BPP: The 50 best players not in the Hall of Fame, version 3.0

From SABR member Graham Womack at Baseball Past and Present on January 2, 2013:

Recently on Twitter, someone asked my friend and fellow baseball writer Dan Szymborski how many people he’d enshrine off this year’s Hall of Fame ballot. I had to speak up. “Like 15,” I tweeted. It’s been a long time since the ballot has had this glut of talent, maybe 50 years if we go back to the 1960s when the Baseball Writers Association of America instituted modern voting rules and the Veterans Committee enshrined several players, greatly thinning the ballot. Perhaps the time has come for another rule change or mass induction.

This year at least, however, the opposite may happen. With the BBWAA a week away from announcing its picks for enshrinement this summer, I wouldn’t be stunned if no players are selected. No consensus picks seem to exist among the writers, with Baseball Think Factory’s monitoring tool having first-year candidate Craig Biggio leading in the early count at 71.6 percent of votes, which would place him just shy of the 75 percent needed for induction. The BBWAA continues to grapple with what to do over players suspected of using steroids, while holdover candidates like Tim Raines and Alan Trammell also remain on the ballot. It’s a mess.

All this in mind, I offer something to ease the confusion.

For the past three years, I’ve run an annual project at my website having people vote on the 50 best players not in the Hall of Fame– not 50 players who need to be enshrined tomorrow, necessarily, just the 50 best not enshrined. The 2010 debut of this project was a great success and last year’s project only built on this, taking on a sabermetric slant. I’m proud to say this year’s version is our best work yet, with 149 voters– as many as the first two years combined– and a crew of great writers to tackle the players involved. Writers include the son of one of the players we’re honoring as well as a BBWAA member who explains why he voted Barry Bonds (and Roger Clemens) for Cooperstown.

 

Read the full article here: http://baseballpastandpresent.com/2013/01/02/50-baseball-players-hall-fame-version-3-0/

Articles were contributed by, among others, SABR members Joey Bartz, Brendan Bingham, Bill Deane, Dave England, Dan Evans, Eugene Freedman, Joe Giglio, Stacey Gotsulias, Bill Ivie, Sean Lahman, Julian Levine, Dalton Mack, Cyril Morong, Peter Nash, Bill Parker, Jacob Pomrenke, Gabriel Schechter, Aaron Somers, Cecilia Tan and Joe Williams.



Originally published: January 2, 2013. Last Updated: January 2, 2013.