Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat –1/14/25
12:00 |
: Good afternoon and happy new year! Welcome to my first chat of 2025
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12:02 |
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jaws-and-the-2025-hall-of-fame-ballot-ben-…), tomorrow it’s Curtis Granderson, with Fernando Rodney and Adam Jones still to squeeze in before Tuesday’s election results.
: Again it’s been awhile, as I’ve been snowed in by my Hall of Fame series, including a larger-than-usual crop of interesting one-and-done guys. Yesterday I covered Ben Zobrist ( |
12:04 |
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jay-jaffes-2025-hall-of-fame-ballot), and I don’t plan to do more than occasionally lurk there going forward.
: I’ve been doing a few Hall-related media spots lately, including a Hall of Very Good podcast and some discussions of the ballot with writers. If this kind of stuff floats your boat, check in with me at @jayjaffe.bsky.social to follow along. By the way, my Twitter account is now locked; I basically stopped posting there just before running my annual Hall of Fame ballot piece ( |
12:04 |
: We’re a week away from the Hall results being announced, so I expect several questions on that subject. With that, on with the show!
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12:05 |
: i’m sure this is the least fun part of HOF voting to discuss, but does stuff like beltran starting low and gaining year-over-year bother you? in a sense i get it, but on some level a voter who switches to Yes on him thought that cheating was bad a year ago but this year actually it’s in the past now. no one twenty years from now is going to care if he went in second ballot or sixth, so i dunno, either cheating is disqualifying or it isn’t
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12:08 |
most interesting aspects of covering the Hall beat. Voting doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Each candidate is competing with the other candidates for one of those 10 spots on a voter’s ballot, and while not everybody goes to 10, enough people do that even some deserving candidates get left off. The voting body changes from year to year, with old voters replaced by new ones, and returning candidates that do well get more scrutiny from voters that bypassed them the last time. It’s a very interesting set of dynamics in play, one we’ve started to get a better handle on thanks to Ryan Thibodaux and his ballot tracker group
: Actually, year-over-year changes is actually one of the |