner and that was it, so I couldn’t point to stuff like a strong runner-up finish for his stellar 1968 season, because there simply was no runner-up that year; Denny McLain just won all twenty votes. Tiant did finish tied for fifth in the AL MVP voting that season, though, which feels at least comparable.
But it’s hard to convey just how quickly and completely the Hall ballot went from “reasonable” to “overloaded” starting in 1989, Tiant’s second year of voting; we were finally seeing the domino effects of MLB’s multiple 1960s expansions reach Cooperstown. You could go through the ballots year-by-year on Baseball-Reference if you’d like, but that can be a lot to take in. So I tried to summarize some of the more shocking details instead:
Who ya got? Results will be announced at 7:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 8 on MLB network.
— Bruce McClure ⚾ (@brucemcclurenh.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 11:54 AM
[image or embed]
Vic Harris: In my blurb on John Donaldson, I mentioned that the pitcher finished fourth place on the 2022 Early Baseball Ballot, behind eventual inductees Buck O'Neil and Bud Fowler. However, you may have noticed that I conspicuously did not mention the third place finisher. Top runner-up status went to Vic Harris, who finished just two votes shy of induction.
That seems like the type of thing that would set him up for an easy path to induction this year, but I’m really not sure how combining the Early Baseball Ballot into one big “Everything Before 1980” Ballot will play out. After all, you may notice that Harris and Donaldson are the only candidates here who would have come from that Early Baseball set; everything post-1950 would have been classified as either “Golden Days” or “Modern Baseball”. That seems like an easy way to spread the votes even more thin than they already are, and I don’t know how that will play out.
So, what makes Harris’s case so special? My elevator pitch for him would be “the Joe Torre of the Negro Leagues”, someone who had a strong borderline case for the Hall as a player, but whose managerial success would easily get him the rest of the way. He was a seven-time All-Star (across six different seasons) in left field, so obviously fairly good and quite popular with fans of the league. His career stats weren’t too shabby on the whole: 738 hits, 31 homers, a .303/.370/.428 slash line, a 112 OPS+, 10.6 WAR. If you play around with Negro League career stat leaderboards, he’s not usually at the top, but he’s almost always in the top 20s or 30s.
But in 1936, he took over as player-manager of the Homestead Grays, unquestionably one of the powerhouses of the scene, and in eleven seasons at the helm, led them to 7 pennants in the Negro National League (most in Negro League history, and tied for fifth all-time among major league managers) plus an additional runner-up season. He also added a World Series win on top of that in 1948* against the Birmingham Black Barons. His career record of 547-278 puts him behind just Candy Jim Taylor (955-991) for most wins by a Negro League manager, and his .663 winning percentage is behind just Hall of Famer Bullet Rogan (.698) for highest ever (minimum 315 games).
*It’s worth noting that, due to the more chaotic status of the Negro Leagues, there was no World Series for his first four pennants; winning the league the upper limit. There were championship series in 1942 and 1945 though, which the Grays lost to the Kansas City Monarchs and Cleveland Buckeyes, respectively. Additionally, the Grays won two more World Series in 1943 and 1944, but Harris was not managing those years, just playing part-time while working in a factory for World War II (although the aforementioned Candy Jim Taylor was who took over for him).
Like I said, the managerial stuff alone looks to be enough to get him in. If it happens, I just hope his playing days don’t go totally unacknowledged, since the Hall sometimes has a tendency to overlook multi-faceted careers. And Harris does seem to be the type of player to get inducted eventually, since the Hall seems to be willing to honor more Negro League stars… the real question is “will it be this year”, since again, we have just three votes to spread across a jam-packed eight-person ballot. And Harris has been dead for over four decades now, so he’s not exactly the most urgent case.
While I’m on this subject, though: there was a question that I had about Negro League players in the Hall of Fame that I was curious about, and I thought that the answer that I found was an interesting enough framing of the subject that I just had to work it into this column. The seven different Negro Leagues that were granted official major league status ran from 1920 to 1948, and in those 29 seasons, they produced 33 different players who are now in Cooperstown. And several of those 33 (like Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson) were clearly inducted for their time in the NL or AL, rather than the Negro Leagues themselves.
