A year ago I was prepared to give up my Hall of Fame vote, which I had held for more than 40 years. Since then, however, I have recalled a story about another writer’s vote, and it has prompted me to reconsider my intention.

This now retired writer submitted a blank ballot, possibly being the first voter to take such a step. Yet another writer asked the voter why he submitted a blank ballot; if he didn’t want to vote for anyone, why send in a blank ballot? Just don’t vote.

However, tossing the blank ballot in the trash and using the postage stamp from the envelope the Hall of Fame provides for paying his electric bill was not what the writer had in mind. By submitting a blank ballot, the writer was casting a vote, a no-one-should-get-in vote, and he was making it more difficult for all of the candidates on the ballot to be elected.

To be elected, a candidate needs 75 percent of the votes submitted. If 500 votes are cast, 375 would be required for election. If, however, five voters sent in blank ballots, a candidate would still need 375 votes but out of 495.

If I adopted that strategy, I realized, I could use my ballot to help block the election of players I don’t believe merit residence in the Hall of Fame. I am sure some readers will find that thinking repugnant, but if I can vote for a candidate – Ken Griffey Jr. this year, for example – I should be able to vote against a candidate and not simply by failing to vote for him.

My ballot may not be blank, but it will count as one more Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza will have to overcome if they are to gain bronze plaques in the building at 25 Main Street in the village of Cooperstown, N.Y.

The bloc that is voting on these candidates and 25 others is smaller than in recent years. That’s because the Hall’s board of directors decided, for a reason it has not explained, to drop about 100 voters from the voting rolls, downsizing from about 550 to about 450.

The Hall required all writers who wanted to continue voting to fill out applications, and it pared the voting rolls before mailing ballots.

BBWAA members will maintain sole voting privileges for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, an exclusive honor granted to the organization since the inaugural Hall of Fame election in 1936.

Exclusive honor? What pomposity! It is the Hall that should be grateful to the Baseball Writers for creating and maintaining the Hall’s legitimacy. The writers are criticized at times for their election or non-election of certain players, but no other group has emerged as being as valid as the BBWAA.

Am I objective in my view of the writers? I don’t think I have to be because it’s a clear-cut case of truth and reality. I’m not suggesting that the writers never get it wrong; there is an occasional outcome that I or others disagree with, but that would be the case with any group of voters.

The BBWAA bloc is more trustworthy and legitimate than any other the Hall might come up with, including former players, particularly Hall of Fame players. Players in the Hall of Fame don’t want to see players added to the Hall because they don’t think anyone else belongs.

With all of that said, I have to add that I don’t think writers should be voting. News outlets pay us to cover baseball. We should cover the Hall elections as news events, but by voting we are creating the news. It seems to me to be a clear conflict of interest to cover the news that we create.

When Max Frankel, the executive editor of The New York Times, many years ago barred Times writers from voting for the Hall and any other awards, not just sports but awards in any other area, I initially objected to his fiat and was prepared to join Dave Anderson, the newspaper’s excellent sports columnist, and others in presenting our case to Frankel.

By the time the meeting was held, though, I had reconsidered my position and found myself agreeing with Frankel’s.

I went further. When the Hall’s directors stripped Pete Rose of eligibility for the Hall because he was on baseball’s permanently ineligible list, it was obvious they did it because they didn’t want Rose in the Hall of Fame and didn’t trust the writers to vote to keep him out so they took the step themselves.

I found their action objectionable and insulting and tried to get the BBWAA to stop voting for candidates for the Hall. My motion at a national BBWAA meeting actually had a chance of passing until it was blocked by a quick-thinking Chicago writer, Dave Nightingale. The motion was subsequently defeated in a national BBWAA vote.

Unfortunately, too many writers buy the Hall’s baloney about voting being an honor and a privilege, and they bask in the prestige of being Hall of Fame voters. They enjoy the stature so much they accept whatever rules the Hall establishes and any changes in the rules the Hall make.

Thus, the Hall can unilaterally eliminate 100 voters, and no one objects. Well. I am objecting to the elimination of two specific voters, both retired, and both retired long enough that the Hall feels they have lost touch with the game and would be unable to cast votes worthy of the Hall’s standards, whatever they may be.

However, these two banished voters, whom I will not identify because I haven’t discussed the issue with them, were among the most conscientious, intelligent and insightful of the 549 who voted last year.

