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survived a bout of cancer and endured more than twenty three surgeries. Walking on prosthetic legs has slowed his gait, but not his charitable work.”
    The Veterans Committee, unmoved by this appeal, chose nobody for the third time in a row. Frustrated, Jane Forbes Clark announced that in 2008 the voting would be limited to Hall of Fame players, not writers or broadcasters (players who broke in before 1943 would be picked by a special committee). But the rule change didn’t alter the outcome: another electoral shutout.
    What accounts for this exclusivity? Some of the Hall of Famers, led by the most se nior member, Bob Feller, have a low opinion of the players who followed them. Others believe that if you weren’t good enough to be picked by the writers, you don’t deserve to be enshrined.
    But there is also an economic explanation. The Hall of Fame produces and markets its own line of memorabilia. For many years, members got nothing; but since 1995, the pot has been split three ways: 30 percent for the Hall, 40 percent for MLB, and the remaining 30 percent split evenly among the living Hall of Famers. Red Schoen-dienst gets the same cut as Nolan Ryan. So far, about $6 million has been divvied up.
    Of course, the money that comes from the Hall directly is only a small part of the income generated by membership in the Hall; an HoF after your name means speaking engagements, endorsements, and memorabilia sales.
    “Adding new people dilutes the total,” Marvin Miller, who founded the baseball players’ union, told me. “Recently I broached this question to one of the veterans. I asked if this was the single most important reason nobody gets picked. He said it had never occurred to him. But his tone told me I got it exactly right.”
    In December 2008, the Veterans Committee voted once again. There were ten players on the ballot: Dick Allen, Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva, Al Oliver, Vada Pinson, Luis Tiant, Joe Torre, Maury Wills, and poor Ron Santo. None was elected.
    The Vets kept their perfect record: 0 for the twenty-first century. *
* Over the years, this appointed committee has had several names: the Centennial Committee, the Old-Timers’ Committee, the Permanent Committee, and the Veterans Committee. Its composition has shifted over the years, and so has its purview. These days it is composed of all the former Hall of Fame players, meeting as a committee of the whole. It now has the power to elect players whose fifteen years of BBWAA eligibility have passed, regardless of whether they played in the twentieth century or, soon, the twenty-first. The committee, in all its iterations, has experienced rule changes “more often than a hooker’s underwear,” in the words of Bill James.
* In 1946, the Hall instituted another unfamiliar feature: the Honor Rolls of Baseball, an honor granted to 39 nonplayers—5 managers, 11 umpires, 11 executives, and 12 sportswriters. Eight of these men were later inducted into the Hall of Fame, but the Honor Rolls were never made concrete at the Hall and were subsequently discontinued. A complete list can be found in appendix 3.
* Dan Okrent, who is not a member of the BBWAA, took a lot of abuse, but he handled it with aplomb (as befits a Detroit boy). Okrent made his journalistic bones as an editor at Esquire and Time and later as editor in chief of Life magazine and the first public editor of the New York Times —not a job for the fainthearted. His baseball credentials come from two very good books he has written on the game and a gig as a talking head in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary series Baseball. He is also the inventor, along with some friends, of the fantasy game Rotisserie Baseball, so named because his Doubleday Field was a table at La Rotisserie Française restaurant in Manhattan.
* Bill Mazeroski was elected by the old, appointed Veterans Committee in 1999. So was nineteenth-century second baseman Bid McPhee.

FOUR . . . A Question of Character
     
    T he rules for