The nine players on the Hall of Fame’s Golden Era Committee ballot totaled three Most Valuable Player Awards, an average of more than six All-Star Game selections per player and seven World Series titles.

And the 10th member of the ballot? Well, all he did was assemble the great Cardinals teams of the 1960s and the Big Red Machine of the 1970s.

The 16-person Golden Era Committee is ready to go to work.

“This system puts people into the context of where they belong,” said Jack O’Connell, the secretary/treasurer of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and a member of the BBWAA’s Historical Overview Committee, which crafts each year’s Eras Committee ballot. “So the voters can compare candidates against other candidates from their own time.”