For those of you unfamiliar with him, Bill James is a famous baseball writer and thinker. In 2001, he released the "New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract," a comprehensive look at baseball since the 1870s, including categorical rankings of the best 100 players at each position throughout history. It's a great book and I highly recommend it for every baseball fan. Anyways I was looking for his entry on Tony Perez when I came across this.

In his entry on Rafael Palmeiro (ranked #19 all-time among first basemen), James talks about voting systems.

In November 1999, we were in the midst of a mini-controversy, occasioned by the fact that Palmeiro, who played only 28 games at first base, was given the Gold Glove as the best defensive first baseman in the American League.

He wasn't the best defensive first baseman in the league, obviously. He wasn't the best defensive first baseman on his own team. Most of what is being written in this controversy seems to me to miss the central lesson. What people are writing is, in essence, that the voters don't pay attention to the games, the voters are ignorant, the voters don't take the vote seriously, the voters screwed up, etc. The voters who vote for the Gold Gloves are the managers and coaches from the league. I doubt that any of them are ignorant or not paying attention to the game, but... well they did screw up, so I suppose that's fair.

The larger point, it seems to me, is that a badly designed voting system will fail sometimes, no matter who votes. The Gold Glove is decided by what could be called an unconstrained plurality, meaning:

1. A voter can vote for anybody.

2. If the top vote-getter gets 15% of the vote, he wins, the same as if he had received 80%.

A voting structure like this is an open invitation to an eccentric outcome. If the United States were to use a system like this to elect the President, the absolutely certain result would be that, within a few elections, someone like David Duke, Donald Trump, or Warren Beatty would be elected President. [emphasis mine]

So I guess the lesson here is that Bill James perhaps overestimated the strength of the current American electoral system.