Meanwhile, the American and National Leagues, during that same 29-year time frame, are represented by no fewer than 100 different Hall of Famers. As above, there are some players who appear on this list who are mostly thought of as Negro League players (like Satchel Paige or Willard Brown), but there appear to be fewer of these exceptions on this list than the previous one. And if you try shifting this 29-year window, you find similar results: 1900 to 1928 saw 95 AL/NL players reach the Hall, while 1950 to 1978 sits at 92 (with a high chance to add a few more names this year).
I try to look at numbers when deciding Hall of Fame cases, and understanding how (often incomplete) Negro League stats translate over to American and National League numbers can be tough, but looking at a wider context like this is illuminating, I think. I don’t know that there’s a “right” ratio for voters to be aiming for here, but I do think that the sheer size of that disparity means that the current totals are undershooting Negro League representation by some amount. And Harris definitely seems like an easy pick for the type of guy you’d induct to give a fuller representation of those leagues.
Tommy John: I’ve talked a lot about how Hall of Fame voters have become way, way too narrow in their consideration of starting pitchers (I even wrote a whole mini-series of articles about this subject over the summer), and I think John is the type of guy they’ve overlooked. Maybe never unquestionably the best, but very, very good for a long time, which feels like the type of thing the Veterans Committee is built to recognize. A 288-231 record, 2245 strikeouts, a 3.34 ERA and an adjusted ERA+ of 111. Maybe he’s a compiler, but what he compiled was still above-average for almost all of his extraordinarily-long career, and so he compiled a lot, in a way that basically no one else does. And of course, there’s also the historic surgery that he’s become the namesake for. Even if I think his stats are good enough, I’d be silly not to mention that this is a pretty great tiebreaker, for those on the fence.
One interesting thing about John’s case, which I’ve really come to appreciate over the last few years as starting pitching has continued to transform into a short-term opener, is just how many innings he threw. His 4710.1 innings are 20th all-time in baseball history, and six of the guys ahead of him started pitching in the 1800s. The only post-1900 guy with more innings who isn’t in Cooperstown already is Roger Clemens; outside of Clemens and John, the next closest misses (guys like Frank Tanana, Jamie Moyer, and Dennis Martinez, all of whom I’ve seen thrown around as somewhat-misguided comps to John) were all still 500-750 innings shy of John, and posted noticeably worse adjusted ERA+ marks (106, 103, and 106, respectively), so I think it’s fair to say John actually kind of stands from any comparison apart here.
Baseball-Reference’s version has John at 61.6 WAR. Fangraphs actually likes him much more, to the tune of 79.4 Wins, mostly because John also did a good job of limiting home runs compared to the rest of the league (his career HR/9 rate of 0.58 was about three-quarters of the league rate over the same time). Given his long career, that had to be skill rather than chance, and it feels like another interesting quirk that raises my appraisal of him even more.
Tommy John spent fifteen years on the BBWAA ballot, topping out around 30% (and this was directly in the era I covered in my recent series, when I noted that voters turned to almost exclusively inducting pitchers with 300 wins and 3000 strikeouts). He’s made four Veterans Committee ballots since then, but never performed well enough to have his vote totals reported. And as I mentioned in Part 1, he’s the oldest of the three living players on this year’s ballot, by several years. I wonder if he’ll get a bump similar to the ones Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat when they were inducted back in 2022 (when they were two of the three living players on the eight-person ballot), or if they’ll continue ignoring John like they did Dick Allen and Luis Tiant (more on that in a second).
