With the Hall of Fame announcement of the 2019 Class set for this evening, many baseball fans are eagerly awaiting the 6 PM EST arrival of results. We perused our Tracker and uncovered voting trends for most of the candidates on the ballot for you to enjoy while you’re waiting to pop the champagne. If you’re from Seattle or Toronto, we would suggest that you go ahead and book a Cooperstown hotel for July’s induction weekend as soon as you’re finished reading. If you’re a New Yorker, pack up the car and bring enough lawn chairs for 50,000 others. Here is a rundown of the vote through 226 ballots, ordered by current vote percentage in the tracker:

Mariano Rivera (226-of-226, 100%)

Spoiler alert: Mariano Rivera will be elected to the Hall of Fame later this evening. He almost certainly won’t be elected unanimously, but he could conceivably top Ken Griffey Jr.’s record-setting 99.32% share. In order to outpace Grifey’s 437-of-440 mark, Rivera can miss no more than two votes, since the number of ballots cast is expected to be be fewer than it was in 2016.

Rivera will become the second relief pitcher elected by the BBWAA in as many years, following Trevor Hoffman’s induction a year ago – not to mention the Today’s Game Committee’s selection of Lee Smith just one month ago. In an interview for Mark Newman’s Yankee Legends, Hoffman said of Rivera, “He has been a great ambassador for the game and he’ll be a welcome addition here.”

Rivera is set to become to first pure reliever inducted into the Hall of Fame on his first opportunity. Dennis Eckersley received 83.2% in 2004, but he spent the first 12 seasons of his career predominantly working as a starting pitcher before shifting to the bullpen full-time in 1997.

Roy Halladay (210-of-226, 92.9%)

Roy Halladay stands a very good chance at posthumously becoming the 56th first-ballot Hall of Famer. All types of voters have taken to his candidacy, checking his name at least 85% of the time on every ballot size except zero-to-four player ones. The current estimate is that he will need a “yes” vote on 53.2% of the remaining ballots to clear the 75% threshold.

The most any candidate has ever dropped in his pre-announcement to post-announcement totals is Mike Mussina, who fell 11.0% in 2015. Halladay’s percentage could fall that far and he’d still be inducted with more than 80% of the vote.

Will 90% of voters vote for Halladay? A vote share that high for a starting pitcher is actually much rarer than you’d think.

He could become the 11th starting pitcher in history to receive 90% of the vote if he stays above that mark.

Regardless of where his vote share ends up, it is a near-certainty he will be inducted into Cooperstown as one of the all-time greats, and next July will be a celebration of the life one of baseball’s best.

Edgar Martinez (204-of-226, 90.3%)

After falling 20 votes short in 2018, Edgar Martinez fans should be encouraged by the DH’s early returns. He’s seen 46 of his “no” voters from last year reveal their ballots and has received a “yes” vote from 26 of them. Incorporating one lost vote, he is currently at +25. There is always a degree of uncertainty in how the electorate will change from one year to the next, but he’s in great shape.

Since the BBWAA returned to annual voting in 1966, there have been seven instances of a candidate receiving at least 55% of the vote in their penultimate year on the ballot. All seven have been inducted eventually, though some needed help from a small committee to gain entry. Martinez is the third player in the last 15 years to reach 65% of the vote entering their final try. His situation compares well to the previous two.

Like Raines, Martinez had a strong campaign elevate his candidacy. He went from 27% to 43.4% to 58.6% to 70.4% of the vote, and appears primed to hear his name announced today, becoming the second player in three years to earn election in their final year of eligibility.

One last note of intrigue concerns whether Martinez can set the record for the highest vote share for a player in their final year. Currently, Tim Raines holds that record with 86.0% in 2017. Can Martinez remain that high? He’s dropped more than that in previous years, but so too had Raines.

If the difference between his final and pre-announcement results increases by the same amount as Raines’ did, 90.2% would be the mark to target in order to beat Raines’ record.

Mike Mussina (184-of-226, 81.4%)

Mussina emerged early in this cycle as the ballot’s most interesting bubble candidate. He received 63.5% of the vote last year, just 49 votes shy of election.

