Hall of Fame voting structure that deals with the ignored 66% of the criteria about character.

I didn't make up the criteria but it's there and pretty much everybody ignores 66% of it.

Hall of Fame criteria: 66% about character, which is all but ignored.  Tuesday, January 6, 2015

http://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/bbwaa-rules-for-election

5. Voting: Voting shall be based upon
- the player's record
- playing ability
- integrity
- sportsmanship
- character
- contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.
_____________________________________

So let's stop ignoring.  I'm suggesting a personal evaluation structure that forces a voter or fan to address the character criteria.  Now it's 100% about playing ability and stats.  I'd be fine if that's all that was used but that's not what the rules state.  Instead we have character ignored almost all the time except by some who, almost exclusively concerning performance enhancing drugs (PED), apply some vague sense of personal outrage about cheating: he cheated so I'm not going to vote for him.

Here's my idea, which is pretty simple and fits into the traditional baseball mind for putting things into neat little boxes.  Let's take the six criteria and assign a point value to each using the ever familiar 0 to 10 scale and then add them up: max score 60.  I'm guessing that a candidate would be eliminated from serious consideration if his score was less than 40.  Remember, this is not an absolute system but one that provides much needed structure to the thinking of those considering Hall of Fame candidates.  The Hall board members, who include the recently departed Major Baseball League (MBL) commissioner Allan Huber "Bud" Selig, should be embarrassed that no such structure has been suggested during all the decades that the mushy thinking voting has been meandering all over the place.

Here is a quick application, which I might well revise but which provides a starting point for consideration.

player	record	ability	integrity	sportsmanship	character	contributions to team	total
Ty Cobb	10	10	3	2	4	8	37
Babe Ruth	10	10	7	8	5	9	49
Lou Gehrig	10	7	9	9	9	10	54
Ted Williams	10	10	9	8	8	8	53
Joe DiMaggio	9	10	9	9	7	8	52
Mickey Mantle	9	10	7	9	6	7	48
Dale Murphy	7	8	9	9	9	8	50
Bobby Brown	1	1	9	9	9	1	30
Barry Bonds	10	10	7	7	3	8	45
Roger Clemens	10	10	3	0	2	8	33

I included Bobby Brown as an extreme example of how a really good person with very modest stats might be a legitimate candidate.  Dale Murphy is an in between candidate who won two MVP awards but who had too few big seasons to make it just on stats but whose character might properly augment his stats and constitute legitimate consideration.