Brilliant Reader Challenge: Hall of Fame Misses and Mistakes

Brilliant Reader Todd challenged me to name the biggest misses and biggest mistakes of baseball writers when it comes to the Baseball Hall of Fame voting. I’m going to tread lightly here, because I firmly believe there are no “mistakes” in the Hall of Fame — not one average player among them — and while I might think it’s a mistake to leave out, say, Barry Bonds or Lou Whitaker, the vote was fairly taken and the results were the will of several hundred baseball writers who think A LOT about the game.

That said, I think Todd’s challenge does give me a chance to clarify some facts about Hall of Fame voting that often get overlooked. As always, I begin with the caveat that you might already know a lot of this stuff.

We’ll begin with the basics: There will be 342 people in the Baseball Hall of Fame after this upcoming induction. That’s probably more than you were thinking … and it doesn’t even include the 47 announcers who have won the Ford Frick Award, the 75 writers who have won the BBWAA Career Excellence Award (formerly known as the Spink Award) or the four people who have won the Buck O’Neil Award. That’s another 125 people (Buck O’Neil himself would be listed twice), bringing the grand total to 467.

That’s a pretty big number, but we mostly don’t concern ourselves with that number because people don’t tend to argue about which umpires or sportswriters have been elected.

OK, so we start to break it down: 271 of the people in the Hall of Fame are players.

Even that feels like a very big number, but again it does cover a lot of ground — 19th Century Baseball, Deadball, the Negro Leagues, etc. What we’re concerning ourselves with today are the players that the Baseball Writers Association of America — the famed BBWAA — have voted in.

And there are only 132 of those.