Now that we’ve had time to digest the latest results of the Baseball Hall of Fame voting which welcomed two new members, Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyeven, we examine the possible solutions to fixing the voting system.
Last week, controversy surrounded the steroid users or suspected users and therefore they got in some cases surprisingly low percentages, like Jeff Bagwell’s 40 percent and Rafael Palmeiro’s 11 percent.
Now while one hasn’t tested positive for performance-ehnaching drugs (Bagwell), the other has and he deservingly so received a result quite less than McGwire who received roughly 23 percent of the vote his time around.
See the difference? McGwire might be getting more because of his impact in the late nineties but one can easily point to discrimination at the hispanic Palmeiro for getting such low numbers his first time on the ballot and he has over 3,000 career hits, an automatic formula for entrance into Cooperstown versus McGwire’s .263 career batting average.
The bottomline is the Hall of Fame voting system is flawed and many fans don’t know how it really works. For comparison, the voting system is similar to that of the absentee ballot for politicians in that it gets mailed to you for you to vote and send back.
The BBWAA, or Baseball Writers Association of America are currently the only ones who vote for the potential Hall of Famers. However, the current voting system, keeps things too secret without really knowing who voted for who and if they voted at all.
Here are the five solutions to improving the voting system so that it becomes a lot easier to understand and becomes more in tune with the fans who watch the game: