The Los Angeles Daily News‘ Tom Hoffarth may provide more coverage of the baseball book beat than anyone else in the mainstream media. Because of The Cooperstown Casebook‘s release date, I missed getting into his annual “30 Baseball Books in 30 Days” roundup back in April — now in its 10th year, which means that he’s logged 300 reviews under that umbrella — but thanks to his interest, I made sure we could do something. The result is a two-part Q&A. From part one at the Daily News:

Sports Illustrated writer Jay Jaffe won’t get to cast his first ballot in the Baseball Hall of Fame voting process until 2021, the mandatory 10-year wait after he became a member of the Baseball Writers of America Association while employed with the Baseball Prospectus.

The irony is his one vote won’t nearly have the same impact as all the research he has processed for Hall deciders spanning the last two decades.

In his latest and greatest public voting manual… Jaffe has no designs of ending enlightened argument that funnels into the imperfect media selection process.

As Tim Raines benefits from new-age data that will get him inducted on July 30 along with Jeff Bagwell and Ivan Rodriguez, Jaffe explains the intent of his project that started with a measuring tool he created called JAWS – Jaffe Wins Above Replacement Score – and hopefully continues with some common sense and historical perspective

From part two at Hoffarth’s blog:

Q: If we take the book title as a statement rather than a headline, are we advocating the Hall of Fame membership that has voted over the last 70-something years needs a do-over? Could we wipe everything clean and pick 325 players in one massive re-election?

A: That’s a bit of a red herring. I don’t advocate we remove anyone. If you ask me about players who don’t belong, sure, I could start with Tommy McCarthy (outfielder inducted in 1946) or some others that are listed as “dubious” in the book. But I spent my time on this book actually trying to understand why those guys that I’d kick out are in, and how they got in, and what they did bring to the game. It’s too late to evict anyone. No one should pack their plaques. It’s all part of the game’s history and how our definitions of what a Hall of Famer changes. There’s nothing set in stone. After the original five went in (in 1939 – Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Ty Cobb), we may have had stars of the game but there was a dearth of statistical information. No Baseball Encyclopedia to compare guys or even for player to know where they stood. If players like Sam Crawford (elected in 1957 with 2,961 hits) or Al Simmons (elected in 1953 with 2,927 hits) knew they were short of 3,000 hits, maybe they would have played longer to achieve that, but maybe they weren’t aware of those milestones. Interpretations change. Now we compare players better and we should just do a better job of choosing going forward. We have better tools to examine careers.

As has been the case since they reached the 2013 Hall of Fame ballot and received less than half of the votes needed for election, the omissions of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens threaten to overshadow the weekend’s induction ceremony. In the July 22, 2017 edition, the Post’s Larry Getlin guides a thorough walk through Chapter 8 of The Cooperstown Casebook, “This is Your Ballot on Drugs,” which explores the long history of performance-enhancing drug use within the sport as well as the so-called “character clause” that many voters cite when omitting Bonds, Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and others from their ballots. I wish that Getlin had at least mentioned the other aspects of the book — the nearly 300 players whose cases are covered at length or in brief, the history of the institution’s formation and the various trends that shaped it, but I’m not going to complain about having nearly 1,500 words devoted to it in a major New York daily.

“Hall of Famers from Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron to Mike Schmidt, Johnny Bench, Willie Stargell, and Frank Thomas have been connected to amphetamines, some by their own accounts, and they were hardly alone,” writes Jaffe.

“We generally don’t wring our hands about their usage — which helped keep players in the lineup and closer to the tops of their games — both because the pills were commonplace and because there were no real deterrents in place, even after these drugs were regulated via the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.”

Even steroids themselves, basically the same drugs considered the scourge of baseball over the past two decades, were used openly prior to that period. A former pitcher named Tom House told a reporter that performance-enhancing drugs “were widespread in the game in the 1960s and ’70s,” Jaffe writes.

“‘We were doing steroids they wouldn’t give to horses,’ he said, estimating that six or seven pitchers per team were experimenting with steroids or human growth hormone. ‘We didn’t get beat, we got out-milligrammed. And when you found out what they were taking, you started taking them.’”