For the record, my vote for Faber was not influenced by RSI.

Example of what to do:

My original ballot was post #132 and #134.

New ballot:

1. Lip Pike
2. George Van Haltren
3. Charley Jones
4. Jake Beckley
5. Eppa Rixey
6. Bill Monroe (was 7)
7. Jimmy Ryan (was 8)
8. Max Carey (was 9)
9. Edd Roush (was 10)
10. Red Faber (was 6)
11. Clark Griffith
12. Tommy Leach
13. Hugh Duffy
14. Wally Schang
15. Dobie Moore (was off)

off now - George Sisler (was 15)

"With an election this tight, we don’t want to elect the wrong person based on faulty data. It’s better to take a day and get it right, as opposed to making a mistake we can’t correct . . . "

For the record, I wasn't implying that Faber is in, just saying better to be safe than sorry, as he is a top candidate - I haven't actually tallied anything myself.

My ballot is unchanged.

No change for me. I had Faber at 16.

For the record, no change needed to my ballot. I use Chris J.'s season-by-season RSI values, but not his adj. W-L records.

Thanks, Joe, for taking this step -- I think it's right that we check on this.

It also keeps the outcome of this election wide open . . .

For the record, my vote for Faber was not influenced by RSI.

Ditto.

No change.

####.

Thanks for pointing it out. FWIW, I did have it correct here.

My guess is that I just screwed up & copied someone else's number in right there (checks - yea, that's Bob Feller's adjusted W-L record - had 'em in alphetical order with similar wins & got careless. Sorry about that.

I'd fix it right now, but the computer I'm on apparently doesn't like blogspot.

If anyone sees any other problems, please e-mail me about them.

No change here.

Generally, I assume that every analysis has typos, including -- maybe especially -- Bill James. I don't think he had a proofreader. I also don't use a single method for rankings.

I looked at Chris's numbers, but they generally confirmed the ballot I had. The change is not enough to dis-confirm it.

Also, not that I'm voting for him either, but were the repercussions of Chris's Faber numbers so great that the effected Joe's view of George Sisler? Maybe the confusion just shook his confidence in Faber's entire race?

My ballot is fine, the only real change is that i want Coveleski to go into my Personal Hall of Merit now instead of Faber. Of course this doesn't change anything for the election since Stan is already in.

No change for me. Faber was off ballot before and remains off ballot.

My God, I knocked the primer-nanny out cold.

No change on my ballot. I'm using his RSI values, but not his Adj. W/L values.

My ballot is unchanged. For what it's worth, in RA+-equivalent records:

(Coveleski 209-134, ++ for big seasons)
Faber 255-199, + for big seasons
RIxie 275-224, no bonus for big seasons
Willis 248-196, +
Waddell 200-129, ++
Cicotte 209-149, +
Griffith, 203-146, +
Shocker, 181-117

Chris,

I'm sure the nanny is too busy searching out obscure profanity like ######## or shitforbrains to worry about anyone using one of the classics.

I'm sure the nanny is too busy searching out obscure profanity like ######## or shitforbrains

Apparently not. Gee, hope I didn't hurt the ol' gal.

My ballot remains the same (Faber on but barely). And, just for fun, ####.

no change for me

No change for me.

No change; I do think it a trifle unsporting to make OTHER ballot changes beyond Faber's position, which is the only thing which should be affected. (yes, Joe, I am a big FO George Sisler, and don't see why this change should knock him off the ballot!) But if everone else doesn't care about this, then I'll go along quietly.e

My ballot is unchanged by this recent development. Thanks for asking, though.

You kind of wish this had happened when the boys in Cooperstown were inducting Morgan Bulkeley insteal of William Hulbert. "Wait! We may have the wrong guy!"

I do think it a trifle unsporting to make OTHER ballot changes beyond Faber's position, which is the only thing which should be affected.

I completely agree... some oppurtunity for potential slickness here. But Joe explained that his ballot had the follow statement in it:

Dobie Moore - I probably should have put him ahead of Sisler. I will correct this next time.

