Baseball Hall of Fame balloting, 1947

Elections to the Baseball Hall of Fame for 1947 followed yet another round of reform. The Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) continued to vote by mail but the Hall of Fame Committee had revised the procedures for that election and reduced its historical jurisdiction relative to the Old-Timers Committee.

The BBWAA now considered major league players retired no more than 25 years. The reform seemed to work, for it elected four: Mickey Cochrane, Frank Frisch, Lefty Grove, and Carl Hubbell.

In the wake of the successful BBWAA election, and perhaps in deference to those critics who believed that the 21 selections by the Old-Timers Committee in the previous two years had been too many in such a short time, the Hall of Fame Committee did not meet in 1947 to make further selections from among the players of the era before 1922, or to add names to the Roll of Honor. It was believed, with some optimism, that further revisions in the election process were currently unnecessary.

The new members of the Hall were formally inducted in Cooperstown on July 21, along with the previous year's 11 selections by the Old-Timers Committee, with National League president Ford Frick presiding. All four new electees were still living, as were four of the earlier choices; however, of the eight living inductees, only Ed Walsh attended the ceremonies.

After the January 1946 BBWAA election failed to elect any inductees, capping a seven-year period in which only one player had been elected, the Hall of Fame Committee concluded that the wide field of candidates from 1900 to the present was making it impossible for any single candidate to gain votes on 75% of all ballots. In response, the Committee selected at its April 1946 meeting eleven inductees, including most of the popular candidates from the era between 1900 and 1918; there was even some support on the committee for removing the BBWAA from the selection process entirely. There was a great deal of criticism regarding the committee's decision in this regard, as they had been understood to only have the capacity to select players from the 19th century; many observers believed the committee was infringing upon the BBWAA's jurisdiction over players of the 20th century.

...
Wikipedia