The one rule
Two separate questions, kept separate
Almost every misreading of a Hall of Fame page dissolves here.
Eligibility
Decides who is on the list
A set of bars your commissioner sets. Clear enough of them and you are a candidate — full stop. Nothing else can put you on the ballot, and nothing else can keep you off it.
Grading
Decides only what order they are in
A 0–100 rating that sorts the candidates. It is a reading aid, not a gate. This is what lets a missed honor cost a manager points and never his place.
The bars
What a new league starts with
Two wings, each with its own criteria and its own bars. Both are switched on by default and either can be switched off.
Managers
Players
These are the bars a brand-new league starts with, tuned for a long-running 10–12 team league — not a standard. A commissioner is expected to move them, and a younger league usually should. By default a candidate needs to clear 2 of the armed bars plus 4 seasons, and at most 2 go in per class. Demanding everybar would enshrine only the manager who is best at everything, which is not what a hall is for. A criterion showing “off” is one nobody has armed — arming it re-ranks a ballot, so it stays a commissioner’s call.
The rating
Qualified is 60, not 100
The rating measures a career against a fixed standard — the bar your league set — rather than against whoever else happens to be in the pool. That is what separates a hall from an award.
What we guarantee
The promises behind a plaque
Each of these is enforced somewhere in the code, not merely intended.
Eligibility decides who is on the ballot. Grading only orders it.
Nothing on the grading side can keep a name off a ballot or put one on — including the qualifying cut line, which marks a candidate rather than gating one. It is what lets a missed honor cost a manager points and never his place.
There is no override flag on an induction.
The ballot is re-derived on the server before anything is written, and a client's claim that somebody qualifies is never trusted. The escape hatch for a borderline legend is lowering a published threshold — which keeps the rules honest, because everyone can see it moved.
The published rules are always the rules the ballot is using.
Settings are stored as the output of the normalizer, never as what a form sent. If a commissioner asks for 'at least 4 of' with three criteria armed, it is clamped to three and the saved value is what comes back — so the page can never show a rule the ballot is not running.
A plaque does not come down.
Raising a bar later changes who can get in next, not who already did.
Hall of Fame questions
What a league asks before its first vote
Join the waitlist
Give your league an honor worth winning
You set the bar, the ballot does the math, and the plaque doesn't come down.
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