More and more, I think the NFL has one part of it right. Every year they elect 6 or 7 guys to their Hall. That tends to make it The Hall Of Very GoodTM, but there is some value in that. Let the fans see their favorite players honored. Baseball diminishes its product by in effect arguing whether some of its best players are even "good enough". Football hypes their product, 13 months a year, and it works. What the baseball Hall would then need to do, on top of that, would be to have some distinguished panel (sorry, BBWAA, maybe the living HoFers themselves) vote 1 or maybe 2 players each year into an Inner Circle of the HoF; whoever gets the most votes is in (no years with nobody), second highest vote getter is in if it's above some threshold, say, for additional suspense. Probably that would be a little less restrictive Inner Circle than the Ruth/Cobb/Musial version we usually talk about, but would address the thirst for some kind of additional honor, currently satisfied approximately by notions of "first ballot" and "near-unanimous" and so forth.