... so I'm not too worried about this particular one.

Wow, the plot thickens.

No f#$%^ing changes for my ballot; I voted for Faber, but not on that analysis..

Well, since balloting doesn't normally close until 8 pm, ANYONE can change any name on their ballots -- as several have. I was not challenging the legality of the change -- just amused.

Meanwhile, although I have no problem with extending the voting if we feel this will be a big problem, the evidence so far is that -- of 18 responses -- 1 ballot change and 17 "no changes". If I can extrapolate from that, no more than two more people will want to change their ballots based on this information, and they are probably both being asked to take their shoes off in an airport at the moment and won't check their e-mails again until after Thanksgiving.

We do not extend voting every time Baseball Prospectus re-figures its WARP values to knock 25% off of all of my favorite candidates and adds 35% to all the candidates I vote against. We probably wouldn't pause voting for a month if Bill James announced a "new improved" Win Shares book coming out next month that adjusts for -- among other things -- how often the home team performs the "wave". As far as October surprises go, this is pretty minimal.

ditto Phillybooster. Not meaning to quash RSI as an important metric, but....I see it as in the noise, no need to extend voting to Tues; may set a poor precedent.

my shitass ballot remains the same

As far as October surprises go, this is pretty minimal.

Drudge is now reporting that Red Faber made a sizeable donation to Chris J. via PayPal immediately following the 1919 World Series.

The latest rumor making the internet rounds is that Faber actually orchestrated the entire Black Sox scandal to eliminate Ciccotte as HOM competition and act as a smokescreen for his nefarious "Pay-for-RSI" scheme.

Clean Sox, my ass!

Well, it knocked Faber down about 2 spots on my ballot - of course, I haven't submitted it yet, so no harm, no foul.

I tend to agree with the delay, though, because this is a very close election, and this came up at the last minute. I'd argue for "better safe than sorry".

I do think it a trifle unsporting to make OTHER ballot changes beyond Faber's position, which is the only thing which should be affected.

I completely agree... some oppurtunity for potential slickness here. But Joe explained that his ballot had the follow statement in it:

Dobie Moore - I probably should have put him ahead of Sisler. I will correct this next time.

... so I'm not too worried about this particular one.

That ends any problems for me, too.

ditto Phillybooster. Not meaning to quash RSI as an important metric, but....I see it as in the noise, no need to extend voting to Tues; may set a poor precedent.

Joe is the boss on this one, so unless he gives me different orders, I say we stick with tomorrow night as the cutoff. I do think, however, if you haven't submitted any ballots by 8 PM EST tonight, then that's it for you. The extension should only apply to voters who had submitted ballots prior to Chris' mistake being known. Sound reasonable?

No change to my ballot (#98-99). Faber remains at #11.

Clearly, balloting still close at 8 p.m. EST, 5 Pacific.
We're only talking about whether to extend to check on possible ballot adjustments via RSI.

I'd lean against the delay, but if it came down to only a few pts, a delay would be hard to argue against, just to be safe. (No comments on where we actually are, please).

For what it's worth, at this point, unless a few people are making MAJOR changes, it just won't matter.

I agree with Matt and I think it is a terrible precedent to set, particularly with so many people keeping concurrent vote tallies. It allows for the appearance of gerrymandering in the future based on the weekly changes to WARP (I metric I don't use for that very reason) or any other metric. I know there is absolutely nothing fishy about Joe's suggestion in this instance, I just think it is a precedent we don't want to set.

My ballot stays the same.

No change to my ballot.

No change to my ballot, and I think we should <u>not</u> change the voting cutoff.

no change to my ballot.

and i vote to not change the ballot deadline for this.

No change to my ballot, either--which mow means we are up to 1 ballot change, 23 no-changes.