Dave Parker: To, once again, be rather direct: I think Dave Parker is definitely the second-worst player on this ballot. I’m not sure that I’d put him above the other six, but he very easily takes the direct comparison to Steve Garvey. Parker edges him in almost everything, from the most basic of categories to the more advanced: hits (2712 to 2599), homers (339 to 272), RBI (1493 to 1308), stolen bases (154 to 83), OPS and OPS+ (.810/121 to .775/117), bWAR and fWAR (40.1/41.1 to 38.0/37.8), Black Ink (26 to 12), even World Series titles (2 to 1). The only areas where Garvey leads are 4 points of batting average and in some award counts. Although even then, it’s easy to just chalk the latter up to Garvey’s extreme popularity at the time, which has not held up; Parker’s 1978 MVP, for instance, looks much more deserving than Garvey’s win, and his Gold Gloves make more sense (Parker was a great fielder in his early days, although his poor fielding as he aged gave a lot of that value back).
I don’t know that Parker would be a great Hall of Fame pick; you can see from some of those totals that he’s a little on the low side in a lot of stats, especially the value ones. But he’d certainly be an understandable one, especially for the Veterans Committee. You may have noticed that his Black Ink (which tracks times leading the league in major stats) is right in line with the Hall average, 26 versus 27. His Hall of Fame Monitor rating is also 125, well above the 100 mark that serves as “likely future Hall member”.
It’s also not hard to start dicing up the traditional stats in a way that reflects well on his Hall case. For instance, his 2712 hits are twelfth among eligible hitters not in the Hall, and the guys ahead of him include a few guys being kept out for other reasons (Pete Rose, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, and Rafael Palmeiro) plus Carlos Beltran (who seems to be on track to go in soon). He’s tenth in RBIs among the same group, and again, the guys ahead of him are largely guys going in soon (Beltran and Jeff Kent, who I imagine is a quick VC selection once he finally reaches the ballot) or PED guys who aren’t going in soon (A-Rod, Bonds, Palmeiro, Gary Sheffield, Manny Ramirez, and Sammy Sosa). His 121 OPS+ is high enough that it fares similarly (tied for 13th among unelected eligibles with 8000+ PA, behind Kent and the same half-dozen PED guys, plus a few more), and since Parker played so long, you can up the Plate Appearance limit to 10,000 and give him some more impressive results (he’s 52nd all-time in OPS+ and 27th among outfielders, with that higher PA minimum).
This marks Parker’s fourth Veterans ballot, after 15 BBWAA ballots where he never quite reached 25% of the vote. He last appeared in 2020, taking fourth place with seven votes (just over halfway to induction), behind just the two inductees and runner-up Dwight Evans (who did not make this year’s ballot, for some reason). In addition to setting Parker’s highmark in Hall voting, it was interesting to see him outperform ballot contemporary Steve Garvey for the first time. Like Garvey, Parker’s vote totals were likely hurt for off-the-field reasons, as he was a major player caught up in baseball’s cocaine scandals in the 1980s.
Unlike Garvey, Parker’s off-the-field life post-scandal has looked a lot less pitiful, which probably makes people more willing to give him some extra credit. He would pass his drug tests post-scandal, and bounced back from that and a rash of injuries to revive his career in Cincinnati (including a runner-up finish in the 1985 MVP race that was… probably a little aided by his comeback story). Since retiring, he’s done a lot of work fundraising for Parkinson’s disease, which he was diagnosed with in 2012 (in addition to some coaching around the league, and also owning multiple Popeyes Chicken locations for several decades; that latter one’s probably more unique or interesting than actually relevant to his Hall case, but I still wanted to share that factoid).
I don’t know that I would vote for Parker right out of the gate, but I also wouldn’t mind him going in. It probably helps that he’s definitely not the worst player on the ballot, but I also think his strong early career and impressive late career comeback are a compelling story, although there’s probably a little bias there (my dad grew up rooting for the Pirates of Parker’s era, and I lived in Pittsburgh for a few years). And really, if I were a part of the actual Committee’s in-person discussions this year and it looked like Parker could build some support, I wouldn’t mind switching my vote to help him get over the line. I’d rather vote for other players on this ballot, but I’m ultimately fine with him getting inducted, and if there was a chance to clear up the Veterans logjam a little and give another player a chance to celebrate while he’s still alive, then even better.