But the Hall rejected their applications, leaving the ballot to others whose standards for election might be less rigid. The voters, for example, who want to be able to vote for more than 10 candidates.

The Hall’s election rules allow for writers to vote for a maximum of 10 players. In recent years, a movement has developed pushing for a raise in that maximum or elimination of the maximum altogether.

In a column before last year’s election Ken Rosenthal of Foxsports.com epitomized that movement. I have always respected Rosenthal’s reporting on baseball, but I can’t understand and strongly disagree with his thinking on the number of players who should be elected to the Hall.

“I voted for 10 players for the Hall of Fame last year,” Rosenthal wrote. “I’m voting for 10 this year. And I’m going to continue voting for 10 for the foreseeable future.

“For me, the only way to clear up the backlog of candidates for Cooperstown is to elect more of them, opening the ballot for others who are deserving.”

Excuse me, but I have no idea what he’s talking about. What backlog? If there was a backlog, why didn’t the writers elect more than Randy Johnson, John Smoltz, Pedro Martinez and Craig Biggio last year?

If only four players were elected, what would a change in the maximum have accomplished?

Yet Tyler Kepner wrote in The New York Times the other day, “…voters remain limited to 10 selections per ballot, even if they believe more than 10 players deserve the honor. The Hall of Fame’s board of directors decided in July not to change that limit, despite a recommendation by a BBWAA committee to raise it to 12.”

Rosenthal and the rest of the 51 percent who voted for 10 candidates a year ago vote for as many candidates as they want, but they see a vastly different Hall of Fame from the one I care to see.

In my enthusiasm the first time I voted for the Hall of Fame, which happened so many years ago I don’t remember the players I marked on my ballot, I voted for 10 players. By the time I voted the second time I realized that by voting for 10 I was saying I thought 10 players should be inducted that year.

That’s ridiculous, I concluded. No way 10 players should enter the Hall in the same year. Is that what Rosenthal and other no-maximum voters want? What kind of a Hall of Fame would result? It would be a palace of good players, not great players. In my view, Cooperstown should be reserved for the elite, the best of the best. In no year in the years I have been eligible to vote, no single year has had 10 elite players on the ballot.

Yet Rosenthal said he will vote for 10 players every year “for the foreseeable future.” Last year Rosenthal’s 10 included Curt Schilling (who received 39.2 percent of the votes), Edgar Martinez (27 percent) and Mike Mussina (24.6 percent). In previous years, Rosenthal said, he voted for Fred McGriff (12.9), Lee Smith (30.2) and Alan Trammell (25.1).

All good players, they were not among the elite, the best of the best, in my view.

ALTERING AN ELECTORATE

The Hall of Fame’s deletion of about 100 voters could very likely have an effect on the voting for elections. Presumably most, if not all, eliminated voters are older writers. Thus, the demographics of the electorate will change.

A younger electorate will open the door for the increased use of sabrmetric-type statistics and philosophy. That could result in some players who otherwise might have been elected falling short of election and others attaining election through the same changed means.

It’s a generational thing that will very likely have an even greater impact on voting for post-season awards. I don’t think I’ll fret over the change. We dinosaurs have had our day.

PEDRO ON PIAZZA AND PED’S

An unfortunate development in this year’s Hall of Fame voting will most likely be the election of Mike Piazza, who in his third year on the ballot gained 69.9 percent of the vote, falling only 28 votes short. Players who receive that high a percentage of votes have always eventually been elected.

I say Piazza’s election would be unfortunate because I believe he belongs in a class with Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire even though he never tested positive for steroids use.

Bonds and Clemens have not reached 40 percent in their three years on the ballot, McGwire is on the ballot for the last time and has seen his percentage drop steadily, plummeting to 10 percent a year ago, and Sosa’s 6.6 percent last year put him perilously close to the 5 percent he needs to stay on the ballot.

I have gained notoriety among Piazza’s zealous fans for raising the steroids issue in connection to the former catcher. Few writers have joined me in linking Piazza to performance-enhancing drugs, but I hold resolutely to my view that the case against Piazza is the strongest circumstantial case there is against any player.

The most recent “evidence” appears in “Pedro,” an autobiography Pedro Martinez, the Hall of Fame pitcher, wrote with Michael Silverman, a veteran Boston baseball writer.

