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Monday, January 11, 2010

Let's open up the Hall of Fame voting and lower the barriers to entry




Football has a minimum of four maximum of seven entrance requirement each year and the Football Hall of Fame doesn't come a tumbling down.

Open the voting to sports fans - one "fan favorite" gets voted in each year. This will open up fan interest and debate and give the game back to the fans. If by chance the fans vote for a guy that the writers are smart enough to also vote in than one less guy gets voted in.

There is already a five-year waiting period for sportswriters to debate a players worthiness to enter the hallowed halls, why is there this nonsensical 50% in the first year, then this slow rise to the sixties, then a final push that gets a guy to 75% threshold somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth year bullshit.

If it takes that much convincing or debating for a guy to get in, does he really belong there. Really? A decade and a half. It's like being forced to watch the health care debate on C-SPAN, sounds like a good idea in theory, in practice, not so much.

Lower the threshold for entry form 75% to writers to 66%.

End the nonsensical "not on the first ballot" barrier to entry that sportswriters have artificially erected.

Guys do not get any better from the first year of eligibility to the fifteenth. They really don't. They're not playing. The statistics don't change, The statistics of the guys currently in the Hall that are used for comparison don't change. WHAT CHANGES???!!!

And guys, even stupid fans can look at certain guys and say, "Hall of Famer, yes". They are referred to a no-brainers for a reason.

Why year after year the current stock of the best and brightest that the Baseball Writers of Association of America passes on some of these guys and then defends the current system leaves fans to annually shake their their collective heads and wonder out loud that there must be a better way.

It's becoming an annual campaign that is probably as loud and necessary as the drumbeat for a college football playoff system. Perhaps we need a congressional inquiry into why the BBWAA continues its unfair and monopolistic stranglehold on the Hall of Fame voting. Why it's un-_American.

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