Posnanski: The history of the Hall of Fame’s Veterans Committee
From SABR member Joe Posnanski at JoePosnanski.com on December 12, 2018:
The Baseball Writers blew it. If you want to know why there are Hall of Fame veterans committees at all, and why for 80 years they have somewhat arbitrarily elected people into the Hall (some overdue, some questionable, some plain bizarre), you merely need to go back to the 1940s, when the Baseball Writers Association of America had a chance to make sense of it all.
And they blew it.
This isn’t meant to be too hard on the BBWAA. The truth is, I’m not sure they could have done anything BUT blow it. See, in the beginning, nobody thought much about HOW the Hall of Fame election process should work. The challenge of raising money to build a baseball museum in Cooperstown, getting baseball’s leaders behind it, marketing the place, collecting memorabilia, etc., all of that was so monumental that logistical questions like “Wait, how do we actually decide which players get in?” were dumped into the, “Yeah, we’ll worry about that later” file.
You might not know this — I didn’t know this — but the original plan was for the BBWAA to handle everything.
Read the full article here: http://joeposnanski.com/the-veterans-committee/
Originally published: December 13, 2018. Last Updated: December 13, 2018.