A 2022 Hall of Fame Ballot of Your Own – and a Schedule of Profiles

It’s Hall of Fame season, if you haven’t noticed by the multitude of Era Committee posts that have run amid the flurry of recent transactions. While my annual series on the BBWAA ballot is barely underway, it’s time to launch what’s become a yearly tradition at FanGraphs. In the spirit of our annual free agent contract crowdsourcing, we’re inviting registered users to fill out their own virtual Hall of Fame ballots using a cool gizmo that our developer, Sean Dolinar, built a few years ago. By next week, I’m also going to use this page to lay out a tentative schedule for the remainder of the series.

To participate in the crowdsourcing, you must be signed in, and you may only vote once. While you don’t have to be a Member to do so, this is a good time to mention that buying a Membership does help to fund the development of cool tools like this — and it makes a great holiday gift! To replicate the actual voting process, you may vote for anywhere from zero to 10 players; ballots with more than 10 won’t be counted. You may change your ballot until the deadline, which is December 31, 2021, the same as that of the actual BBWAA voters, who have to schlep their paper ballot to the mailbox.

The ballot is here and contains all 30 candidates (sorry, no write-ins for those fixated on Pete Rose). We’ve got tables of career stats for the ballot’s position players and pitchers, if that helps, as well as a checkbox that allows you to see the stats of those already enshrined. As with last year, I’ll write up the crowdsourcing results sometime in early January, when we’re all jonesing for Hall news in advance of the announcement of the official results on January 25.

As for the schedule, since I’ve already fallen a few days behind the extremely preliminary one I sketched out a few weeks ago due to travel and Era Committee coverage, I’ve decided to skip full re-runs of some of the candidates who won’t be getting elected this year; instead, I’ll link to last year’s profiles while limiting my updates on those guys mainly to explaining where they stand, voting-wise. This is particularly aimed at the Barry Bonds/Roger Clemens/Curt Schilling/Sammy Sosa quartet of 10th-year candidates, because for the most part fully relitigating their situations feels unnecessary, and at the Mark Buehrle/Tim Hudson/Andy Pettitte group of pitchers, whom I’ll cover in light of S-JAWS, the experimental, workload-adjusted version of starting pitcher JAWS that I introduced during the Golden Days Era Committee cycle.

Rest assured that I’ll be covering every candidate at length or in brief, in keeping with what I’ve done since the start of my JAWS-flavored coverage in 2004. I’m not about to miss any now. New profiles below are denoted with asterisks.

Nov. 22: Intro
Nov. 24: Todd Helton
Dec. 7: Scott Rolen
Dec. 8: Gary Sheffield
Dec. 9: David Ortiz
Dec. 10: Billy Wagner

Dec. 13: Andruw Jones
Dec. 14: Jimmy Rollins*
Dec. 15: Bonds/Clemens/Schilling/Sosa
Dec. 16: Omar Vizquel
Dec. 17: Bobby Abreu

Dec. 20: Joe Nathan*
Dec. 21: Jeff Kent/Manny Ramirez
Dec. 22: Mark Teixeira*
Dec. 23: Buehrle/Hudson/Pettitte
Dec. 24: (site dark)

Dec. 27: Torii Hunter
Dec. 28: Alex Rodriguez*
Dec. 30: My Ballot
Dec. 31: (site dark)

Jan. 4: Prince Fielder*
Jan. 5: Justin Morneau*
Jan. 7: Ryan Howard*

Jan. 10: A.J. Pierzynski*
Jan. 12: Carl Crawford*
Jan. 13: Jake Peavy*
Jan. 18: Tim Lincecum*
Jan. 19: Jonathan Papelbon*