1936 Veterans Committee vote counting fix

[Brad Harris]

What on earth happened to the votes for the 1936 Old Timers Committee? Can anyone explain how exactly the votes were accredited as "half" votes?

78 ballots were turned in. Voters were instructed to vote for exactly 10 candidates. I read where "a majority" of the ballots returned had the full 10 names on them (which means at least a few did not). Rather than discount the ballots with no names and count the votes as a percentage of the properly cast ballots, the people doing the math did a strange thing and opted to penalize the voters who followed the instructions by counting each vote for a candidate from those ballots as a half vote. Nevermind how completely and utterly ridiculous this sounds. Have I understood this correctly or did they count ALL votes on ALL ballots as a half-vote in 1936?

The leading vote-getters garnered 39-1/2 votes which, if ALL votes counted as a half-vote, then that implies there were 79 ballots cast and perhaps the figure of 78 was a typo. I'm looking for source material to confirm some of this.

I am keen to figure out what actually happened with the freakish vote discounting decision and whether or not some of those candidates would have been elected in 1936 had the people in charge just done the right thing and let the votes stand as they were sent in.

[Freakshow]

Here's how our friends at Wikipedia describe the 1936 elections.

Baseball Hall of Fame balloting, 1936 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_Hall_of_Fame_balloting%2C_1936)

[KCGHOST]

About all you can say in defense of the people who were trying to set-up the HoF and it election process is they had no yardstick to measure themselves by and totally lacked the info, info access, and the info analysis we do today.

[Paul Wendt]

I have supposed writing and editing errors at The Sporting News. They didn't understand what they wrote or didn't have enough facts to provide a full explanation and "threw up their hands".

I can't rule out that Anson and Ewing were listed on all of 79 ballots but I don't believe it.

I don't understand why the incident is essentially unknown. Our generation's most important source on elections for the Hall of Fame and other honors, Bill Deane is a careful researcher and for years he enjoyed and used access to records in Cooperstown. For more than a decade email exchange at least among SABR members should have exhumed this incident more than once, and put it in the collective memory of one thousand people or so.

On the other hand, I doubt that anyone has ever judged the story to be essentially groundless, a hack job founded on a writer's hearsay of a disgruntled clerk, something like that. First, the official result is not plausible, support for Anson or Ewing only 39-1/2 or 40 of 78 votes. Second some latterday writers would insert notes such as "(There is no truth to a contemporary report that . . .)".

[JessePopHaines16]

Here's how our friends at Wikipedia describe the 1936 elections.

Baseball Hall of Fame balloting, 1936 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_Hall_of_Fame_balloting%2C_1936)

How did Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson get into the Hall of fame before Cy Young did?

[Freakshow]

How did Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson get into the Hall of fame before Cy Young did?
I believe the main reason was confusion among the electorates as to which jurisdiction he properly belonged to, the Modern Players or the Old-Timers.

Some of it, too, was the image of the players in the mid/late 1930's. Mathewson and Johnson were exemplars of The Upstanding Ball Player, while Young's image had begun to fade. Then as now, they weren't voting just on stats.

[Brad Harris]

I believe the main reason was confusion among the electorates as to which jurisdiction he properly belonged to, the Modern Players or the Old-Timers.

Some of it, too, was the image of the players in the mid/late 1930's. Mathewson and Johnson were exemplars of The Upstanding Ball Player, while Young's image had begun to fade. Then as now, they weren't voting just on stats.

I think there was a lot of perference for the deadball game, however, as demonstrated by Cobb's surpassing Ruth in the vote totals. Mathewson surpassing Johnson has always surprised me, particularly given that Mathewson hadn't pitched since before WWI and was dead almost a decade before the vote. Nevertheless, the "idol of millions of young boys" thing would tend to explain Mathewson's votes. "The Christian Gentleman" was a media invention as much as the "anti-hero" image of Barry Bonds is today. Sportswriters love their idols and their goats and love to create those ideals for their readers.

As for Young, the split-vote thing is certainly part of it (though Young was listed as a suggestion on both ballots and very few voters participated in both elections.) It's my belief, at this point, that Young actually received enough votes in the 1936 Veterans Election, but the vote-tabulation snafu that occurred robbed him of election. As it is, he finished 4th in the Veterans voting and 8th in the BBWAA voting. Regardless, Young was one of the inaugural inductees, as was everyone elected prior to 1939.