“By 1993, boy, could he hit,” Martinez writes. “Like so many hitters that decade who found sudden success at the plate, he had added some weight and bulked up that lanky frame of his. His bat started to fly!”

Although Martinez doesn’t say it in precise words, his implication is clear. Then there is this passage about Bonds, who came to spring training in 1999 “with a dramatically enlarged physique and some bad back acne.”

I have written about Piazza’s bad back acne and have been ridiculed by his fans for it. However, back acne is one of the most prominent telltale signs of steroids use, and Martinez cites it in relation to Bonds. Maybe Martinez never saw Piazza undressed.

Lest the Piazza zealots forget in defense of their hero, Piazza’s acne disappeared and his back cleared up the same year when baseball began testing for steroids.

Baseball fans find very little, if anything, to enjoy in The New York Times these days. I often hear from them when they complain about the absence of news of baseball. What do you want me to do, I usually respond. I don’t work there anymore.

Soccer has become the sport of record of the so-called paper of record.

On Saturday, though, a wonderful thing happened, courtesy of Joe Nocera, a new sports business columnist, who comes to the Times sports section from its op-ed page, where he was basically a business columnist. I don’t know why he switched locations for his columns and whether it was a smart move for him because I found him to be one of the Times’ most entertaining op-ed columnists.

Yes, columnists should be entertaining as well as smart and incisive, and Nocera provides intelligence and insight. Previously, Times sports business columns were filled with TV ratings and interviews with announcers who were going to “call” the big games, as if anyone cared what they had to say.

In one of his earliest sports business columns, Nocera wrote about injuries fans have suffered at baseball games as the result of foul balls and broken bats. The best part of the column was I didn’t agree with its conclusion and it didn’t matter. I was delighted to see it in the paper and I look forward to more Nocera columns.

In this column, Nocera concluded:

“Baseball likes to say that it puts fan safety first. When baseball mandates netting down the foul lines, and a leaguewide policy that bans open umbrellas while a game is being played, I’ll believe it. Not until then.”

Nocera referred to a fan who, sitting in a third-row box seat about 50 feet past first base at Yankee Stadium, was hit in the face by a Hideki Matsui line drive, which the fan never saw because it was raining and fans sitting in front of him had raised umbrellas overhead.

The 50-year-old fan suffered terrible damage to his face and an eye and is suing the Yankees and Major League Baseball. His lawsuit has to do more with the Yankees allowing fans to use raised umbrellas rather than failing to protect fans with netting in front of the seats, but netting and protection generally have become a significant topic of conversation in Major League Baseball.

Protective netting and other safety measures are part of the changing landscape in baseball. In some opinions, including this one, the modern changes are not welcome.

Some of the changes have already occurred, some will arrive in the near future and others will proceed more slowly. The question is when all of the changes are complete, will it change the game so much that someday we won’t recognize it?

All right, many of us won’t be around to see the modern game. Maybe that’s just as well. We like the game we grew up with and raised our children on. No protective nets at ball parks, runners knocking down catchers at home plate, runner taking out shortstop to avoid double play.

There is, of course, a common thread that runs through some of the changes. Protecting the catcher, the shortstop and second baseman and the fans is all designed as safety measures. Keep everyone safe.

What happened in the first 100 years or so? Baserunners ran over catchers and wiped out shortstops. Batters hit foul balls into the stands and had broken parts of their bats fly into the stands. Where was the outcry for new rules to protect everyone? Were players and fans dumber in those days and didn’t know any better than to accept their fate?

It’s too late to protect yesterday’s fans, but Major League Baseball is planning to protect today’s and tomorrow’s fans.

Commissioner Rob Manfred said after last week’s owners’ meetings in Dallas that it was “absolutely clear” that there would be changes in ball park protection. He declined to give details, saying more work needed to be done.

“In addition to a recommendation on the physical location of nets, there will be a broad fan education component to the program,” Manfred said.

I am not advocating injuries, but I am advocating letting the players play and the fans watch. The fan who sued the Yankees didn’t have to sit in that third-row box seat behind first base. He had three young teenagers with him. He could have purchased seats in a safer location.

I have sat in box seats, and you can have them. You can’t look away. You attention has to be focused in the batter every second. If you’re not comfortable doing that, sit somewhere else.

