Baseball Stew: Unanimous Hall of Fame Pick? Never
I used to think that it was folly not to vote for a player just because so few candidates have gained admittance to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. That is ludicrous. I’ll never understand why a voter would say no one year to a player then switch to a yes vote in a later election. After all, the player has been retired for five-plus seasons and over that period, he certainly didn’t do anything to add to or diminish from his performance.
However, when I read an article by Howie Rumberg of the Associated Press back in September of 2014, I reconsidered the point, but just a bit. Admittedly, I am no fan of Derek Jeter, but that’s mainly because I resent all the hype generated largely by the New York media. You don’t see MLB Network broadcasting any specials on Biggio, salivating over him and his feats like they do Jeter, do you?
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I don’t want to see Derek Jeter become the first player ever to get inducted unanimously to the Hall of Fame. I am not saying that Jeter is unworthy of Hall of Fame status, I am simply arguing that due to some flaws in his game, mainly on defense, that he simply is not nearly good enough to be elected unanimously. If Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, et al weren’t unanimous picks then, in a perverse way, perhaps nobody should be.
By the way, nine voters felt Aaron didn’t deserve membership in the Hall. Nine! All he did was smash a slew of the game’s most cherished and vital records including, of course, the all-time home run record (with 755) as well as the mark for the most total bases and runs driven in! He is still #3 for career hits, proving he could do it all for a long, long time.
Yet despite all of those accolades, Aaron pulled down only 97.83% of the votes, the sixth best percentage ever, but still way too low of a percentage. He deserved 100% of the votes, but he simply didn’t get it.
For those who agree with me about not wanting Jeter to be the first unanimous inductee, don’t worry, he simply won’t get all of the votes. I envision Jeter easily garnering a percentage somewhere in the 90s, probably in the high-90s, four years from now, making him a sure first-ballot Hall of Famer. He will have to settle for that.
If Jeter did become the first-ever unanimous selection, I would think that even his most devoted fans might wonder how a Babe Ruth or a Ty Cobb wasn’t a unanimous pick while Jeter was. By the way, Cy Young, who won a record 511 games, didn’t even get in during the first time he was eligible for induction, let alone earn all of the votes.
And get this: in his first time around, during the initial voting for the Hall (1936), Young received 49.1% of the votes from the BBWAA and 41.7% of the votes from the Veteran’s Committee that same year, something that couldn’t happen under today’s rules. The next year the BBWAA saw fit to give him enough votes to get in, but, incredibly, he got barely enough votes at 76.1%, just 1.1% more than the necessary 75%! What were they thinking?
Even if they wanted only the very best of the game–the Big Five who got in–as the initial Class of ’36, , they were crazy not to think Young was among the elite. Unless I’m missing something, perhaps the voters simply thought, “Let’s not rush it this time around and induct too many guys. We can always put more later.”
In any case, the five charter members of the Hall of Fame were Ty Cobb at 98.2%, Honus Wagner at 95.1%, Babe Ruth with a surprising tied-for-second-place finish for a man who usually ranked first at everything (95.1%), Christy Mathewson at 90.7%, and Walter Johnson who, despite his 417 career wins, only received 83.6% of the votes cast!
Tris Speaker only got 58.8% that year and Rogers Hornsby, who once hit .424 and remarkably averaged more than .400 for a five-year stretch, checked in at 46.5%. Nap Lajoie didn’t fare much better than them with his 64.6%. Other astonishing percentages include Lou Gehrig (22.6%), 373-game winner Grover Alexander (24.3%), Jimmie Foxx, who bashed 534 homers and drove in nearly 2,000 runs (9.3%), and Lefty Grove, a 300-game winner (5.3%).
However, rules for voters have changed over the years, and back when voting first began, ballots could be cast for active players. So we have to remember that some players who got votes, such as Foxx and Gehrig, for example, were still active in 1936 when the first voting took place. The rule requiring a player to be retired for five years before he could be considered a Hall candidate didn’t come along until 1954. And, from 1946 until the 1954 election there was a one-year waiting period for players.
Trivia note: Shoeless Joe Jackson, banned from baseball for life for his involvement in the throwing of the 1919 World Series, still received two votes in 1936.
The sixth and final part of this series on the Hall of Fame will be the next post.