Who's a Hall Of Famer? Baseball Writers Can't Seem To Decide

The 2010 Hall of Fame vote produced some interesting and seemingly inexplicable results.  When faced with the choice between two candidates of similar value, there were several circumstances in which many voters felt comfortable casting votes with the candidate who had a clearly less-impressive career.

The most pronounced demonstration of this was the election of Andre Dawson to the Hall of Fame while Fred McGriff received 21.5 percent of the vote.  Dawson, elected with 420 of the 539 ballots cast, had an impressive career.  Fred McGriff received 116 votes.  Here is how their careers stack up against each other:

                     G         AB        H         HR       RBI         BA       OBP   SLG    OPS     OPS+

Dawson      2,627   9,927     2,774    438      1,591      .279        .323    .482    .806      119

McGriff      2,460   8,757     2,460    493      1,550      .284        .377    .509    .886      134

Every offensive comparison leaves McGriff way, way ahead, both in absolute numbers and when those numbers are adjusted for the era in which he played.  Yet McGriff received 304 fewer votes. 

McGriff led the league in home runs twice, Dawson once.  Dawson was a Gold Glove winning outfielder, while McGriff was a first baseman who never won a Gold Glove.  The difference in defensive performance, though, clearly does not equal the vast gap in offensive performance between the two players. 

Dawson had 10,769 plate appearances, while McGriff had 10,174.  With nearly 600 additional plate appearances, Dawson created 1,518 runs while McGriff created 1,704.  Dawson was responsible for 7,621 outs, while McGriff was responsible for 6,604. 

If McGriff had accumulated the 595 plate appearances that separate him from Dawson, and made out in every single one of them, Dawson would still have been responsible for 422 additional outs. 

The next bizarre choice by the voters this year concerned Don Mattingly and Ellis Burks.  Don Mattingly, in his 10th year on the ballot, was not elected.  He received 87 votes, and will be back next year.  Burks, in his first year on the ballot, drew two votes.  He won’t be back next year.  Yet their numbers do not show much difference.

                     G         AB        H         HR       RBI         BA       OBP   SLG    OPS     OPS+

Mattingly  1,785    7,003     2,153    222      1,099      .307      .358     .471    .830     127

Burks        2,000     7,232    2,107    352      1,206       .291     .363     .510     .874    126

Burks was a Gold Glove winning outfielder, Mattingly a Gold Glove winning first baseman.  Burks had a longer career, with a higher on base percentage and significantly more power.  Even adjusting for the differences in era, Mattingly does not leap ahead.  Yet for many voters, Mattingly was seen as deserving, while Burks was not.

Why these votes?  Why these differences?  

I think many baseball writers don’t look very carefully at the performances of players, preferring to rely on impressions, often left over from childhood, as to who these guys were and what they did to determine whether or not they belong in the Hall of Fame. 

In essence, they are reflecting the judgments of children, frozen and preserved and dragged into the present, 25 years after the actual performance, and not the opinions of those who have studied the actual job that the players did on the field, rather than what was said about them by broadcasters and by other journalists