The purpose of the 10 vote rule (or any number as a maximum) is to better differentiate between players with strong support and players with weak support.
mathguy - the 10 vote rule goes back to the era when there were 16 teams. Now there are 30. There are many more players who would be eligible for consideration now. With a required minimum of 5% to stay on the ballot, and a recent rule change to limit the window of eligibility to 10 years, there is a squeeze out of players who have credentials to match current hall members.
I like the idea Ken Rosenthal suggests and that Madj55 brought up - you vote for a guy, the guy banks the vote until he is elected or dropped from eligibility, allowing a voter who to recognize newly-eligible players and ones who he has reevaluated. It's not perfect, but the consensus is that the current backlog on the ballot probably has 15 or so very credible candidates.
Here's a link to Rosenthal's article:
http://www.foxsports.com/mlb/just-a-bit-outside/story/baseball-hall-of-fame-ballot-needs-to-change-bbwaa-cooperstown-122114The rules are screwy - we all know that. But voters from the Baseball Writers' Association of America need to take a pragmatic view and account for the under-representation of players from recent eras while continuing to push the Hall to adjust the voting process.
The Hall initiated a change of its own in July, reducing a player’s eligibility from 15 years to 10. To me, this seemed a rather obvious attempt to clear the ballot of players who are linked to performance-enhancing drugs, and I didn’t like it.
Not because I vote for such players - to this point, I have not. But perspectives occasionally change over time, as evidenced by the elections of Bert Blyleven in his 14th year of eligibility and Jim Rice in his 15th. As I’ve written before, I want to stay open-minded on even confirmed PED users. Reducing the years that such players are eligible deprives them of a fuller consideration.
The BBWAA delivered a sensible response to the Hall’s maneuver at the winter meetings, asking that the maximum number of votes on each ballot be increased from 10 to 12. Honestly, 15 might have been an even better number, but 12 at least would ease the pressure on each voter, pressure that only increased with the Hall’s unilateral action.
To illustrate how the backlog affects even a voter who snubs confirmed PED users or others with compelling evidence against them, consider my 2015 ballot.
...
Choosing my 10 actually wasn’t all that difficult - I simply took the three spots that I reserved for last year’s inductees (Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and Frank Thomas) and awarded them to the three compelling first-time candidates (Johnson, Martinez and Smoltz).
My holdovers were the same: Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina, Mike Piazza, Tim Raines and Curt Schilling. But my exclusions again included three players for whom I have voted for in the past (Fred McGriff, Lee Smith and Alan Trammell) as well as at least one other for whom I would strongly consider voting for in the future (Jeff Kent). And again, I did not even factor Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa into the equation.
