Thinking about the whole Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame issue, some players (I’ve know I’ve heard Brooks Robinson’s name) have said that they would effectively resign from the HOF if Rose was admitted. This got me to thinking: “Okay, what we’d do is just set up a whole new HOF having nothing to do with the old one, Cooperstown, etc., and gain the added advantage (added, that is, to not having Rose in ours) of having a voting system that’s reasonable, fair, protected against cronyism and all the other things that the old HOF system was weak on.”
When Bill James addressed the issue in his book on the HOF, he suggested some ways to have a fair system: have various constituencies (players, fans, sportswriters, stat-geeks, etc) have separate votes, which is a good idea. But I’d like to know how to design a voting system for baseball’s HOF, knowing what we know about the flawed system currently in place, and using safeguards and ideas from current thinking on designing such systems generally.
I do not know what you consider fair or how it applies to baseball especifically but it has been proven that there is no such thing as a perfect or even best voting system and that they all have drawbacks. Taking that into account, this is a matter of discussing which ones have particular advantages and which one each person prefers.
Sailor is right. There are quite a few voting systems, but all have drawbacks (not to mention the impossibility at finding a common definition of “fair”). There’s something called “Arrow’s Theorem,” which shows that no possible set of rules for a voting system can produce both a rational and democratic result for all posible sets of preferences.
Sailor and RC: I guess that’s what I wanted to discuss. Can you cite articles about the advantages and disadvantages of various voting systems? I’ve never heard of “Arrow’s Theorem,” but I’ll google it unless you know places I could find out more about it. I was about to propose a harebrained voting system, until I realized that I was reinventing a wheel that certainly has been thoroughly discussed by specialists before.
Some time ago I did a fair amount of research for a thread which, IIRC, was about the senate or the Electoral College. It may have been just after the mess of the presidential election. I remember I posted some links and this same issue was discussed. Frankly, I am not motivated to do the same thing all over again but you may locate the thread if you search for it. And you may find other threads discussing the same thing.
Fair enough, I suppose. “Arrow’s Theorem” explained why NO system is really adequate universally, but I was asking how an HOF vote could be designed most nearly fairly, not perfectly, so I don’t think that’ll be useful for my purposes. OTOH, Sailor, I searched your posts #263-290 (all from 2000) and found nothing, other than that you’re an interesting thinker and I could have spent hours reading those threads, if I were not so disciplined. Masturbation, Spanish grammar, tire chirping, pyramids, cruise ship prostitution, man, you covered it all…
The posts before me are correct in that, for example, Arrow proved that there is no guaranteed way to have a rational aggregation procedure of individual preferences that is not a dictatorship. Where they stray, IIRC, is that Arrow’s theorem requires at least three possible outcomes. Indeed, IIRC, most voting procedures require at least three options to be ranked or chosen from before any mathematical monkey wrenches can be thrown into the works.
You’re just asking about the Hall of Fame and admittance which is only a two option scenario: he’s in or he’s out. Compare that with ranking football teams where an order must be placed on however many teams there are. In the first case, I don’t think any mathematical difficulties will obtain, in the second it’s hard not to have them.
In regards to the question of HOF, no “fair” system is available because no clear constituency exists. If we vote for mayor between two candidates, clearly registered voters are the constituency. But to put a player in the HOF is different. Clearly stat-geeks should vote rather than sports writers because the first uses systematic knowledge for choosing and the latter uses anecdotal. But stat-geeks shouldn’t be chosen over fans because, let’s be honest, aren’t the fans what pro-baseball is really all about? But fans shouldn’t be chosen over writers because writers make careers about knowing the game whereas any given “fan” may just watch a couple of games a year. Then why should any of those people have votes since its the players who play the game, who live the game, who know the candidates, and who should make the choice–like the Oscars? With such an illdefined constituency, there will always be someone with a legitimate complaint.
I think Arrow’s theorem is irrelevant here since you can elect as many as you want.
The real problem is that people cannot agree on what the criterions should be. For example, does activity off the field count? Does what you do after you hang up your spikes count? Without Pete Rose, you might have said no to both questions. And speaking of Bill James, he made a pretty good case somewhere that the evidence against Pete Rose was pretty defective and included unverified hearsay and basically would have been laughed out of any courtroom.
One thing I would not do is to let sport writers anywhere near the process. One example of this is that when Barry Bonds finally becomes eligible he will be elected but not unanimously because some ***hole of a sportswriter will say that he didn’t deserve to be elected unanimously and maybe not on the first round at all.
Anyway, there is no fair system possible, but Arrow’s theorem is a red herring. BTW, when Arrow’s theorem was published the review in Math Reviews described it, in effect, as saying that if you make a bunch of fairly obviously self-contradictory axioms, you will not be able to satisfy them.
Let me amend my question, since it now seems that there is no fair electoral system: what electoral system would work best to elect a new HOF, starting from scratch? (Guess this is no longer a GQ, either. Mod: IMHO?)