Is Cooperstown's Selection Process as Biased as it could be?

[bonarae]

IMHO as this article may suggest...

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/baseball-hall-of-fame-why-alex-rodriguez-manny-ramirez-omar-vizquel-will-never-get-voted-into-cooperstown/

[Gil Dobie]

Same bias Bonds, Sosa, Clemons, McGwire aren't in the hall. PEDs for these guys, off field shenanigans for Visquel. The magic of PEDS, or else Judge is the single season home run champ, and people remember how great Griffeys back to back 56 homer seasons were.

[ngineer]

Whenever an entity has vague criteria to 'measure' the qualifications of any candidate, personal bias will reign supreme. The Baseball HOF has 6 criteria listed: a player's record, his ability, his integrity, his sportsmanship, his character and his contributions to the team(s) he played on. Other than the player's stats (his record) there are no other categories of measure that are objective. The rules do not state that any one of these six categories are to be weighted more or less than the others. So, for some, the stats may carry 80-90% of the value in voting, whereas for others it may only carry 30-40%. Some may not use any consideration for some of the criteria. If a former players 'fails' at any one of the categories, is that disqualifying? The rules don't say, although it is implied that since they are listed, all six categories are to be 'considered'. Since it is a "Hall of Fame" and not "Hall of Infamy", one would think that serious violation of the core rules of baseball (i.e. gambling on baseball, performance enhancing drugs, etc.) would be sufficient for a voter not including a player on the ballot of whom there is strong evidence of violating core categories of eligibility. These would certainly include "integrity, sportsmanship and character--half of the measuring categories. A lot of the names mentioned as having been 'barred' by a large majority of the voters were unquestionably some of the most productive ballplayers the game has seen. But, their statistics speak for themselves and will forever stand on their own. However, to be included in the Hall of Fame does not require one to be a saint; but, to at least been an honorable person who played by the rules and didn't cheat. Perhaps some of these standards in today's society are no longer in vogue. So, yes, bias is at play in the voting, but it has always been and will forever be unless someone comes up with a metric for the subjective characteristics.