Womack: The hunt for more Veterans Committee ballots
From SABR member Graham Womack at Baseball Past and Present on March 23, 2015:
“The Veterans Committee never reveals its vote. In fact, committee members are cautioned not to say anything about their meeting. But word gets out.” -Jack Lang in The Sporting News, March 13, 1989
The quest began for me when, in the course of Sporting News archive research, I discovered lists of Veterans Committee candidates for the 1961-64 elections. Heretofore, such lists have been forgotten and thought not to exist. Baseball-Reference.com, which lists full voting results for every Hall of Fame election by the Baseball Writers Association of America since 1936, has only listed names of players inducted by the modern version of the Veterans Committee since its founding in 1953. This is because the Veterans Committee, for almost 50 years, was loathe to release any information.
Since the Veterans Committee reformed prior to the 2003 election, it’s gotten easier to find lists of candidates and voting results. [Baseball-Reference.com doesn’t list this information, though my friend Adam Darowski alerted me that Wikipedia does.] Still, that’s left 45 Veterans Committee elections between 1953 and 2001 unaccounted for. Recently, I decided to do something about this.
Read the full article here: http://baseballpastandpresent.com/2015/03/23/hunt-veterans-committee-ballots/
Originally published: March 23, 2015. Last Updated: March 23, 2015.