You may recall that last month, I got my first article published at National Review Online last month arguing that Curt Schilling shouldn't be excluded from the Baseball Hall of Fame because of his support for President Trump and his conservative politics generally.
NRO editor Nicholas Frankovich has weighed in on The Corner and takes issue with my argument:
A few problems dog that theory. One is that Schilling did better in the 2017 voting than he’s done on average in his five years of eligibility. Remember, the procedure is that every baseball writer with a vote selects up to ten names from a list. Most writers select fewer than ten. In 2017, the percentage who included Schilling among their picks was lower than in 2016 but higher than in 2013, 2014, and 2015, his only other years on the ballot. (Frankovich produces a graph).
You could come up with a hundred theories for why the dips (2014, 2017) and the spike (2015–16) occurred when they did. Aaron correlates the second dip, but not the earlier dip or the spike, with Schilling’s political activism. I don’t see it.
Frankovich swings and misses. I devoted two paragraphs to correlating the first dip:
Yet when the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) unveiled the results of the 2017 Hall of Fame balloting on January 17, Schilling was selected on only 45 percent of the ballots. (Each voter may select a maximum of ten players.) That was well short of the 75 percent required for induction. What was eye-popping was that his share of the vote in 2016 was 52.3 percent. Of course, this isn’t the first time Schilling’s vote total has dropped. In 2014, his second year of eligibility, his vote declined from 38.8 to 29.2 percent. That was not attributable to politics. Rather, the juggernaut of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas, on the ballot for the first time, depressed the vote of other players. Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines, who will be inducted in July, along with Ivan Rodriguez, saw their vote drop 5.3 and 6.1 percentage points, respectively. Four other players saw their vote drop off in double-digit percentage points (Lee Smith, 17.9 percent; Alan Trammell, 12.8 percent; Larry Walker, 11.4 percent; and Edgar Martinez, 10.7 percent). The same cannot be said for 2017. The only other player whose vote total declined this year was Billy Wagner, at a statistically insignificant 0.3 percentage points.
It is worth noting that while Schilling’s vote fell 7.3 percent this year, Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, whose storied careers were tainted by legal problems that arose from alleged PED use, gained 8.9 percent and 9.5 percent and increased their totals to 54.1 percent and 53.8 percent, respectively. It is also worth noting that Schilling, Clemens, and Bonds have five years left on the Hall of Fame ballot. When they reached the ballot in 2013, who would have thought that Clemens and Bonds would have a greater chance of enshrinement than Schilling?
Aside from Bonds and Clemens, six other players had vote increases of 5% or more Three of those players (including 2017 Hall of Fame inductees Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines) had double digit vote increases. If other players had experienced a significant drop on this year's ballot then Frankovich might have a valid point.
Frankovich also argues that Schilling is a borderline Hall of Famer. He is on firmer ground here. The problem is that several prominent baseball writers have publicly stated that Schilling's politics, not his accomplishments on the diamond is their reason for excluding him from Cooperstown such as Dan Shaughnessy and Jon Heyman with many others following their lead. With President Trump not likely going away anytime soon there is a good chance that politics will trump pitching where it concerns Schilling's Hall of Fame prospects. This would be most unfortunate.
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