A more detailed breakdown of Mussina’s chances was published here last week, but many ballots have been revealed since then.

He’s only received one additional vote on these new ballots, but it was from a voter who voted only for the four inductees last year, a “Small Hall, no PED” voter. That group still likely comprises the majority of remaining voters, so for Mussina to change a mind there bodes well for his chances.

This evening, Mussina fans should hope he once again experiences a post-announcement surge.

Since inactive voters began losing voting eligibility, Mussina’s post-announcement gains have by and large kept pace with his pre-announcement gains percentage-wise. He needs an overall gain of 11.5% to clear 75%. If the pattern holds, he’ll be agonizingly close to the votes he needs.

It’s also worth noting that players who have been in the 80% range have seen the differential between their pre-announcement and final share shrink. After drops of 6.7%, 6.3%, and 5.6% the year before they were each elected, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza, and Raines saw their final shares decrease by only 1.4%, 3.3%, and 2.8% when they crossed 75%. If Mussina’s gap shrinks, that would help a lot.

Barry Bonds (161-of-226, 71.2%) and Roger Clemens (162-of-226, 71.7%)

Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are grouped together here because their situations are virtually identical. One is arguably the greatest player of all-time; the other is arguably among the greatest pitchers of all-time. They would have been in the Hall of Fame years ago if not for their connections to performance-enhancing drugs. Instead, they have been passed over six times. Clemens reached 57.3% last year, while Bonds got to 56.4%.

Both men have seen virtually no change in support from 2017 to now; Bonds has netted just four public votes in the last two cycles, with Clemens gaining six. So is there any hope that these two make it to Cooperstown on the BBWAA’s ballot?

Well, both candidates are much closer to the 75% threshold now than they were just a few years back. After each landed in almost exactly the same spot from 2013 to 2015, the duo has seen a series of favorable events fall their way.

The Hall reduced the window of eligibility for players to be considered from 15 to 10 years prior to the 2015 election. While seemingly hurting their chances by allotting them fewer opportunities on the ballot, Bonds and Clemens may have actually benefited, as the 10-year limit has coincided with a number of players making large gains in an effort by voters to get worthy players inducted before their time runs out.

Of much greater aid to Bonds and Clemens was the Hall’s decision to dramatically decrease the voter pool prior to the 2016 election, which meant revoking the voting rights of honorary BBWAA members who had not held active status within the last 10 years. This rule change preceded jumps of 7.7% and 7.5% for Clemens and Bonds, respectively, in 2016.

The very next year, the Today’s Game Committee inducted Bud Selig to the Hall of Fame, nearly unanimously. Pandamonium ensued following the selection of the man who presided over the Steroid Era and chose to ignore what was happening in the sport, and as a result, a large number of voters began supporting Bonds and Clemens, feeling as though there is no reason they should be kept out if Selig was already enshrined. Clemens tacked on an additional 8.9% and Bonds increased his share by 9.5%.

As already mentioned, the support for these two has hit a wall in the two years since. Support will continue to grow slowly due to voter turnover as new voters enter the pool and older voters lose eligibility. Since the election of Bud Selig, public first-time voters have overwhelmingly supported both – Clemens at 31-of-35 and Bonds at a 30-of-35 clip.

Still, some chips have to fall the right way for Bonds and Clemens to have a shot at BBWAA induction. Much like with Curt Schilling, the first hurdle is clearing 60% of the vote. It may not be as dramatic as with other candidates, but it is likely that there are voters who will begin to support Bonds and Clemens if, say, a 60-65% majority of their peers have already done so.

It is also conceivable that a handful of voters are simply waiting until 2022 – the final time Bonds and Clemens will appear on the writers’ ballot – to check those two boxes.

A lot can happen over the course of three years. Perhaps there will be yet another referendum by the Hall that, whether intentionally or inadvertently, will present a more favorable outlook for the two of the arguably most widely debated candidates in history.