Luis Tiant: There was a brief time, between the induction of Bert Blyleven in 2011 and Roger Clemens joining the ballot in 2013, where Tiant was arguably the best eligible pitcher not in Cooperstown. Even now, he’s still towards the top of that list: a 229-172 record, 2416 strikeouts, a 3.30 ERA and 114 ERA+ over 3486.1 innings, a 1.199 career WHIP, 66.1 bWAR, and 54.8 fWAR. He had a solid peak, albeit one broken up a little by injury and having to rebuild his delivery, and wound up leading the AL in ERA twice (1.60 in 1968 and 1.91 in 1972). Basically, in any way you try and break down Hall of Fame pitchers statistically, Tiant looks more or less like the median one or just a hair below, which makes him a stellar Veterans Committee candidate. The actual voting hasn’t played out like that for him, though.
I recounted this during my “Rethinking Hall of Fame Pitching” series, but Luis Tiant might have had some of the worst luck in ballot history.* Tiant debuted on the 1988 Hall of Fame ballot, which was fairly standard for its era: one new big name, Willie Stargell, who was elected on his first ballot, plus a half-dozen eventual Veterans Committee selections sitting around down-ballot. Your average freshman class of Hall candidates each year would be one big star who’d get voted in, maybe a second one on a good year, but also maybe the rare dry year with nobody. And with most induction classes being one or two guys, that would leave some space for other players to build momentum for their cases over several years. Tiant topped 30% of the vote in his first election, which was not a bad starting place for being one of those kinds of guys.
*Back in those articles, I applied that title to Jim Bunning, but I’ve wavered on this since; after all, Bunning’s support slammed into a wall in his 12th year on the BBWAA ballot, but at least he was close enough to 75% that the Veterans Committee could get off their rears and induct him in a somewhat-timely fashion. Tiant, meanwhile, saw a reasonable amount of support on his first ballot, but it was all immediately burned away, and his case has never really improved on that opening performance.
You might also remember in that series that I proposed Cy Young Shares as a Hall metric; I did so in part to help Tiant (and guys like him) with more statistical arguments for their case. But unfortunately, Cy Young ballots weren’t really an option for him until he was in his 30s. Before that, each voter just picked their one single Cy Young winner and that was it, so I couldn’t point to stuff like a strong runner-up finish for his stellar 1968 season, because there simply was no runner-up that year; Denny McLain just won all twenty votes. Tiant did finish tied for fifth in the AL MVP voting that season, though, which feels at least comparable.
But it’s hard to convey just how quickly and completely the Hall ballot went from “reasonable” to “overloaded” starting in 1989, Tiant’s second year of voting; we were finally seeing the domino effects of MLB’s multiple 1960s expansions reach Cooperstown. You could go through the ballots year-by-year on Baseball-Reference if you’d like, but that can be a lot to take in. So I tried to summarize some of the more shocking details instead:
-In the fourteen-year run starting with 1989, comprising the rest of Tiant’s time on the BBWAA ballot, a total of 28 eventual BBWAA inductees appeared on the ballots, or a clean two-per-year (plus another 4 VC selections, although that figure is also likely to rise with time). Years with one or fewer big debuts vanished, and years with three or more stars became more common.
-Despite that, the number of actual inductees in this timeframe didn’t rise much compared to the pre-1989 days. Only 23 players were inducted by the Writers from 1989 to 2002, much fewer than the two-plus-per-year that were joining the ballot each season.
-Eight pitchers with 300 wins and/or 3000 strikeouts joined the ballot in this span. Less than half of them were first-ballot picks, and their average number of years on the ballot before induction was over four.
-Despite that, the number of actual inductees in this timeframe didn’t rise much compared to the pre-1989 days. Only 23 players were inducted by the Writers from 1989 to 2002, much fewer than the two-plus-per-year that were joining the ballot each season.
-Eight pitchers with 300 wins and/or 3000 strikeouts joined the ballot in this span. Less than half of them were first-ballot picks, and their average number of years on the ballot before induction was over four.
