Bill James notes that the quality of the players elected to the Hall of Fame keeps improving. He divides the Hall into A, B, and C level players, the A’s the best of all time and the C’s the marginal players, mostly elected by non-BBWAA votes:
We have been selecting Hall of Famers for 82 years, or, as Betty White would describe it, the last couple of weeks now. If we divide the 82 years into three almost equal eras and count the A Level Hall of Famers at 3, the B Level at 2, and the C Level at 1, the average “value” of a Hall of Famer selected from 1936 to 1962 was 2.03, from 1963 to 1989, 1.78, and from 1990 to the present, 2.25. If we then subdivide the recent period (1990 to 2017) into two 14-year groups, the average is 2.18 in the first half of that, and 2.32 in the second.
The average quality has been going up because the number of players selected has been going down, essentially. The number of “A” Level Players selected in recent years is about what it always has been, but the number of “C” Level Hall of Famers selected has declined.
That’s good. If you worry about Cooperstown becoming the Hall of the Very Good, it’s not happening.
I would say it already was the Hall of Very Good and that it still is. Many awful picks in the early years into the 80’s. Also, James tends to be biased against power hitting corner position players and favors those playing up the middle w/o much power.
Over the last 15 years guys like Puckett, Larkin, Sandberg, Mollitor, Dawson, Gwynn, Ripken, Henderson, Alomar , Smith and Raines getting in he loves. Lot of C and up the middle guys or low power guys getting in but not the corner power guys (Bagwell, Murray, Rice, Thomas excepted)