Letter to the Editor: `Hall' Needs More Transparency

As a fan of horse racing and someone that holds the Hall of Fame in esteem as the highest honor in our sport, I would like to implore the Hall and their Board of Trustees to take a hard look at both the nominating process for applicants to the Hall of Fame, and at the system through which the horses and people are elected.

For the past few years, we have had a number of very good nominees on the equine and human side, and to not even know how close or how far they are from being actually put into the Hall of Fame is one mystery that would be nice to know. In the Eclipse Awards, for example, they tell us at the end of the day how many votes each nominee received. In the Hall of Fame, those numbers are not released. Contrast this to the baseball Hall of Fame, where I can tell you how many writers voted, how many votes players needed to get in, how many votes each player received, and which players got so few votes that they will drop off future ballots.

The second part that I think requires some review is who is voting for these people and horses to get into the Hall of Fame?

We work in a very tight-knit industry. If you go to the website for the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, you will see that the voting procedures describer the voting panel as “active and former racing writers, editors, broadcasters, historians, and commentators on the sport of thorough racing.” But even in this relatively small, close industry, I have spoken to a number of very prominent current racing writers who don't have a vote. I know people I consider to be great historians of the game who don't have a vote. I've spoken to people that I respect as commentators who don't have a vote. The people who have a voice in this process should have extreme knowledge of the sport, and maybe they do, but we don't even know who the voters are. We need to improve this process, and make it more transparent.

One suggestion I would make for the Trustees to consider is that any living person in the Hall of Fame gets a vote. Let's face it; if you're good enough to make it into the Hall of Fame, you're good enough to get to vote on your contemporaries.

I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, but for some reason, people are afraid to speak up about it. I implore the Trustees of the Racing Hall of Fame to take a hard look at the system and look for ways to improve it before next year's ballot comes out.