The vote is in, with the results to be announced Jan. 9, and so to say this will change nothing, but still: The only thing in baseball more embarrassing than the voting for the Hall of Fame is the discourse around that voting. A tedious inquiry into ontology at best, at worst a pretext for character assassination, it needs to change or go away.

The problem is simple: The elections are carried out by writers who have been members of the Baseball Writers Association of America for at least 10 years, and consequently, the debates aren't about baseball or ballplayers but about sportswriting and sportswriters—much less interesting subjects.

A young fan looks at Hall of Fame plaques in Cooperstown, N.Y. Getty Images

An obvious solution—one so elegant it's surprising it wasn't put in place decades ago—is to simply strip writers of the vote and give it to the public. Writers and traditionalists would cry to the heavens, and all would fret over the perils of mass democracy, but we'd at least be rid of an inherently toxic structure.

Hall of Fame arguments are so bad because they serve as way for rival sets of writers to have a proxy battle. The less offensive half of this equation is the set of writers who highly value statistical analysis; they argue for various players on the basis of derivative mathematical appraisals and tend to disregard such issues as alleged drug use. This is bad only because the idea that an institution devoted to the historiography of the American game should be mainly organized around accounting techniques doesn't really hold.

The more offensive half of the equation comprises the older writers who do nearly all of the voting. They judge ballplayers by personal impressions, bad statistics like runs batted in and how they meet vaguely defined notions of morality because that's the way things have always been done. If rating players by strict readings of value is a bit silly, this is ridiculous, especially since many of these purported guardians of the game's history are now using their votes to accuse great players of using drugs even when such claims haven't been backed by solid reporting.

So far as the debate here is essentially an ideological one about how the sport should be covered, it is fundamentally nonsensical, irrelevant to an appreciation of great ballplayers like Kenny Lofton and Larry Walker. The worst element, though, is that the writers debating all of this have the franchise even though there's no real reason for them to have it: They have no special knowledge of the game relative to anyone else, and they've never done a good job.

The first point here, that writers know little more than anyone else, shouldn't be especially controversial. The voters are (theoretically) good at writing about baseball, which has no obvious connection to assessing what players' legacies mean within the broad context of 160 years of history. No one who wanted to know who the most important presidents of all time were would think to poll political reporters rather than historians or the public. Why do the same in baseball?

The second point should be even less controversial. In 1938, there were more than 50 future Hall of Famers on the ballot, including Eddie Collins and Rogers Hornsby, the two best second basemen of all time. One player, Pete Alexander, was elected. This year, with at least a dozen truly great players on the ballot, it seems quite likely that none, or one at most, will be voted in. The intervening years comprised an uninterrupted run of botches and inexplicable calls.

In light of this, it's hard to understand how the public would do a clearly worse job. Average baseball fans may not have any special insight into the men who play the game, but then neither do most Hall voters, who in many cases haven't actively covered the sport for years. The fans wouldn't always pick the right players, but then neither does a voting body that never got around to electing Johnny Mize and Arky Vaughan, genuine all-time greats.

The best thing about a public vote, though, would be its inherent legitimacy. If baseball fans were to vote in Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, that would end all sorts of handwringing over whether players who used (or, more often, are weakly alleged to have used) performance enhancing drugs are worthy of being honored alongside past greats of dubious character. If they weren't voted in, that would offer clear proof that the public really does consider the use of steroids different from the use of amphetamines, racism, violent tendencies, or other characterological defects displayed by the already enshrined. Either way, the focus would be on baseball and memory, not on the useless philosophizing of 600 or so sportswriters.

That group would, of course, have their say. So would all the younger writers who want to dismiss them as done. So would the historians and the players themselves. So would every fan. Give the vote to the same people who are responsible enough to elect mayors and senators, and everyone will make their arguments, based on appeals to authority or readings of math or the position of the stars or whatever you will, and in the end the most convincing will win. In the depth of every winter, we would have something lovely. It might even come near to being a debate.

Write to Tim Marchman at