The Hall of Fame announces its results tomorrow, and the next few days will be filled with voters publishing their ballots online, giving you ample opportunity to shake your head in wonder at the thought process of some voters. But, instead of getting frustrated by decisions made by other people we have no influence over, I’d like to do something else while waiting for Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and maybe even Frank Thomas to be acknowledged as all time greats. So, today, let’s update a post I did a few years ago, and look at which players currently active are going to eventually end up in Cooperstown.

Before I started picking names, though, I was curious as to what the historical precedent was for active Hall of Famers in any given season. I noted a few weeks ago that, historically, between 1-2% of all players have been inducted in the Hall of Fame, but because the best players have long careers and end up crossing over eras, it would make sense that there are more than 8-15 Hall of Famers playing in any given season. So, with assistance from Baseball-Reference’s Play Index, I pulled the number of players in every season of baseball history who were eventually elected to the Hall of Fame.

I won’t reproduce the whole list here, since it covers 134 seasons even after you exclude the nine recent years in which no one has yet to be elected, but I will note that the most Hall of Famers ever in one season is 53, back in 1928-1929-1930. There were 52 in 1926, 1927, and 1932. In fact, there are only 15 seasons in baseball history where there were 40 or more active Hall of Famers in that season, and those 15 years are every season from 1923 to 1937. Here are those 15 seasons, with rank being their position on the all time leaderboard for seasons with most Hall of Famers active.

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Whether you go by ZIPS or Steamer, the Orioles have exactly five good position players. In Adam Jones, Chris Davis, Manny Machado, Matt Wieters, and J.J. Hardy, the Orioles have a core of talent that projects for roughly +15 WAR, meaning that they’d only need to get about +25 WAR from the other 20 spots on the roster in order to project as a legitimate contender for 2014. +25 WAR across 20 roster spots is not a particularly high bar, and with the head start that their Big Five give them, the Orioles should be a good team next year.

But right now, they don’t project as a particularly good team. Our forecasted standings based on the Steamer data (ZIPS will be included once all the team projections are finished) have the Orioles as a 78 win team, 10 wins behind the Red Sox and in last place in the AL East. Steamer thinks the Orioles are approximately as good as the Mets. The Orioles, as currently constructed, are a perfect example of why roster spots #6-#30 matter quite a bit, and why the Stars and Scrubs model of building a baseball team isn’t always all its cracked up to be.

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Yeah, I know, this is like the 40th post this week about Masahiro Tanaka. I’m sorry about that, but in our defense, there’s nothing else going on. Tanaka’s posting has effectively shut down the market for starting pitching until he signs, or at least, until teams that think they have a shot at him learn that they don’t. Most of the position players worth writing about have already signed, and now we’re just into staredown mode between the Mets and Stephen Drew, the Mariners and Nelson Cruz, and the Orioles and Kendrys Morales. Maybe I’ll try to find something interesting to say about one of those three players next week.

Today, though, more Tanaka, because I still find this entire situation pretty fascinating. You guys expect him to sign for $120 million over six years, not including the $20 million posting fee, so the final price would put Tanaka squarely in the range of what Zack Greinke got last winter, despite the fact that he’s technically still a prospect. And historically, the crowdsourced contract forecasts have been low on the top guys, so there’s a pretty decent chance that he’s actually going to cost more than 6/$140M, and his final price might push him into the range of contracts recently signed by legitimate aces like Felix Hernandez and Justin Verlander.

And yet, the general consensus is that Tanaka probably isn’t an ace in the way that most people think of the word. Most of the scouting reports suggest that his strengths are going to be throwing strikes and getting ground balls, with enough strikeouts on his splitter to make the overall package successful. There are certainly very good pitchers who fit that description, so I thought I’d create a list of pitchers who have pitched to something like that skillset over the last three years, as a representation of what that kind of performance actually looks like.

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Ballots for Hall of Fame voters are due today. While I am a member of the BBWAA, I have not been in the organization for the requisite 10 years, so I do not have a vote for the Hall of Fame. But I still have opinions, and so, here is my hypothetical 2014 ballot. If you’re interested, here is my ballot from last year, where I voted for Bagwell, Piazza, Schilling, Biggio, Raines, Walker, Martinez, Bonds, Clemens, and Trammell. Because of the 10 vote limit, several of those players are getting bumped this year; hopefully the BBWAA does away with the arbitrary limitation and lets people vote for whoever they believe is worthy of enshrinement in the future.

