December 22, 2023 By: Mark Knudson

Who should be doing the voting for baseball’s Hall of Fame? Guys like ME…that’s who

Follow Mark on Twitter/X @markknudson41

The voting and the voters for the Baseball Hall of Fame have become almost a joke.

Not all of them, mind you. But enough of them that it’s time for the Hall to finally step up and revamp the voting process.

A lot.

Since the inception of the Hall of Fame back in 1939, the Baseball Writers Association of America has handled all the voting and everything that goes with it. Regardless of all of the changes going on around them or within the baseball media world, it’s always been the same very very flawed process. Even some of the most tenured and well qualified voting members have asked the Hall to reconsider some of the procedures for selecting who gets enshrined in Cooperstown, New York. To date, the answer has always been a thumbs down to any change.

That needs to change in order for the selection process to retain any and all credibility.

For starters, there are very few baseball “writers” anymore.

Everybody works in multiple mediums. Print, internet, radio, video, podcasting, etc.

Baseball journalists are plentiful.

Yet those who are eminently qualified but aren’t necessarily writers first are disqualified. The guys who cover the game full time, like a blanket, and do it for a living 24/7/365 – like the guys on the MLB Network for example – don’t get membership or a vote. But the local columnist who attends a few games a year at his local ballpark but spends just as much or more time watching and writing about other sports like football and basketball…that guy could very well be a tenured member of the BBWAA and be a Hall of Fame voter.

Ridiculous.

And disgraceful, too.

The Baseball Hall of Fame needs to be better than this. There are a very large number of baseball media members who aren’t “writers” who should be voting…and a lot of them were pedestrian ex-players like me.

Who better than me and my peers to tell you that a guy like Gary Sheffield (who was my teammate but also someone I have serious personal issues with) belongs in Cooperstown? We Average Joes know who got the better of us way more times than not. We know a Hall of Famer when we see, play with and against one.

For example, nearly every member of the on-air team at the MLB Network should be voting for the Hall of Fame. That group includes a whole lot of guys who were average, or justly better than average, big league players and are now full time baseball media members. Nobody better to evaluate a player’s worthiness for Hall induction. Now they’re obligated to do the research, watch the games, study the facts and make determinations. They’re also watching the current group of players – all of them – compete night in and night out, which will come in handy down the road.

Too many of the current voting block don’t watch closely, don’t do their homework, don’t know all the important facts, and carry obvious and blatant biases into the process – especially those based on the east coast. The East Coast Bias is VERY real. For example, one Philadelphia-based writer/voter checked off Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley, but left off Billy Wagner and Todd Helton. He could have voted for 10 but only voted for three. No one who’s done any sort of competent research, or takes the voting process seriously would turn in that ballot. And he’s not the worst. There are guys who turn in blank ballots, too.

Ignorance – and laziness – is not bliss.

Guys like Dan Plesac, Mark DeRosa, Harold Reynolds, Mike Lowell, Hunter Pence, Anthony Recker…and a dozen more…have forgotten more about baseball than many of these kinds of quack BBWAA guys will ever know. The game has been their life.

As for me, despite having been active in sports media – largely as a writer – for more than 30 years now after I retired as a player in 1993, I’ve never been able to gain membership into the BBWAA.

Frustrating? Sure, but there IS a very solid reason for that. As a general sports columnist, I don’t cover baseball full time (like the guys mentioned above most certainly do.) I don’t make my full-time living covering baseball, so I’ve never been accepted by the local BBWAA chapter.

And I actually agree. They’re right. For that reason, I actually shouldn’t be a voter.

But many of my peers should be. Guys who played AND still cover the game on a national, coast-to-coast-including-everything-in-between, 24/7/365 basis. THEY should be making these calls.

It’s time for the Hall to modernize the voting system. Include audio and video baseball media in the voting process. The criteria should be changed to include ONLY media members (not just writers of course) who cover the game full time and base their livelihood on it.

And anyone who returns a blank ballot should never be allowed to participate ever again.

Again, this is not to throw every member of the BBWAA under the same bus. There are a lot of very good, diligent and very talented baseball writers who take the voting process very seriously and do a commendable job. In most cases – but not all – they overwhelm the under-educated and lazy members of their own organization. Thankfully.

But there are still enough egregious errors committed during the entire process every year (for instance, how in the world can the great Dale Murphy, arguably the best player in all of baseball for the decade of the 1980’s, still not be in Cooperstown?) to delegitimize too much of the selection process. Changes need to be made.

The organization has made strides in purging member voters who aren’t covering baseball anymore. That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough to return full legitimacy to the Hall of Fame voting process. Not without serious and substantial change.