I agree with PhillyBooster and Daryn: waiting until tomorrow to tally is overkill. We all know this is not an exact science. If we had started this project in 1995, half of us would be using linear weights as our standard metric; God knows what sabermetricians will think of Win Shares and WARP ten years from now. I am also appreciative of Chris J's work, but to hold up an election tally because of an error just seems a little overreactive.

No change to my ballot.

Either blogspot's having glitches, or there's been a curse placed on any/all computers I come in contact with. A second computer goes all "cannot find server" button when I click on the "save changes" tab.

It'll get fixed eventually. Maybe not this century, but eventually.

Extend the balloting? Wow - not sure if I'm flattered or mortified. Just think what a mess it would've been if I did this too a pitch who didn't have league average run support.

My two cents worth...

1) If this info had come out two days later, we wouldn't redo the vote. When WARP changes every few weeks, we don't redo the old votes. In the future, I'm against changes to ballot deadlines. But now that a new deadline has been announced, let's live with it for this year's vote.

2) I'm against ballot changes in general, except for gross errors (a ballot with two #1's, a ballot with 16 choices, etc.). Submit a final ballot and let it stand until next year, or wait till the last minute if you want to change it through the week. Just my opinion, wondering how others feel about this.

3) John, and several others, have been much more involved in the day to day discussion for the past several weeks than Joe. I'm not sure that "Joe makes the call" is the way we want to handle issues like this in the future.

52 votes so far. No new voters. The only 1938 voter not yet heard from is jimd. I see little likelyhood of there being enough revisions to change the results. Hence, I'm with favre, Sean, PhillyBooster, Daryn, and whoever else has chimed in: I see no reason to delay counting the ballots.

Question for Chris J.: Why have you stopped voting?

"Joe is the boss on this one, so unless he gives me different orders, I say we stick with tomorrow night as the cutoff. I do think, however, if you haven't submitted any ballots by 8 PM EST tonight, then that's it for you. The extension should only apply to voters who had submitted ballots prior to Chris' mistake being known. Sound reasonable?"

I hate to be difficult about this, but no, it's not reasonable. Why shouldn't balloting be extended for everyone? What if somebody reconsiders having Carey over Welch? Why shouldn't someone be able to post tomorrow--what makes the Faber mistake so important that it not only holds up tallying, but ONLY APPLIES to Faber?

Again, I don't mean to be a jerk, and I know that Joe meant well and cares a great deal about this project. But he has now held up results for a close election which, so far, has only affected HIS ballot. That, to me, seems unreasonable.

Question for Chris J.: Why have you stopped voting?

All the sudden it went from feeling like something I wanted to do to something I had to do. No idea why, but more importantly, if it isn't feeling fun, then why do it? So I stopped. If I get interested again, I'll vote again.

Why shouldn't balloting be extended for everyone? What if somebody reconsiders having Carey over Welch?

1) This was an extremely close election.

2) If something major occured today about Carey's statistical standing, then the same thing should apply. Other than today with Faber, how many times has this happened since '98? I may have forgotten one, but I can't remember an election with this problem. IOW, it's not going to happen every election, if ever again.

With all due respect, I think some of you are overreacting, but I'll tell you what I'll do. At 8 PM, if it appears that any revisions would be a moot point anyway, I'll post the results sometime tonight.

what makes the Faber mistake so important that it not only holds up tallying, but ONLY APPLIES to Faber?

The error only applied to Faber.

But he has now held up results for a close election which, so far, has only affected HIS ballot. That, to me, seems unreasonable.

There are two reasons why Joe's decision was reasonable and cautious when he made it.

First, he had _no way_ to know, when the error was discovered, how much impact it had had on voters' assessment of Faber. It appears to have had little effect, but there was also _no way_ to know for sure that the error's lack of impact could be demonstrated prior to the scheduled end of balloting. Given that Joe had to make a decision with little information and under a strict deadline, extending the voting period for voters to make changes if they wanted to was a reasonable precaution.

Second, since this is Faber's first year on the ballot (with everyone's assessment of him fresh and quite open to influence from erroneous data) and since he is clearly a major candidate in a close election, it was distinctly possible that the error could have had a decisive effect on who got elected. In such a case, it is surely reasonable to be cautious.