As for players, Joe Torre played in those ancient times when nothing and no one was protected. He was even a catcher for a while and got knocked over a time or two by a runner barreling home from third. Now he’s the chief baseball officer spearheading all of these changes from the safety of his Park Avenue office.

While he’s there, he’s reviewing rulings of official scorers and changing hits to errors and errors to hits. That never used to happen, maybe because the scorers were baseball writers with greater credibility than today’s anonymous scorers.

Replay, of course, holds far greater significance than scoring changes, which don’t alter the outcome of games. A replay that changes an out call to safe can directly affect the outcome of a game.

Better to get it right? Maybe, but I have always felt if managers and players can make mistakes, umpires should be entitled to make mistakes, too. Replay, however, is here to stay and will only be employed to review more and more types of calls until everything is covered and it will be only the managers and players who will be allowed to make mistakes.

Here’s one I will advocating changing. A player slides into second, pops up and for an instant, or less, his foot or hand comes off the bag. Infielders have learned from replay that if the runner loses contact with the base the umpires will call him out if the fielder’s glove, with the ball in it, is touching some part of him.

Umpires give middle infielders leeway to execute phantom double plays, the old neighborhood play. If they continue to call that play, they should give the runner his version of the neighborhood play.

A very visible change has been the steady employment of infield shifts. For a large part of the game, infields do not have the customary two fielders between first and second and two between second and third. Teams stack their infield, depending on who is hitting, placing three fielders, say, between first and second, one usually in short right field for a left-handed hitter from where he can throw him out and often does.

Relief pitchers have become a bigger part of the game. With managers using pitch counts to dictate their pitching decisions, starters need work only six or five innings, leaving the remainder of the game to the relief corps. More and more of these relievers are throwing 97 miles an hour or faster, if the ubiquitous radar guns are to be believed.

I have a friend who scoffs s at the gun readings, calling them an attention-getting gimmick. He may be right. Is it possible that all of a sudden teams are finding a platoon of pitchers who throw in the upper 90s?

I also find it ridiculous that teams accept only five innings from starters. That’s half a day’s work, not enough, in my opinion, to justify a pitcher’s existence. But if teams want to build pitching staffs in that manner, it’s their prerogative.

Teams have made another change in strategy that they won’t admit to although it has become too obvious to deny with a straight face. Teams are manipulating players’ major leaguer service time more than ever, keeping players in the minors longer than they need to be there.

The clubs say the practice is legal, but no one will admit to doing it to affect a player’s eligibility for salary arbitration and free agency. The Chicago Cubs did that to Kris Bryant this season, keeping him in the minors at the start of the season long enough – 12 days – that he was deprived a full year’s service time. Thus, they will have rights to him for seven years instead of six.

The practice not only affects a player’s service time, but it also raises a serious question about a team’s integrity. If a team keeps a good player in the minors longer than necessary, is it doing everything it can to win? Is it cheating the fans by not doing everything it can to win?

Bryant was asked about it when he won the National League rookie of the year award last Monday.

“Honestly,” he said, “I haven’t thought about it that much lately. I said how I felt earlier in the season. Things happen for a reason. I played with a chip on my shoulder this year.”

Was the chip there because of what the Cubs did?

“I always play with a chip on my shoulder,” he said. “There are always things that happen in your life that contribute to the way you play.”

As a political science major in college, I had thoughts of getting into writing about politics. Baseball, however, grabbed hold of me and never let go. How was I to know that at this late date I would find a reason to combine the two interests?

I combine them through the name David Samson: the southeast David Samson, who is president of the Miami Marlins and the northeast David Samson who is a long-time friend and ally of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and possibly part of a scandal that has seriously undermined Christie’s efforts to gain the Republican nomination for president.

The political Samson, who has also served in the Christie administration, has not been accused of wrongdoing in the George Washington Bridge scandal, but after it became a publicly controversial issue, he resigned as a board member of the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, of which he had also been the chairman.

More recently Samson was linked to an investigation at United Airlines, resulting in the resignation of three top executives. Samson frequently flew United from Newark Airport to South Carolina, where he has a second home. The Port Authority manages Newark Airport.

The baseball David Samson has encountered his own controversies but is best known for generating widespread dislike among his baseball colleagues.