Curt Schilling (158-of-226, 69.9%)

After Schilling praised a photo of a t-shirt that advocated the lynching of journalists, his support dropped from 52.3% to 45.0%. He recovered most of that lost support in the 2018 cycle, rising to 51.2%, but along the way lost two valuable years of eligibility. At +17, he’s been among the big gainers so far this cycle, but it might be too little, too late.

The most important benchmark for Schilling’s eventual candidacy is clearing 60%. Only Gil Hodges has cleared that mark with the BBWAA and failed to later make the Hall of Fame. Schilling has three more tries left before his Hall fate is left in the hands of small committees. If Mussina is elected this year, Schilling will be the top returning candidate without a hard link to performance-enhancing drugs, though his offensive and inflammatory public persona persists. In recent years, top returners without a tie to PEDs have usually been inducted in short order.

Piazza, Raines, Hoffman, and Vladimir Guerrero were all inducted in their first try as one of the top two returning clean candidates. Martinez is expected to follow suit, and Mussina might as well.

At 60%, Schilling would need to average a gain of just 5% per year to make it to 75%. If he does better, his chances increase that much more. He won’t be elected today, but the important thing to look at when assessing his future candidacy will be whether or not he can clear into the 60s and whether Mussina is elected.

Larry Walker (149-of-226, 65.9%)

A breakdown of Larry Walker’s candidacy was explored in full last week, with some of the findings updated below following the influx of 49 ballots since then.

After seeing a huge uptick in public ballot support (+47 net gained votes so far) and appearing on 75.8% of all ballots of at least seven votes cast, Walker appears primed for a huge vote increase this year. Come 2020, there is a chance Walker is in a very similar position to where Mussina finds himself now. Ballot space will be cleared as four or five candidates – including Fred McGriff – who received a sizable vote total will exit the ballot in advance of next year. As with McGriff and Martinez, it is quite common for candidates to receive an additional boost in their final year of BBWAA eligibility.

The sudden, dramatic increase Walker has experienced is rather unprecedented, and it should allow him to clear 55% with relative ease. He’d be hard-pressed to see such a jump next year, but then again, nobody foresaw his current trends as a possibility either.

Fred McGriff (89-of-226, 39.4%)

Three years ago, Alan Trammell entered his final year of eligibility with the BBWAA with just 25.1% support. He went +39 among public, returning voters en route to surpassing 40%, then was promptly elected his first try in front of a small committee.

Smith didn’t enjoy the same final-year bump, in no small part due to the presence of Ivan Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and Guerrero all debuting alongside him, but he had previously cleared 50% in 2012. He was elected unanimously by the Today’s Game Committee last month.

McGriff’s best path towards induction is to follow in their footsteps and clear 40%. If he can do that, he might be viewed favorably when his name is put before a committee in a few years. Right now, he’s trending in the upper 30s, but has typically fared better with later ballots than earlier ones. Whether that holds now that he has been getting additions from voters who vote for 10 players remains to be seen.

His meteoric rise is one of the biggest stories of the cycle, however, and it will be extremely interesting to see if he ends up over 40%.

Omar Vizquel (85/226, 37.6%)

In just his second year of eligibility, Omar Vizquel has received the third-most “+1s” of any candidate, with 23. It seems unlikely that he can cross 50%, though if he does, eventual induction would seem to be assured; only one candidate not on the current ballot has ever received 50% of the BBWAA vote and not made the Hall of Fame, though some have needed help from the committees.

Even if Vizquel settles in around 46 to 48%, he has eight more years of eligibility to get the required remaining votes. With fewer players coming onto the ballot in the coming years who are expected to draw significant support, Vizquel could quickly emerge as a candidate for rapid increases.

Only a small handful of players have ever cleared 40% and not gotten into the Hall of Fame, namely Hodges, Marty Marion, Maury Wills, Roger Maris, Tony Oliva, and Steve Garvey.

Vizquel fans should look to 45% as a reasonable target this year, as that’s where most of the above names stopped making further progress.

