Every year, when the Hall of Fame votes begin to be announced online, and I compile my unofficial ballot, I follow the guidelines that the BBWAA has established. Two rules in particular have been a nuisance and should be changed. The ten-vote limit and the ruling that if you don’t receive five percent vote totals, you fall off the ballot should be removed.

THE DISRESPECTED 5%

The ruling that if a player doesn’t receive five percent of the vote, they fall off the ballot is ridiculous. Sure, the argument can be made that if you don’t receive five percent, you will likely not reach the 75% required for induction. But during the height of the “steroid era” ballots, many players that could be Hall of Fame worthy would fall off the ballots without a genuine opportunity for analysis. Players like Bernie Williams, Jim Edmonds, and Kenny Lofton fell off the writer’s ballot because of this rule. I’ll use Bernie Williams as the main proposition against this rule. Bernie was a significant presence in the middle of the order of four World Series championships. Williams was also a five-time All-Star, a four-time Gold Glove winner, and a batting title and Silver Slugger under his belt, with an ALCS MVP.

Let’s place the “should have been” candidacy of Williams to that of Hall of Famer, Kirby Puckett. Williams ended with 2336 hits, and Puckett had 2304. Kirby hit 207 home runs, while Bernie hit 287; regarding RBIs, Williams had 1257, while Puckett had 1085. And if you want to boil it down to OPS+, Kirby ended up at 124, while Bernie finished with a regular-season score of 125 in OPS+. And when examining bWAR, Kirby finished at 51.2, and Bernie finished at 49.6. It’s an easy comparison, but we never got the honor and the privilege to make such a comparison because Bernie fell off the ballot. This rule needs to end right now.

TEN TOO FEW

The other rule of Hall of Fame voting that has bothered me to no end is that the writers are limited to only being allowed to vote for ten players. Obviously, the argument that can be made is that many of the “old guard” writers don’t even fill out all ten spots on their current ballots. However, as many new writers are being given the opportunity to cast their votes and the “get off my lawn” voting writers start to fall off the ballot, we are seeing more ballots get maxed out. While this was a much more difficult problem during the aforementioned “steroid era” ballots, there are still a significant number of players who missed out on being voted for because of the ten-player limit. If we remove the ten-player limit, we could have even more players voted into the Hall of Fame.