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You could have found the one dumb ass idea that Schmidt managed to omit.

Hell no.

Hell. No.

Schmidt is an idiot, Craig had it right in his assessment.

Get over it.

The earth is 6000 years old.

Submit your suggestion to Hardballs Talk.

Thin the voting herd. Cap it at 300-400 voters or something based upon some clear criteria. Number of games attended over the last 10 years and last 5 years; articles written; background check (essential if morality/character will be a criteria – cheat on your wife – not fit to judged another’s moral fitness); etc. Come up with 10 or so.

Then maybe take it to a smaller committee of players, coaches, scouts gm’s and, yes fans. Maybe 50 people total. Require them to elect at least 3. Holdovers with 50% or so come back for five years max. Over 75% you’re in no matter if there are 3 or 10.

We get a Hall that reflects the game.

The reason the vote-for-life provision is there is so a writer who covered a player could be able to vote on them through their entire time on the ballot, which could (obviously) be 20 years after the player’s retirement. That’s very different than voting on a single-season award for an active player.

So offer a limit to the amount of time a writer has to vote from the point they stop covering baseball on a regular basis: say, 25 years. That would satisfy the desire of the BBWAA to have the writers who covered those players doing most of the voting while preventing writers from voting many decades beyond their knowledge of the sport.

Well worded Craig. While flawed, it could be tweeked and improved, but it’s the best we got?

Sounds just like “Democracy is the worst form of gov’t, except for all the others”.

The HOF is nothing more then a post-baseball popularity contest. For players in larger markets who have gotten a ton of press and fanfare in their careers, the argument for them to go into the HOF becomes much easier then someone who played their whole career in Kansas City or out west somewhere like Seattle. The boarderline players who are chummy with the media ALWAYS have a better chance, since they are the only ones who get a vote. Why not have qualified media members who are active baseball experts vote, along with the some retired baseball executives and players? It’s a novel idea, but the system is always bigger with the HOF then the purpose. You have a bunch of old cranky guys carrying voting eligibilty that haven’t covered baseball in years and may know less about things then you or I. It should be about electing the best players the game has ever seen into an a select group.
There are no defined standards, or voting critera. You’ll see a player almost every year get into the HOF with a million people posting stat lines of players who have no chance of getting into the HOF that are nearly identical.

There were tons of comments about your great piece about Bonds and Clemens needing to go in right away. Mine basically stated that I was in full agreement with it.

That said, one aspect that needs to be dealt with is how the current Hall of Famers feel about PED users, even if that feeling is totally simplistic, omits what THEY did, and is unworkable.

The many loser writers who vote with delusions of grandeur are just another of the many groups that make it difficult to do a good job.

It’s going to take someone able to deal with the crap from ALL of the groups that care about this in order to move towards something that makes sense.

Writers, Hall of Famers, uber-moralistic commenters, owners, management, current players with no sense of history – these are just some of the various groups that need to be dealt with.

Of course, that has no bearing on the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of Schmidt’s comments.

Another possibility is some panel of experts thing, but I have no idea how such a thing could ever be workable because, dude, you gotta pick experts and that’s a fight in and of itself.