Each Hall voting season, ballots are justified atleast partially on past MVP and Cy Young Award voting. I won’t recap a ton of examples but here’s a classic one for illustration, from Sean McAdam about Bert Blyleven:
For a guy who pitched 22 seasons, he received Cy Young votes in four years. Put another way, only once every five years, Blyleven was considered one of his league’s 10 best pitchers. Sorry, but that doesn’t exactly scream “all-time great” to me.
The rationale is that this is a great way to gauge how a player was perceived during his playing days. This rationale is, of course, incredibly flawed. With better ways of evaluating players at our fingertips, I’m not sure why, for example, Alan Trammell’s failure to win an MVP Award (despite deserving it in 1987) should hurt his Hall candidacy. This is not to say that all voters in the past were total fools. Advanced statistics were not readily available, and concepts like positional adjustments and the importance of defense were not prevalent. To their credit, BBWAA members generally have taken steps in the right direction, and it’s likely that the major awards this season will be correctly handed out. Nevertheless, as long as the same group votes on both postseason awards and the Hall, past MVP and Cy voting will likely impact a player’s entrance to Cooperstown.
Ideally, the BBWAA wouldn’t have a say in the Hall voting process. The system stinks but it’s going to be in place for the foreseeable future. Until the day when induction is determined by an objective SABR committee (or something similar) which realizes past mistakes by awards voters are meaningless, the MVP and Cy Young Awards should continue to be scrutinized. Several BBWAA members have modified their voting standards in the Internet age and I like to think public analysis of past mistakes played a small role.
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1. sunnyday2 Posted: November 18, 2009 at 04:00 PM (#3390306)But I have no problem with seasonal awards being part of HoF deliberations either. It's just that to be fair they ought to be used from a "gray ink" standpoint and not just "black ink." Two seconds in the MVP voting, or two fifths, would be preferable to one MVP award.
And yes, be honest enough to admit that the '87 AL MVP vote sucked and give Trammell the credit he is due. OTOH there's always Juan Gonzalez and his two awards. They're not gonna help.
But this is all pretty obvious.
this is not fixed in stone.
Thank you for smashing the question begging-est headline of the day.
So in a nutshell here's the main problem with the HOF and the voting process: In Sean Mcadam's eyes, "Perception" is more important than "Reality". Even though Blyleven finished in the Top 5 in K's 13 times!!!, and the top 10 in ERA+ 12 times times!, he doesn't consider him a top pitcher from the era because he didn't receive enough Cy Young votes?
And realistically Blyleven probably deserved the award in 1973 & 1984.
Overall there's too much weight given to MVP & Cy Young awards anyway.
Orel Hershiser could have very easily won 3 Cy Young awards in row, 87-89. So doing nothing differently other than writers doing a better job voting for the award he would be a HOF??
Fred Lynn probably deserved the '79 MVP. 2 MVP awards would most certainly strenghten his HOF case. How about '81 if Dwight Evans or Bobby Grich won the award. Albert Belle probably deserved 2 MVP awards, Olerud in '93, Tramell could have easily won in 84 & 87, Jimmy Wynn in '74, A Cy Young for Gooden in 84, Appier in '93, An MVP for Raines in '87, Joe Mauer in 06 & 08, Santo in 66.
So players doing nothing differently in their career wouldn't suddenly seem more "Hall Worthy" because of an award or two?
Oh piffle. Positional adjustments have been around forever. You think nobody ever noticed that SS don't hit as well as 1B? It would be fair to say that, to date, the BBWAA has done a lousy job with positional adjustment when it comes to the HoF, but they do make some positional adjustment. Besides saying it wasn't prevalent lets them off the hook for under-adjusting.
If you clicked through and read the whole thing you might have seen this disclaimer at the bottom of the post:
If the awards "matter" and are treated as important, they will have an impact on future HOF voting because they are considered important.
I dont know if that is clear, but if everyone stopped paying attention to the awards and they ceased to matter, then the HOF voters will eventually stop paying attention to them as much also because they ceased to matter (even with the awards and HOF voters being the same people).
Something similar is true of Award Share leaderboards. The all-time leaders in MVP Shares are Bonds, Musial, Williams, Mays, and Mantle. Well, that tells me zero of interest. But Eddie Murray tied for 21st with 3.33 Shares is somewhat interesting, given that Murray doesn't have a great deal of Black Ink, never actually won an MVP, and is seen as more of a career than a peak HOF/HOM member. Murray, as those of us who followed his career at the time knew, drew an unusual amount of respect from everyone in the game – maybe slightly illusory, but it's there to be accounted for, at least. That Murray has so many more MVP Shares than Cal Ripken (2.3) or Robin Yount (1.8), who were two-time MVPs with long careers, is at least of mild interest.
Well, about a 100-word post's worth of interest.
A big part of what it says is that the 1926 NL had one of the weakest MVP candidate fields ever, which was further thinned out by the fact that repeat winners weren't allowed, and Vance and Hornsby had won the previous two awards.
That was only true for the AL. NL winners could repeat, as Hornsby did in 1929.
Edit: And Bob O'Farrell was a perfectly cromulent MVP. Caught nearly every day for the pennant winning Cardinals and hit a 112 OPS+.
Did not know that (obviously). My bad.
Edit: And Bob O'Farrell was a perfectly cromulent MVP. Caught nearly every day for the pennant winning Cardinals and hit a 112 OPS+.
Yes. But the weak field undeniably helped.
Put another way, if you're a HOF voter, why in the world would OTHER people's opinion matter? The caveat is if you take the "Hall of Fame" to be literally what the name implies. But if, like most people, you view it as the best players, you should be able to think for yourself.
Catchers were still held in high regard in that era. Bill James wrote in the BJHA about Johnny Bassler, a catcher for the Tigers in the '20s, who in successive years finished sixth, seventh, and fifth in the AL MVP voting. Ray Schalk, playing for a .500 White Sox team that finished fifth in the AL, came in third in the vote in 1922, and Steve O'Neill, playing for a Cleveland team that barely beat out the White Sox for 4th, tied with Bassler for sixth that same year.
-- MWE
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