Educating Twitter: Tiant By A Nose

With the recent announcement that both Luis Tiant and Tommy John are finalists on this year’s ballot of the Hall of Fame’s Classic Baseball Era Committee, I guess it’s only natural that we have to compare them. Thanks very much to Jim Miloch for teeing that up:

Before getting into that discussion, though, it’s probably a good idea to first note that this comparison likely represents a binary choice that has to be made by the voters this year. The structure of the various Eras Committees forces the 16 members to limit their support to just three of the eight annual candidates, at most. That severe limitation means it’s unlikely a voter would support two pitchers from the same era instead of, say, one pitcher from the 60s and 70s, one hitter from the 50s and 60s, and one Negro Leagues representative, just to have diversity of the inductees.

I suppose the Hall of Fame, in establishing this framework, was trying to mirror the annual BBWAA ballot, which typically has between 25 and 30 candidates, from which voters can only support a maximum of 10. That works out to a limit of about 33-40% of the ballot, and a rough translation of that for the Eras Committees is a maximum of 3 votes for 8 candidates (37.5%). On that level it makes some sense, but there are at least a couple of problems with this thinking.