My Hall of Fame Ballot

[Mondogarage]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Are you contending that the only qualification for the HOF is who has the higher OPS+ or VORP over the length of their career?

[/ QUOTE ]

Certainly the members of the Hall of Fame should match up closely with the list of the best players as best we can measure who the best players were.

[/ QUOTE ]

That would be a fine aspiration. However, the HOF already has a good number of peopel who weren't the best players, using those same measures. It's a subjective vote, and not nuclear physics. I mean, truly, if it's only supposed to be the most precise scientific evaluation that determines who goes into the HOF, then ballots are utterly meaningless, because voting is irrelevant. Just go to the calculator.

Because we *do* have voting means we vote using criteria we're allowed to use, and subjectivity comes into play. I explained what my criteria were. At least one person thinks I'm a moron, but then, that person would seem to be one who thinks all elections are moronic on their face, and that determining election results should be about what is statistically optimal.

[ QUOTE ]
Then why did you bring him up in the first place? When we were debating who should make the HOF, you brought up Bill James, yet he agrees with me. The only way it makes sense is if you believe that someone has a good chance of making the HOF is an argument for them actually making the HOF.

Do you see why I'm confused?

[/ QUOTE ]

My only mention of Tim Raines was that he was really close, in my opinion, but comes up just short. I wasn't drawing a comparison of Raines to Rice, per se, it was you who brought in the direct comparison, but alluding to me diminishing walks.

I suppose to the extent that we're all typing out our ballots, we're all comparing each eligible player to every other eligible player, but not really, because you can vote for more than one.

As for referencing voters and predictions, it's only because this is probably one of the only years in which I think my ballot would end up matching the final results -- not because I think a ballot should reflect what the final results should be.

I'm not saying I vote for Rice and not for Raines because Bill James says Rice is more likely to make it than Raines. I really only brought that up to reflect that even Bill James acknowledges that making it into the HOF is not simply based on an objective sabremetric evaluation of who's best, and that votes may have subjective criteria.