That last point was maybe my biggest take-away from the history side of that series: Hall voters were completely inundated with strong choices for starting pitchers in the nineties, and rather than just electing them all as they appeared, they began comparing them directly against each other and treating big milestones as bare minimums for candidates rather than outstanding achievements. Starters who didn’t reach those marks used to get inducted with some frequency, and now they were instead being totally ignored, unable to even reach the 5% of the vote needed to stick around.
Guys like Tiant and Tommy John who at least had solid career totals, could still stick it out for fifteen years, but cracking even a third of the vote became a difficult task for everyone else. This would have been an ideal time for the Veterans Committee to act, since their entire purpose should be to step in and correct things when the Writers mess up… except right as this cohort aged off the regular ballot, the VC was having lots of its own issues, electing just three players total from 2002 to 2017. Tiant appeared on six different VC ballots from 2005 to 2018, and his reported vote did not break 25% in that time span.
Things have turned around for the VC since then, as they seem to have somewhat fixed their total logjam, with that 2018 result serving as a bit of a turning point. However, Tiant did not survive long enough to see the benefit. He passed away this October, with 2018 still his most recent vote. I feel like his recent passing makes him a favorite for this year’s election, which feels especially perverse since he was vocal about not wanting to be inducted posthumously, saying it felt disrespectful to only honor a player once they died.
I’ve believed that Tiant should be in the Hall of Fame for years now, and I still think he should be, but seeing him inducted so quickly after he died despite being so against that… well, it would certainly cast a dark pall over the experience. But what if this is his best chance at actually getting inducted? It just sucks, all around.
So, with all eight players covered, where does that leave us?
First, let me reveal my ballot: as I’ve said, I would say that I’m in favor of seven of these players being inducted, which is four too many for an actual ballot. Since the actual Veterans election tends to be an in-person discussion, I would probably try and game out which of those seven had the best chances of induction, and throw my support their way.
However… I’m not a part of those discussions, so I should probably pick my final three just for the sake of this column. It’s hard to say no to Dick Allen, after falling one vote shy two ballots in a row. Also, given that I’ve stressed the importance of trying to induct players while they’re still alive, I think Tommy John takes on a higher priority this time, given that he’ll be 82 at next year’s ceremony.
The third one is tricky. I still like Ken Boyer’s case a lot, but I just can’t see any X-factor that puts him over the edge in this group. Dave Parker, like John, is still alive, but he’s also about a decade younger, so it feels a little less urgent at the moment. Luis Tiant may have the clearest shot at induction he’s ever had, but like I said in his section, it feels cruel inducting him so quickly after he passed away, despite his wishes; I think I’d prefer to at least give him an election cycle first? I think I’d go with Vic Harris right now, given that Negro League stars are still underrepresented in Cooperstown. It’d be great to see some activity on that front while the re-classification is still somewhat recent, and it would be great if he could capitalize on his momentum from his last election. But this feels like, if I were actually a voter, I’d want to reach out to Tiant’s family first or something before locking it in.
And how do I think the actual Veterans Committee will vote? We don’t know the specific voters yet (which can make a difference, just ask Harold Baines), so my general gut feeling is… I think this is finally the year for Dick Allen, he’s just gotten too close too many times. I think they also decide to induct Luis Tiant, regardless of how he felt about it; they just have too long of a track record of inducting players right after they pass away, and I guess seeing their name in the news inspires strong nostalgia or regret or something.
And I think they pass over Harris, because throwing the Early Baseball guys onto a ballot with more recent stars probably hurts them. Instead, if they go for a third name (they don’t always, the votes can be tight, so this could just wind up a close runner-up)... I think they go with Dave Parker, actually. The 2020 ballot marked his first strong finish in ages, and with no Dwight Evans this time, Parker becomes something of a leading runner-up. Plus, I think the voters are at least somewhat conscious of honoring players who are still alive (between Tiant’s passing and their 2022 results), and I think the actual voting body will be more inclined to break in Parker’s favor than Tommy John’s. I might reconsider this if the actual make-up of the voters looks especially favorable for a specific candidate, but for now, that’s who I’m expecting.
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