Several years ago I was talking to a baseball executive and expressed the thought that Samson seemed to be the most disliked executive in baseball. I was thinking about Samson because I had just written about the Marlins’ questionable treatment of their rookie left fielder, Logan Morrison, in demoting him to the minors.

My executive friend disagreed with my view. If not Samson, I asked, who? Jeff Wilpon, he said. Wilpon is the New York Mets’ chief operating officer and son of Fred Wilpon, the team’s principal owner.

Samson has his job for a similar reason. It was all in the family. When his mother married Jeffrey Loria, Samson, who had a law degree, joined the Marlins’ front office, eventually becoming president. The surprising part of his position was he retained it when his mother and Loria were divorced.

“His mother had the money,” an executive of another club noted.

Samson has a sandpaper personality, and he is not well regarded as a baseball man. He has no baseball background. Perhaps that’s why he makes comments like the one that caught my attention last week.

It’s not entirely clear how Samson’s latest foot-in-mouth stumble developed, but he exchanged verbal shots with Scott Boras, the agent every club official has reason to resent. To deal with him costs a lot of money.

Last summer Marcell Ozuna, a Boras client, encountered a rough stretch, managing only 1 hit in 36 times at bat. The Marlins demoted the young outfielder to the minors, where he stayed for six weeks despite quickly regaining his hitting stroke.

The Marlins used Ozuna’s slump as an excuse to send him to the minors, but Boras saw more to the demotion and he was probably right. The extra time in the minors cost Ozuna significant major league service time, affecting his eligibility for salary arbitration. The Marlins were having a surprisingly miserable season, and they figured they didn’t stand to gain anything if Ozuna helped them win a few more games.

“He’s a lifetime .265 hitter,” Boras told reporters at the general managers meetings, “and I can find you 30 players in the major leagues that went 1 for 36 some time in their career, and they did not get sent to the minor leagues. When you do those things, it sends a message to players, sends a message to the locker room and sends a message to everyone that looks at the organization that there is a calculus going on that is beyond performance.”

Some unsophisticated reporters heard or read that comment and criticized Boras for trying to tell the Marlins how to run their team, but those critics hadn’t paid attention to the games clubs play in manipulating players’ service time so they can retard their eligibility for salary arbitration and free agency.

Like all club executives, Samson wasn’t going to acknowledge what the Marlins’ motives were, but he went a step further in yapping back at Boras, choosing an entirely different subject as his weapon.

Jose Fernandez, the bright young right-hander, will presumably be pitching his first full season following elbow reconstructive surgery, and Samson said the Marlins won’t consult Boras for his opinion on how much Fernandez should pitch next season.

“My strong suggestion to Mr. Boras is that instead of resting on his 5 percent that he collects from his stable of players, he write a check and buy a team,” Samson said. “Then he would have the opportunity to run a team that he claims to be so able to do. Until that time, he is in no position to comment how any Major League Baseball team is operated.”

Sounding like a petulant child, Samson added of Boras, “He will not be involved in any discussion as it relates to Jose Fernandez. We will be in touch with the doctors and Jose as we formulate a plan.”

Samson did not return multiple calls seeking comment. Dan Halem, MLB’s chief legal officer, and David Prouty, the union’s general counsel, didn’t return calls either.

In years past years, baseball’s labor lawyers on both sides returned calls to the few reporters who called them so that they could give reporters their views on issues that might have two sides. Perhaps they are so cozy and comfortable with each other in these times of unnatural extended labor peace they don’t feel the need to express their views or the rules as they see them.

Boras, on the other hand, called back as did a veteran agent whom I called to find out the protocol for clubs involving agents in such conversations.

“If they want to involve the player,” the agent said, “the agent has a right to be there. If they don’t want to involve the player, they have no reason to involve the agent. There’s no protocol. It’s just based on good manners.”

Boras seemed amused by Samson’s remarks, which he had not heard or read previously.

“I don’t talk to him; I talk to Michael Hill and Jeffrey Loria,” he said by telephone Saturday evening, referring to the Marlins’ president of baseball operations and the owner. “I don’t really talk to Samson. I talked to Hill about free agents and Fernandez.

“Jose’s surgeon isn’t the Marlins’ surgeon, but we invited their surgeon into it. We’ve talked with the Marlins about Jose’s schedule. He’s fine. There was comment before and after. I talk to them regularly.”

It seems that maybe it’s Samson who is left out of the conversations.