Hopefully by now, with some downtime over Thanksgiving week, you’ve had time to read my major piece on the Hall of Fame’s upcoming Veterans Committee ballot. If not, you can catch up on Part 1 here (covering Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, John Donaldson, and Steve Garvey), and Part 2 here (covering Vic Harris, Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Luis Tiant). The actual voting will be occurring this weekend, and in the lead-up, we finally got the last piece of information in that puzzle: who the actual sixteen voters from the Veterans Committee will be.
This year’s voting body will consist of Hall of Famers Paul Molitor, Eddie Murray, Tony Pérez, Lee Smith, Ozzie Smith, and Joe Torre; MLB executives Sandy Alderson, Terry McGuirk, Dayton Moore, Arte Moreno, and Brian Sabean; and writers/historians Bob Elliott, Leslie Heaphy, Steve Hirdt, Dick Kaegel, and Larry Lester.
So, why is this relevant? Well, as I mentioned in those preview pieces, a big problem facing the Veterans Committee these days is that the ballot is actually too crowded. The process was neglected for, really, the majority of the last three decades, which allowed for a bit of a backlog of candidates to build up. And on top of that, they keep a stricter limit on vote totals than even the main Baseball Writers ballot, only allowing VC voters to choose up to three of the eight candidates they bring up for each vote (despite the fact that they require every candidate to first be approved by a panel of baseball historians to even reach a vote in the first place).
I made an affirmative Hall case for seven of the eight players up for consideration on this year’s Veterans ballot, but if I were a real voter in the process, I wouldn’t be able to officially vote in the affirmative for even half of them. Because they’re all competing for those same handful of votes, the question moves from “is this player Hall-worthy” to “are they the most Hall-worthy on the ballot”, something that is much more nebulous. Is it better to vote for the best player available? The ones from underrepresented eras or positions or leagues? The ones actually still alive to enjoy the honor? Do players who passed away in recent memory garner more attention, since they’re at the front of voters’ minds? Is it better to focus on players with a chance to get in, even if there are strictly “better” options available? There really isn’t any guidance here, so it’s up to our specific voters to decide.
Of course, there is also the more cynical way to look at this too. Back in 2018, when Harold Baines was elected in one of the more shocking votes in recent memory, many people (myself included) noted that the longtime White Sox star likely had a couple of big boosters among that year’s voters, including longtime White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Baines’s first MLB manager Tony La Russa (plus a few other former teammates and such peppered in).
The more diplomatic way to view this is probably something like “it is helpful for candidates to have someone in the process who might advocate for them”, as a way to help their cases stand out in a crowded process. After all, the VC votes in person, with their sixteen panelists discussing the candidates in a face-to-face meeting at the Winter Meetings. Presumably, there is also some level of politicking that occurs here as well; after all, some of the voting results in recent years have been pretty well-distributed, making sure that some candidates actually reach the 75% mark each time (rather than everyone getting stuck hovering in the 50% range).
So in short, it’s hard to say how much our voters’ identities will matter right now. This might come into play, but so might Dick Allen finishing 1 vote shy in his last 2 Veterans elections, or Vic Harris finishing 2 votes shy in his VC debut back in 2022, or Luis Tiant’s recent passing, or Tommy John, Dave Parker, and Steve Garvey still being alive, or how everyone is feeling on the day of the vote, or so many other things. Not to mention that we can’t really account for all possible biases. For example, I have no read on which way those historians might be leaning; and I assumed all connections between voters and candidates will be positive, when it’s also possible that they hated each others’ guts. This is mostly just looking at storylines that could possibly form in the election, and we won’t really get a sense of which ones will actually happen until the results are announced.
The big thing that I noticed, in a quick glance, is that there are no really big overlaps that stand out here. The Baines case was already an unusual exception, but it’s also possible that Cooperstown has become a little more wary of this as a factor and is working to avoid the issue. In trying to look at the teams represented in the tenures of the voters (Braves, Royals, Orioles, Mets, Giants, Cubs, among others) and the candidates (Phillies, White Sox, Dodgers, Pirates, Red Sox, among others) there are a lot of total mismatches, plus a few more smaller instances (Yankees, Angels, Padres, etc) where the timelines just don’t match up.
The closest thing to an exception is maybe the Cardinals? They appear prominently in quite a few voter resumes, and Ken Boyer has his number retired by the team. Except even that is a bit of a mismatch; Boyer left the team in 1965, several years before Torre arrived in town, and he passed away in 1982, long before Lee Smith played for the team and in the middle of Ozzie Smith’s first season in St. Louis. It’s possible there was some deeper off-the-field connection we don’t know about, or that they’ll feel some sympathy because of the jersey, but I also don’t know that I’d bet on it. Certainly, none of that matches up to the overlap we saw with Baines and Reinsdorf or La Russa.
