Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
Kenny you're making a fallacious slippery slope argument. I never suggested drawing the line anyplace close to 1 or 2 years. My point is there comes a time (I could live with 15 years) when if someone hasn't got in or even come close, there's a reason for it. The reason people get in decades after the fact is some combination of dilution, misplaced nostalgia, and boredom.
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Peter,
I absolutely disagree with everything you just said. It isn't a slippery slope argument and a couple of years certainly would be as "fair" as are the current voting standards. Statistics don't get better after a player retires and voting on them quickly allows them to be voted on by people who saw them, who can place those statistics in context of the time in which the player played, and who can also judge them based upon criteria that don't necessarily show up in simple numbers. As I'm sure you are well aware, memories tend to fade. After a while, things that don't show up as numbers tend not to show up at all.
And yes, you do want to draw a line -- some time period (10 or 15 years is what you originally said) after which you have unilaterally determined that they have gotten enough of a "look" and don't need to be "looked at" anymore.
That is the problem with your analysis when it comes to guys like White, Mullane and Dahlen, to name a few. Dahlen last played 25 years before there was a HOF vote, and he was the last of the three I named to play. He really didn't get much of a "look" from anyone who saw him play at all, Yet he shouldn't get another look (under your analysis) because: 1) he didn't get the vote from people who didn't see him play when the voting first began; and 2) then didn't get in during the many years of Veteran's Committee cronyism because he played too early and therefore didn't have a crony on the committee to speak up for him? Now THAT is a fallacious argument and analysis.
We can't change the fact that most of the voters in the initial years didn't see guys like White, Mullane and Dahlen play. But, as sabremetrics increase our ability to view statistics in new (and hopefully better) ways, we can at least make up for that a little bit by re-visiting what those statistics mean in context. And, IMO, that should occur. BTW, were Dahlen, for example, to be elected, I would place him above 8 or 9 of the shortstops already in the Hall. He certainly wouldn't dilute the representation of shortstops in the Hall. If anything, he would bring the average up.