How would it have looked if, a day after Faber were elected, 15 voters had posted about the error saying, "If I'd known that, I would have voted differently?" There's no recall system for the HoM. Waiting 24 hours to make sure that the error _won't_ affect the outcome of the voting seems a small inconvenience.

It was not so long ago that we someimes waited several days for official results to be posted. Would it be so hard to wait 24 hours?

All that said, since no one has come forward to say that they need to revise their assessment of Faber, if Joe wanted to rescind the extension, I believe that would also be reasonable.

"With an election this tight, we don’t want to elect the wrong person based on faulty data. It’s better to take a day and get it right, as opposed to making a mistake we can’t correct . . . "

IOW Primer has higher standards than the State of Ohio? Wow.

For what it is worth, no change on my ballot.

"With all due respect, I think some of you are overreacting"

I meant no disrespect to Joe or John, both of whom are doing terrific jobs managing the site. I'm just being impatient :)

Let's keep politics out of this thread.
Thanks.

No change here. The Fabe is on my ballot but I hadn't seen Chris' number. There are three things that make a NB pitcher (or player). High peak, long career, and normal curve. Faber hits two out of three and two out of three ain't bad (I should write a song or somethin'). Not quite as many good years as his peak and career length would suggest, but between the two it's more than most this particular era.

I think Joe made a reasonable call at that moment.
No harm done if we wait, yet I suspect he'll see tonight that it's not necessary, and we can just waive it.
All is right with the HOM world.

Let's keep politics out of this thread.
Thanks.

I'm glad it wasn't me this time being the Nervous Nellie about it, Howie. :-D

I meant no disrespect to Joe or John, both of whom are doing terrific jobs managing the site. I'm just being impatient :)

You must be horrible around Christmas time, favre. :-)

Seriously, I wasn't upset with anything said here.

I was going to respond to all of this, but Chris Cobb said just about everything that needs to be said.

I'll only add that it's better to be safe than sorry - and yes, if WARP or Win Shares had a massive revision that drastically changed a top candidate's case for negative (meaning we could elect someone that we otherwise wouldn't), I'd consider holding up an election. Hasn't happened before, but I suppose it still could.

Positive changes are much different, because there is always next year. Negative changes have much more potential to do harm and should be treated with caution.

John made the right call, since the votes weren't impacted much. I had no way of knowing this at the time and I was heading off to sleep.

"Also, not that I'm voting for him either, but were the repercussions of Chris's Faber numbers so great that the effected Joe's view of George Sisler? Maybe the confusion just shook his confidence in Faber's entire race? "

LOL - as other mentioned, I had said early that I goofed and actually had Moore ahead of Sisler but forgot him when I posted my ballot. Since I was changing it anyway for Faber, I figured I may as well correct that as well.

"John, and several others, have been much more involved in the day to day discussion for the past several weeks than Joe. I'm not sure that "Joe makes the call" is the way we want to handle issues like this in the future."

I've been reading, just not posting as much. In the last week, I've actually gotten back on the horse and started posting much more regularly. I've got a lot of coals in the fire and I'm working a goofy schedule, so from time to time my active involvement slips a little, hopefully that's not perceived as disinterest, etc. . . .

I just hopped on to check results, and since they are posted, I dont know if this matters, but I also have no need to change my ballot.

To be clear, my criticism was not of Joe's initial decision -- which as Chris said was a reasonable conservative position. I don't know what lots of people base their rating on, and maybe it would make a difference.

I only made my post after seeing that there was only one ballot change out of 18. It then appeared to me (with the benefit of the hindsight of 18 posts) that an extension was unnecessary, so chose then to suggest that an extension was unnecessary.

Fixed.

Turns out the problem wasn't blogspot or any computer - there was a problem elsewhere in the post (long story) and when I fixed that blogspot let it go through. Man that was annoying.