Are small connections worth anything? It’s less clear, but there are several of those. Torre’s time in St. Louis did overlap with Dick Allen’s. Sandy Alderson acquired Tommy John for half a season in Oakland. Luis Tiant might have been working with the Red Sox or Dodgers front offices while Lee Smith or Eddie Murray were there, although I’m not positive? A lot of it seems like the kind of incidental contact you’ll see across the careers of guys who spend decades around MLB.
If there’s one big beneficiary from that theory of voting, it’s probably Dave Parker. Tony Pérez made his end-of-career homecoming to Cincinnati during Parker’s revival there, and Parker took a one-year stint in Milwaukee at the end of his career while Paul Molitor was still a Brewer. Sandy Alderson also acquired him, but it was for the 1989 A’s that won Parker his second World Series, rather than the random 1985 stint that John was there. And he even overlapped with Eddie Murray during his brief run as an Angel (although Parker was a coach on that team, rather than a player).
Does all of this give him an edge in the voting? It’s possible. In total, it adds up to something like six combined years of overlap, and spread out over a sixteen person voting body… That still mostly seems to fit my description of “incidental contact between baseball lifers”, but it might mean something. And of course, even post-election, it will be difficult to separate that out from other factors, too. As I mentioned, Parker is one of just three living candidates on the ballot this year (something that seemed to benefit Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat back in 2022), and he’s come closer to election than either of John or Garvey. And given that Parker was diagnosed with Parkinson’s over a decade ago, while Tiant’s recent passing is also looming large over the ballot… well, it wouldn’t be surprising if that drove more votes his way than a few years on the same team as voters.
One other thing we can look at here is past voting history of the electorate, although that’s also a little kludgy. Since their switch to this format, Cooperstown has published a list of the panelists for each year’s votes, and they’ll report the total votes for candidates who finish above a certain threshold each year. However, they don’t publish each individual voter’s ballot (and as far as I’m aware, no voters have self-published either), meaning that we’re still doing a bit of inference here. So for example, we can say that Candidate A performed well on the 20XX ballot, and that Voters B, C, and D were all voting in 20XX, meaning it’s likely that they all voted for him., but we can’t actually confirm that Voters B, C, and D all voted for Candidate A in 20XX.
With all of that explanation out of the way, onto the findings! Since the VC’s format shift back in the 2010s, all eight candidates have appeared in at least one election, across a total of eight elections (counting the two different 2022 ballots as separate). Six separate times, they’ve finished close enough to the necessary 12 votes get their final tally reported: Vic Harris (10 votes) and John Donaldson (8 votes) in 2022, Dave Parker (7 votes) and Steve Garvey (6 votes) in 2020, and Dick Allen in both 2015 and 2022 (11 votes, both times).
On the flip side, half of the 2024 electorate has voted in one of the eight elections mentioned, with historian Steve Hirdt voting in seven of them (Ozzie Smith is the next closest, at four). Hirdt, Smith, and Joe Torre were all voters in 2022, meaning there’s a good chance some or all of them have voted for Allen, Harris, and Donaldson, plus historian Dick Kaegel was a voter back in 2015 when Allen finished one shy (Hirdt and Smith were both there as well).
Meanwhile, four voters here (Hirdt, Smith, Murray, and Alderson) were a part of the 2020 vote that went well for Parker and Garvey, but given that their margins were smaller, the inference that all four voted for them seems weaker. Those two finished fourth and fifth, behind the inducted pair of Ted Simmons and Marvin Miller (both with 13 votes) plus the not-returning runner-up Dwight Evans (8 votes).
It’s interesting to know, I suppose, and I think it probably bodes well for Allen at least, but we also quickly run into the limits of this method. For example, like I said, Hirdt was included in every one of these votes; even assuming he broke for every one of these players (already seems like a stretch, given you could completely fill up your ballot just on the guys who finished ahead of them in 2020), how would he rank them against each other on the same ballot? That’s one of the major issues of just smashing together the formerly-distinct era groupings into big “Everything Pre-1980” ballots. Like I said, I think it’s a good sign for Allen, because it seems plausible he has at least two repeat voters here, but I don’t know that this point is much more compelling than “we know he’s finished 1 vote shy twice”; maybe it’s at least an indicator that he won’t have a surprise collapse?
Looking back at my original preview, I ended up going with Dick Allen, Luis Tiant, and Dave Parker as my picks for “most likely to get inducted this year” (with Vic Harris as a potential upset), and after looking over this little bit of new evidence, I do feel a little emboldened by those choices. There doesn’t look like there’s much potential for a Baines-type upset to completely throw our expectations out of whack. Allen probably needs the least extra help to get over the finish line, but nothing here goes against him finally making it. On the flip side, Parker probably needs a little more help, but it does look like there’s some small upside in this set to make that happen, if nothing else in the form of more favorable ears. And there’s nothing really here indicating extra credit for Tiant will happen, but I’m also not sure that any of the factors we’ve discussed are actually more powerful than the traditional sympathies voters show for recently-deceased stars on the Hall’s borderline. Final results will come this Sunday at 7:30 PM Eastern time.
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