Building the Ballot: The Baseball Hall of Fame’s Era Committees

This Winter, the Golden Days Era Committee will meet to vote on ten candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. This committee covers baseball from 1950 to 1969. Chris Bodig of Cooperstown Cred joins the podcast to discuss the 2015 Golden Era results, a relatively new rule added to the Era Committee process, and (of course) the players who would both make his ballot and get his vote.

Chris Bodig on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cooperstowncred

Cooperstown Cred: https://www.cooperstowncred.com/

This Winter, the Golden Days Era Committee will meet to vote on ten candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. This committee covers baseball from 1950 to 1969. This time we welcome a very special guest: Jessica Brand. Jessica is sabermetrician, baseball historian, and a Stathead legend. We discuss the process Jessica would take toward building a Golden Days Era ballot. We touched upon some of the more sabermetricallly-qualified candidates in this episode.

Jessica Brand on Twitter: http://twitter.com/JessicaDBrand

This Winter, the Golden Days Era Committee will meet to vote on ten candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. This committee covers baseball from 1950 to 1969. Graham Womack joins the podcast again to discuss the history of the Golden Days Era Committee as well as the ten names he’d place on his ballot (and a few more).

Graham Womack on Twitter: http://twitter.com/grahamdude

Baseball Past and Present: https://baseballpastandpresent.com/

This Winter, the Early Baseball Era Committee will meet to vote on ten candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. This committee covers all of baseball before 1950. The ballot will consider players from the White major leagues and the Black major leagues as well as pioneers, managers, umpires, and executives. How will the committee distill over 100 years of baseball into just ten names? To complicate matters, this committee won’t meet again for ten years.

Graham Womack joins the podcast again to discuss non-players—managers, executives, umpires, and contributors. Names like Charlie Grimm, Sam Breadon, Cy Rigler, and Lefty O’Doul come up. We also discuss Buck O’Neil as Graham makes his list from the candidates not chosen yet. Then we build a 10-man ballot, one pick at a time.

Graham Womack on Twitter: http://twitter.com/grahamdude

Baseball Past and Present: https://baseballpastandpresent.com/

This Winter, the Early Baseball Era Committee will meet to vote on ten candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. This committee covers all of baseball before 1950. The ballot will consider players from the White major leagues and the Black major leagues as well as pioneers, managers, umpires, and executives. How will the committee distill over 100 years of baseball into just ten names? To complicate matters, this committee won’t meet again for ten years.

This episode covers the pioneers of the game, from its origins into the 20th century. SABR member Joe Williams joins the podcast. We talk about baseball’s origins (candidates like Doc Adams and Will Wheaton), Black Baseball (Bud Fowler, Grant Johnson, George Stovey, Octavius Catto, etc.), Amateur Era players (Jim Creighton, Joe Leggett, Joe Sprague, etc.), National Association Era players (Ross Barnes, Dickey Pearce, Joe Start, etc.), and more (Al Reach, Chris Von der Ahe, John Gaffney, Lefty O’Doul, etc.). 

Joe Williams on Twitter: http://twitter.com/lheadsgridiron

SABR Overlooked 19th Century Base Ball Legends: https://sabr.org/sabr-overlooked-19th-century-baseball-legends

This Winter, the Early Baseball Era Committee will meet to vote on ten candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. This committee covers all of baseball before 1950. The ballot will consider players from the White major leagues and the Black major leagues as well as pioneers, managers, umpires, and executives. How will the committee distill over 100 years of baseball into just ten names? To complicate matters, this committee won’t meet again for ten years.

This episode covers the Negro major leagues as well as top Black players and pioneers before the establishment of the Negro National League in 1920. Scott Simkus from the Seamheads Negro League Database (and author of “Outsider Baseball: The Weird World of Hardball on the Fringe, 1876–1950”) joins the podcast. We started with how box scores are added to the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database and moved on to a history of Negro League players in the Hall of Fame. We then covered dozens of candidates, from Buck O’Neil to Dobie Moore to Grant “Home Run” Johnson.

Scott Simkus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/scott_simkus

Outsider Baseball: The Weird World of Hardball on the Fringe, 1876–1950: https://www.amazon.com/Outsider-Baseball-Weird-Hardball-Fringe/dp/1613748167

This Winter, the Early Baseball Era Committee will meet to vote on ten candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. This committee covers all of baseball before 1950. The ballot will consider players from the White major leagues and the Black major leagues as well as pioneers, managers, umpires, and executives. How will the committee distill over 100 years of baseball into just ten names? To complicate matters, this committee won’t meet again for ten years.

This episode covers the White major leagues from 1871 to 1949. We’ll cover 19th century players like Bill Dahlen, Harry Stovey, Jim McCormick, and Charlie Bennett along with 20th century stars Wes Ferrell, Sherry Magee, Bob Johnson, and Wally Schang. Jay Jaffe, Senior Writer for Fangraphs and author of the Cooperstown Casebook joins the podcast.

Jay Jaffe on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jay_jaffe

The Cooperstown Casebook: https://cooperstowncasebook.com/

This Winter, the Early Baseball Era Committee will meet to vote on ten candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. This committee covers all of baseball before 1950. The ballot will consider players from the White major leagues and the Black major leagues as well as pioneers, managers, umpires, and executives. How will the committee distill over 100 years of baseball into just ten names? To complicate matters, this committee won’t meet again for ten years. 

This episode is an introduction to the podcast with baseball historian Graham Womack of Baseball Past and Present. Graham and I discuss the history of the Veterans Committee and Era Committees, how these ballots are constructed, and why this committee will only meet once per decade. We tossed around a few names you could expect to hear in the forthcoming episodes. 

Graham Womack on Twitter: http://twitter.com/grahamdude 

Baseball Past and Present: https://baseballpastandpresent.com/