P.R. or not, Hall change is good one

It's long overdue, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't extend our heartiest kudos to the Hall of Fame for finally exercising some control over the voting electorate...

In case anyone's wondering: No, this is NOT some back-handed ploy to get Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens into the Hall. Yes, jettisoning a few voters in their 70s and '80s will almost certainly improve the percentages for the steroids guys. But considering they're not even at 40 percent yet, and have only seven more years on the BBWAA ballot, it's unlikely that they'll ever get to 75 percent.

Mostly what this does -- and being quite frank about it, I've been suggesting this for a long, long time -- is improve the appearance of the process, if not necessarily the results themselves. It just looks bad when you've got voters without any clear connection to the candidates. This conversation essentially began around 15 years ago when Maury Brown and others started looking at who was actually voting, and discovered some bizarre names on that list.

The actual impact was probably minimal, maybe kept Bert Blyleven and Rich Gossage waiting an extra year or something. But it just looked really bad. And the first rule of running a monopolistic institution is to keep up appearances, lest anyone start asking uncomfortable questions.