MLB Hall of Fame: That challenging first-year eligibility
How is it that the election to the MLB Hall of Fame is so devilishly difficult in a player’s first year of eligibility? Into the murky past…
Younger baseball fans may wonder why the first question that comes up whenever the annual articles about the MLB Hall of Fame inductees are written is: Who will the first-ballot inductees be? The related questions are always: Will there be any at all, and if so, are those inductees worthy?
Why does the presumption exist that some years there will be no first-ballot players who will be getting plaques in the central tourist attraction in the Hall?
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Very early on, basically, the Baseball Writers of America Association (BBWAA), the Hall voters, seemed to decide as a group that the MLB Hall of Fame was never going to be a place where any old Gino Cimoli could have a plaque.
Cimoli was a perfectly good MLB outfielder, once an All-Star, and a fairly important part of a World Series championship team, but the BBWA seemed very, very determined to make sure that the Cimolis of MLB would never slide into the Cooperstown shrine undeservedly.
After the first MLB Hall of Fame class was voted on in 1936, in fact, no one could foresee there would be a wait of more than a quarter-century for another first-ballot Hall of Famer.
After that year, no other MLB player was voted into the Hall in his first year for 26 years – until Bob Feller was eligible in 1962. This fact was partly obscured by the four, separate annual votes for the Hall before the first induction ceremony in 1939, as well as by the induction of executives and managers at the same time.
Of course, few likely gave any thought to the notion of first-ballot player inductees for quite a few years, but some eyebrows must have raised at the second-year crowd, those who followed Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson.
MLB Hall of Fame: That challenging first-year eligibility
Surely, someone asked why 1937 inductees Nap Lajoie, Tris Speaker, and Cy Young weren’t in the previous year’s class. Right?
Well, in 2019 Jim Thielman, who covered MLB for 16 years, gave a somewhat thorough answer, confusedly broken down among four (or 15) separate points that should be reviewed by people who want to be totally befuddled about this matter. Chief among his points were these, specifically related to Young, but with a wider application:
- Young was “victimized because no one had a road map as to what the Hall of Fame was for.”
- “There was not even stipulation, let alone agreement, that the inductees needed to be great baseball players.”
- (and 4.) Supposedly, in 1936 five players were to be picked from before 1900, and five after that date. There was a “disagreement” in the “pre-1900s voting,” and Young’s 20th-century voters placed him sixth – his career was evenly split between the two centuries, roughly speaking. (It may also be worth noting that Lajoie also played four years in the 19th century, and Wagner played three.)
- (or 5.) Somewhere in the middle of all that, what Thielman described as “brawling in the street, giving wet Willies or whatever the hell happened,” the original ten inductees were reduced to a consensus five.
Had enough?
MLB Hall of Fame: That challenging first-year eligibility
The larger point is the unique, 26-year gap between the famous first-five inductees and Feller’s acceptance by the MLB Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.
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Whatever the precise details, the BBWAA lost interest in voting into the Hall any eligible, “great” players the first time their names appeared on the ballot until John F. Kennedy was in office.
The rules, of course, changed regarding eligibility, but the five-years-since-retirement stipulation was in effect for eight years before Feller’s vote. So, for eight years, players five years gone from the game were eligible, and no one was voted in his first year on the ballot.
Between 1936 and the mid-50s, besides Lajoie, Speaker, and Young, Baseball-Reference.com lists Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, and Joe DiMaggio as “notable” retired players not elected to the MLB Hall of Fame in their first-eligible years.
Among those who retired within five years of 1962 or after that point, they named Roy Campanella, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Eddie Mathews, and Harmon Killebrew as other ignored, but worthy, first-year candidates. Whatever Feller’s accomplishments, the BBWAA remained a difficult group of voters indeed even after they relented on him.
Next. MLB history: Forgotten stars of the current NL East teams. dark
After the first, initial gap of 26 years between first-year eligible players, the next “big” gap with no first-year inductees didn’t occur until the five-year stretch between 2009 and 2014.