While we're not typically inclined to critique individual Baseball Hall of Fame ballots, the explanation from one voter on his 2022 ballot is too silly to be ignored.
Jeff Blair of Sportsnet revealed his 2022 Hall of Fame ballot Thursday, and it includes Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez.
There are some who wouldn't vote for any of those four given their respective ties to performance-enhancing drugs, but there's no debate that on paper, all four are slam-dunk Hall of Famers. Today isn't about debating how voters should treat players connected to PEDs.
Where the issue with Blair's ballot comes in is that he voted for Manny Ramirez -- an all-time great who also has PED ties -- in 2021. He removed Ramirez on his 2022 ballot, and his explanation why is perplexing, to say the least:
"I’ve voted for Manny Ramirez in the past, but decided against it this year because I’m one of those voters who casts a small ballot and I wanted to make room for A-Rod."
This, of course, is a self-imposed decision to "make room." BBWAA voters can vote for up to 10 candidates each year. It's fair to wonder why there's a cap at all, but Blair was nowhere near the cap. He voted for four players.
Later in his story, Blair would go on to say that he's "not interested in voting" for players who you have to spend some time "making a case for." This attitude is unfair to players like Todd Helton, who put up superstar numbers but often weren't part of teams who were nationally televised and/or playing in the postseason. Anyone that says that they can't use a refresher on the cases of all players on the ballot is being disingenuous. It's not physically possible to see every pitch of every game -- certainly it wasn't in the 1990s and early 2000s, when many of these players peaked -- and there's a five-year gap in between retirement and first appearing on the ballot.
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But while players like Helton, Scott Rolen, Jimmy Rollins and Jeff Kent have cases that require a deeper dive than just looking at their names, Ramirez doesn't. A 12-time All-Star, Ramirez slashed .312/.411/.585 with 555 home runs, a .996 OPS and 66.3 fWAR. He has 29 career postseason home runs, the most in MLB history. Even if you're a "small Hall" voter, Ramirez is unquestionably one of the greatest hitters that has ever stepped on a baseball diamond. And Blair knew that a year ago.
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Then again, Blair suggests that he's only putting in the elite of the elite, and somehow leaves Sammy Sosa off the ballot. If you're not worried about players with cheating scandals, Sosa is the only player in baseball history to hit 60 or more home runs in three separate seasons. He's one of only nine players in MLB history with more than 600 career home runs. Leaving him off a ballot where Blair says that he is "embraces the elitism" is comical.
We're not in the business of asking for any voters to have their ballots taken away, or anything like that. Different voters will arrive at different conclusions, and trying to police something subjective like this is a slippery slope. But as long as ballots like this -- with flabbergasting explanations -- continue to surface, public confidence in the process of Hall of Fame voting will keep plummeting.
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