Is the Hall of Fame in trouble? Nahhhhh.

Does “true” mean that every voter’s ballot is public? That has never happened, either (although, to the BBWAA’s credit, the organization now encourages voters to publish their ballots)....  My membership expired last week. Which is neither here nor there, but it just occurred to me.

Edit: I’ve changed the original submitted title as it is misleading.In the article, Rob Neyer mentions that he BBWAA membership has expired. The submitter of the post took that to mean Neyer had his membership taken away. That’s not my read of the situation. Jim

Davis: Smelly Bloggers Admitted to BBWAA

Murray Chass to hold press conference and nose.

On Tuesday, that chasm may have lessened a bit. With the inclusion of Carson Cistulli, Eno Sarris, Sam Miller, and Joe Hamrahi, the online baseball community now has more representation in the BBWAA. I think that is a good thing and I suppose I’m supposed to go on and tell you why. I think it’s a good thing because these gentleman bring qualities to the BBWAA that, stereotypically, haven’t existed much in the past. These guys are well versed in advanced statistics. The know how they work and what they aim to accomplish. They also understand their limits and their margins for error. I would say they know how to responsibly apply new numbers to baseball analysis while also supplementing them with additional sources and methods. Additional methods like, say, scouting reports and video analysis and things like that. Despite popular opinion, it is not required that one pledge pure allegiance to only statistics, or only scouting and eye-seeing in baseball. There exists the possibility, get this, of combining the two (!), of using all available information available to make arguments and draw conclusions. Quaint, I know.

...If we accept that we care about post-season awards, and by extension, the Hall of Fame, then it becomes important that the voters are open-minded, inquisitive individuals, willing to write about, discuss, and argue their votes and selections. Right now, this is not the case. Voters lie in anonymity, sometimes presenting nonsensical ballots with zero explanation or accountability. History swings on the whims of the uninformed and silent. Awards voting and Hall of Fame selecting can only improve and regain respectability if the process becomes open and accessible, understandable and defensible, and what better stewards of such a revolution than people who write about baseball daily on the internet? Members who interact with readers and other writers through Twitter, and comment threads, and Email, and all sorts of other electronic marvels. One is much more likely to take one’s BBWAA responsibilities seriously if one is held to a high communal standard by one’s peers, isn’t one? Writers who live visibly in the light of the internet make better members than those who hide in the darkness of whatever not the internet is (real life)?

So here’s to progress, and the new BBWAA members, and to improving the process. Here’s to taking baseball super, super seriously, but not too seriously, of course.

Murray Chass: A BASEBALL WRITERS’ GIVEAWAY

I posed that question to Jack O’Connell, the long-time BBWAA secretary-treasurer, who announced the awards live on the shows.

“Any answer to my question about our giving away our awards while MLB network makes many thousands off it?” I asked in a second e-mail.

“The answer is that we did not give away the awards,” O’Connell replied. “They are still ours.”

I will give O’Connell the benefit of doubt and figure he misunderstood my question. My “give away” was not to be taken literally, as in giving the network proprietary control of the awards. But the BBWAA gave away the awards for television profit and got nothing in return.

There was commercial money involved, and the network got it all. ...

Using the low estimate, each show would have earned $120,000 for a total of $600,000. Even if the commercials were discounted by 50 percent, the network would have had $300,000 in revenue. ...

What could the BBWAA have done with the money if it had received any from the network? It could have helped families of writers who died or writers who had lost their jobs in a shrinking and decaying industry. Institute a college scholarship program. Make donations to hurricane or earthquake victims.

The BBWAA wouldn’t have to keep any of the money and ruin its nonprofit stratus [sic]. But instead of giving away money, the BBWAA would rather give away its awards.