@MarkKnudson41
College athletics isn’t the place you’d think to turn these days to find the right kind of “modeling” for much of anything within your organization. College sports are a complete mess at the moment, with the governing body – the NCAA – having seemingly abdicated all oversight responsibility, leaving no rules or guardrails for much of anything that’s going on, especially in football and basketball.
But college football and basketball have done one thing very well over the years which could and should be modeled. The have very carefully selected and qualified people serving on committees that choose who participates in their championships. The NCAA Basketball tournament has been around since 1939 and has grown incrementally, especially over the past half century. The members – currently numbering 12 – rotate in and out on five-year terms, but the mission always stays the same: Pick the best teams (currently the best 68) to participate in March Madness. Since 2014, the College Football Play-off committee has labored for more than two months to pick the four best teams to participate in that play-off at the end of the December. Like it’s basketball counterpart, the 13-person football committee also rotates selectors, typically in three year terms.
Regardless of whether or not these groups get every single selection right (and they often don’t in the eyes of most experts) they do make their selections very carefully, based on a consensus of well qualified observers including former players, coaches, administrators and even former media members. No one lands on these committees simply due to tenure or because of the platform they have. These committee members all watch all the games and carefully study players and teams before reaching painstaking conclusions.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was opened, ironically, the same year – 1939 – that March Madness was born. Those who run the baseball hall could learn a thing or two from the way these two collegiate committees conduct business and how they make important, life altering selections.
Baseball’s Hall of Fame selection process is horribly flawed and painfully outdated. This year, the more than 400 voters who pick the Hall of Famers could only agree on one eligible player – David Ortiz – to add to their museum. A single player out of packed ballot of 30 eligibles. Several voters sent back blank ballots. They almost got their wish.
The voting block – eligible members of the Baseball Writers Association of America – have been tasked with doing the voting and ultimate selecting of membership since the Hall’s inception. This despite the tried and true journalistic standard of reporting the news, not making the news. There are numerous writers and even one prestigious newspaper – the New York Times – that’s uncomfortable enough with the process to refuse to participate. While there are plenty of writers who value the opportunity to be part of the voting, it’s clear that there likely even more BBWAA members who wouldn’t lose any sleep if the task were taken off their homeplate, so to speak.
There are also many many people – within the game and in other types of media – who are qualified to help make these selections but who have no say so…and many many more that have a vote who are not qualified to use it. The BBWAA has more than a few members who have either moved away from full time baseball coverage or left the business. Some drop off, others remain with a vote – regardless of how many baseball games they’ve watched over the past decade.
A horribly flawed process.
There IS a better way – the college selection committee model – that could be used to select who gets immortalized in baseball’s ultimate museum.
The Hall of Fame could very easily change the policy, and decide to put together say, a 15-person committee consisting of three retired Hall of Fame players, three former Managers, three retired baseball executives, three former umpires and three media members. Give them the list of ALL eligible players – no 10-year clock to worry about – and let them do all the digging and research they need to do in order to determine whether or not a player is worthy of induction. Such a committee could correct many of the wrongs the BBWAA has left in it’s wake, such as the omissions of players like Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Roger Maris, Dick Allen, Dale Murphy and others without whom you could not accurately tell the full story of the game in a particular era.
And tell the story is what every museum is supposed to do.
Let the committee determine if the PED era players – Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and others – were Hall of Fame worthy, or if the nebulous “character clause” is really grounds for keeping guys like Curt Schilling out of Cooperstown while leaving Ty Cobb and Kenesaw Mountain Landis in.
This is much closer to the model used in professional football and other sports to select membership. And those sports have a lot more members in their Halls.
Baseball isn’t selection committee-less. Along with the BBWAA, the Hall uses four subcommittees under the umbrella of the “Veterans Committee” to take up the cases for induction of players that have failed to garner enough writer support but may still be Hall worthy. This year, six new members, who failed to garner enough BBWAA support, were chosen for induction by the “Early Era” and “Golden Days” subcommittees. Seems like there’s a healthy disconnect in there somewhere.
Simply put, moving away from the BBWAA voting – much to their relief – and to a selection committee model would be the best way for baseball to fix something that is clearly broken.
Be sure to catch Mark Knudson and Manny Randhawa on the Park Adjusted Rockies Podcast each week, available on all major Podcast platforms.