On to my 2014 picks, listed in order from strongest to weakest candidate. For players who are holdovers from last year’s ballot, I just copied and pasted what I wrote a year ago.

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A few hours ago, I put up a crowdsourcing form for you guys to project what Masahiro Tanaka will sign for in the next few weeks. Now that we’re up to about 700 entries, I’d say our sample is large enough to post the results.

First, some graphs, because the word is in our name.

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Since it’s Masahiro Tanaka day here at FanGraphs — Tony and I both wrote about him this morning — and because I find our reader’s expectations of contract prices to be endlessly fascinating, let’s go ahead and break out the Contract Crowdsourcing series again for MLB’s newest sort-of-free-agent.

This won’t be an exactly apples to apples comparison to the other 47 crowdsourced free agent contracts you guys already did, since we now have information about the market rate for players this winter and how teams are reacting to having more money than ever before, but it should still be a fun exercise. As usual, the form is below, though because I made this one, it won’t be as pretty as the ones Carson created a few months ago. As my wife will tell you, I’m more function over design, so it’s just a plain and simple two step form. We’ll collect a representative sample of the readership, and then I’ll publish the results either later this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

Two simple questions: how many years will Tanaka sign for, and what will the AAV of his salary be in those years? Note that because we know that the posting fee is going to be $20 million, there’s no need to forecast that, so you should only include the salary Tanaka will receive, and then his total cost will be the forecast years and dollars plus $20 million. But don’t include the $20 million. Really. Don’t do it. Just the AAV of what he’ll receive. Got it? Okay, go.

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Masahiro Tanaka was finally posted last week. Now, for the next 25 days or so, he’s going to be the center of the baseball world, for all the reasons Tony talked about this morning, and the month long courting of Tanaka is going to end with him likely signing a deal that costs a similar amount to Shin-Soo Choo or Jacoby Ellsbury. Perhaps more, on an annual average basis, since his deal is likely to be for six seasons instead of seven, and teams will have to pay a $20 million posting fee in addition to the salary they negotiate with Tanaka. My guess is that he ends up at $120 million over six years, so the total cost will be 6/$140M with the posting fee, putting his final bill just slightly behind the 6/$147M that Zack Greinke went for last winter.

It is going to be, by far, the largest contract ever given to a player who has yet to play in the big leagues. Including the posting fee, Daisuke Matsuzaka cost the Red Sox about $100 million, while Yu Darvish cost the Rangers about $110 million. And those deals dwarf all of the contracts given to other international players: Jose Abreu got $68 million this winter after defecting from Cuba. Previously, Hyun-Jin Ryu went for $62 million including the posting fee paid to his Korean team, Yasiel Puig got $42 million (plus some potential arbitration payouts that could raise that number substantially), and Yoenis Cespedes got $36 million over four years. Even going back a few years, we see Aroldis Chapman at $30 million and Leonys Martin at $15 million.

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On Saturday, the Rangers agreed to sign Shin-Soo Choo to a seven year, $130 million contract. With Nelson Cruz and David Murphy departing via free agency and Craig Gentry traded to Oakland, they had a gaping hole in atheir outfield, and they signed the best outfielder left on the market. Given their position on the win curve, maximizing their 2014 roster potential is an understandable strategy, even though Choo is likely to be completely dead weight by the end of this deal. As I wrote at the beginning of the off-season, nearly every long term free agent contract will be a poor investment for the team by the end, as they are designed to be a value to the team in the first few years and a value to the player in the last few.

That said, even with the Rangers having ample revenues — thanks to their television contract — and being in a prime position on the win curve, this still looks like a pretty significant overpay to me, and a contract I think Texas will regret sooner than later. In fact, depending on how much money Nelson Cruz suckers someone into paying him, this might actually end up as my least favorite contract of the entire winter. And I think this deal looks particularly mediocre when you see what the Yankees did with the same resources.

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