In the wake of the Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot announcement earlier this week — a ballot I’ll cover soon enough at SI.com — I spoke to Katie Strang, managing editor and senior writer for the Detroit outpost of The Athletic. With Alan Trammell and Jack Morris both among the 10 candidates on the ballot, our conversation centered around the omission of their longtime teammate Lou Whitaker, who like Trammell is one of the Case Studies in the Casebook.

[Bobby] Grich and [Lou] Whitaker, both hailing from the same time period more or less… have both gotten particularly screwed by the voters, and essentially for the same reasons. They both fell short of the minimum five percent in their lone BBWAA ballot appearance and that has been held against them when the historical overview committees have built the Veterans Committee ballots, the Era Committee ballots. It’s a really unfortunate way of reinforcing a judgment that I don’t think was intended to be as final as it has become.

I do think it’s alarming though, the way that has become reinforced. The prevailing notion of the day was some voters just refused to ever vote for anyone on the first ballot unless they were Hank Aaron, you know — a slam dunk. But they assumed they’d have a chance to vote for these guys at a future date.

It was just one of those things, like ‘You didn’t vote for him, either? Oh no,’ and then he’s off the ballot. I think that was part of how [Whitaker] slipped through the cracks. I don’t think that was entirely [the reason] though

…Whitaker had a reputation with being relatively aloof as far as the media was concerned. I don’t think that helped him, either. I think it’s entirely possible that race played into it as well. I know that sportswriters now still tend to be white middle-aged men that aren’t maybe the most culturally-sensitive. And back then, it was whiter to an even greater degree. Reading some of the coverage, it’s clear that Whitaker would not have been alone in terms of a disconnect with the middle-aged white writers of the day.

(The Athletic is behind a paywall, but I’ve found that the quality of the content and the contributors justifies the cost of the subscription.)

Also on the topic of Whitaker, The Detroit News’ Lynn Henning (to whom I spoke for the Casebook) cited my work in railing against his omission from the ballot.

I’d stumbled across The Hall of Miller and Eric a few times over the years, a blog in which two self-described “baseball obsessives” have built their own alternative shrine based on their analysis and methodology, mirroring the size of the actual Hall but doing their level-headed best to get it right. So of course I was down for a Q&A about The Cooperstown Casebook with HOME’s Eric Chalek. A taste:

Eric: Something cool about The Cooperstown Casebook was how many different perspectives you personally brought to the writing: Fan, critic, BBWAA member, researcher, analyst. Over the years, how have these experiences changed how you think about the Hall?

Jay: I’m not sure I’ve thought about it in quite those terms before, but I’d say that the different perspectives reflect my own growth and the expansion of my horizons. When I started writing about the Hall voting at Futility Infielder in the winter of 2001-2002, I was a moonlighting graphic designer, just a fan who wanted to share some of my knowledge and perspective while connecting with others.

Pretty quickly, once I brought the project to Baseball Prospectus in late 2003, I developed a more critical edge, and the backbone of this book is a few of the major beefs that I had with the Hall as it stood, namely the omissions of Bert Blyleven and Ron Santo and the mess that the Veterans Committee had made that had permanently compromised the Hall. Each of those topics has a chapter devoted to it in the first half of the book.

Eventually, I was able to devote myself to writing about baseball full time. Not only did I get to  sharpen my analytical and researching skills, I was given a platform to produce what might be the largest annual volume of Hall-related writing at SI.com — my editor, Ted Keith, let me run wild with the topic in December, basically. I was admitted into the BBWAA (for 2011) and was eventually able to participate in a committee that examined the case for changing the voting process; I was involved in drafting the final proposal that was submitted to the Hall of Fame board of directors. The proposal was tabled, but BBWAA voters do read my work and sometimes cite it when explaining how they filled out their ballots.

I’ve gone from being a total outsider to something of an insider, even if I don’t yet get to vote.