The Baseball Hall of Fame wants some of the old sports writers off the voting rolls for the game’s greatest honor — admission to the Hall of Fame.

I would take that personally … except that I think it’s a good idea.

To see the headline is to think, at first: “Hey, ageism at work! That’s wrong!”

But that doesn’t convey the nuance of the decision, and the nuance makes it sensible.

Here is the key provision:

Anyone holding a Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) card can vote for 10 years after going off the group’s “active” list.

Previously, once you put in your 10 years as a baseball writer you became eligible to vote in the annual Hall of Fame balloting pretty much forever. Or until the great scorer in the sky called you home.

Before, after ball writers retired (or, more likely of late, were dumped out of journalism), they continued to get a Hall of Fame ballot annually as long as they held a “Veteran Inactive” card from the BBWAA, and my sense is that those were not hard to get.

An “HOF vote forever” for former baseball writers might seem like a wise thing. Older guys have the ability to judge players over history’s arc, maybe three or four decades around the game. “Is this guy better than the guy I covered 30 years ago?”

That has to be good, doesn’t it? A sense of the more modern game doesn’t have to be a casualty of age, and it is beyond rare for the people who covered the game to stop paying close attention to it.

But this has one worrisome aspect: A lot of us are living longer than did our predecessors.

A generation or two ago, hard-living sports writers could be counted on not to live to a great age. We retired, we fell over dead a few years later from all our bad habits.

But the era of journalists making more money, exercising, taking care of themselves, avoiding ballpark food and at least moderating drinking … it seems to me has led to more sports writers living to advanced age.

An age when the mind might begin to slip. When closely following the game begins to ebb a bit. When a retired journo perhaps has not seen the inside of a clubhouse for 20, 30 years and perhaps does not give as much consideration to the Hall of Fame ballot as he or she once did.

But we don’t want to be too harsh about this. We don’t want to disenfranchise veteran ball writers too quickly.

That is where the “10-year rule” at the back end, allowing BBWAA members to vote for a decade after they are no longer active members, comes in. It assures that some wise old heads will remains eligible to vote. More than a few 70-year-olds will continue to cast ballots.

This 10-year rule is a sort of echo of the 10-year rule for admission to the BBWAA. The idea for the latter is that you can’t really know a great player unless you have been covering baseball for a decade. The idea behind the former is to have an electorate more up to date with the game as it is now.

One other consideration that might be at work: The voter rolls seem to be growing.

The linked story, above, suggests the BBWAA has 650 voters eligible for the Hall of Fame. My recollection is that when I first got the right to vote, in the 1990s, the electorate was more like 500.

I think 500 is plenty of voters, and if we get closer to that by tightening the eligibility rules, well, fine.

Anyway, taking the vote from the BBWAA members who have not actively covered baseball in 10 years …

As a proud “Lifetime Honorary” member of the BBWAA, I am OK with that.