Manny Ramirez (58-of-226, 25.7%)

Unfortunately for Ramirez, he remains stuck in PED-tainted purgatory on the Hall ballot. After collecting a vote share of 23.8% as a first-time eligible candidate in 2017 and dipping slightly to 22.0% in 2018, he appears set to land right around those two marks yet again. The reasoning behind both why his vote total has been stagnant and is unlikely to change much year-to-year is simple: he is the only player discussed here to be handed a suspension by MLB for a positive PED test, an event that occurred multiple times. For a player who most would agree statistically merits enshrinement, the PED stain is a major obstacle to overcome. One positive sign for Ramirez is that a number of voters may begin to consider him as ballot space permits, holding to the philosophy that he deserves a vote, but not at the expense of another worthy candidate who was never disciplined by MLB for PED usage.

Scott Rolen (48-of-226, 21.2%)

Scott Rolen has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the ballot logjam easing. Of those candidates who received under 20% of the vote last year, he has seen the biggest net increase in votes from returning voters, at +16.

His initial vote share of 10.2% would be historically low for a candidate eventually elected by the BBWAA, but the recent past provides more reason for optimism if Rolen can see a jump to around 19%. In his fifth year of eligibility, Walker received votes on 11.8% of ballots cast and is now expected to clear 50% handily. Martinez bottomed out with 25.2% in his fifth year, and is now on the doorstep of Cooperstown.

Walker and Martinez are but two examples. Mussina went from 20.3% to 63.5% in four years and is expected to receive yet another large jump. If Rolen can quickly distinguish himself from other candidates, he could ride a similar wave of momentum and avoid languishing at the bottom of the ballot for too long.

In that vein, it’s worth watching where he lands relative to Ramirez, Todd Helton, Jeff Kent, and Billy Wagner this year. With four or five of the top candidates exiting the ballot either by election or the expiration of their eligibility, some of these candidates could enter into the top 10 next cycle, which has served as a good indicator of future enshrinement in recent years. From 2007 to 2016, 33 different players ranked in the top 10 of a ballot share at least one time, though Mark McGwire, Bonds, and Clemens all have ties to performance-enhancing drugs. If Martinez and Mussina are both elected, 26 of the 30 candidates without ties to PEDs will already have been elected, and three of the remaining four will be top 10 on this ballot.

Todd Helton (40-of-226, 17.7%)

Todd Helton is perhaps the most intriguing candidate that nobody is paying attention to. In his first ballot appearance, he is performing significantly better than Rolen did pre-announcement a year ago, and the two are within a handful of votes. As touched on last week, the number of votes on any particular ballot has had minimal correlation with the frequency of Helton’s votes. Through 226 public ballots, he has gotten the nod on 25 of 127 (19.7%) ballots on which the maximum 10 spots were utilized. That figure has dropped marginally to 15.2% on all other ballots, and Helton’s name has actually been included most frequently on ballots in the 7-8 vote range (20.6%).

Why is this the case? Helton’s supporters are negatively correlated with Bonds and Clemens voters. On 160 ballots with both Bonds and Clemens, Helton has just 18 votes (11.3%), and just one on a ballot that did not feature 10 checkmarks. However, that ratio has nearly tripled when Bonds and Clemens aren’t chosen; he is 22-for-66 here, a 33.3% share.

The catch here is that, when Bonds and Clemens are excluded, there is the same amount of space available for a Helton vote as there is on a full ballot that includes them. In fact, there may be as much space on a six or seven-player ballot in the former category, as many Bonds and Clemens supporters also vote for Ramirez and/or Sammy Sosa, whereas they are almost always out of consideration for voters who exclude Bonds and Clemens from their ballots.

Since post-announcement reveals have been notoriously unkind to those accused of PED usage, it is very possible that Helton will be the rare candidate who winds up finishing ahead of where he currently tracking.

Jeff Kent (38-of-226, 16.8%)

Kent might be the best example of a candidate who has been lost in the shuffle on the ballot. A player known more for his consistency than anything else, Kent suffers from sharing a ballot with others who were perceived as consummate superstars. He won the 2000 NL MVP Award, but did not record any other top-five finishes.

With just four years of eligibility remaining after 2019, Kent probably won’t ever sniff election by the writers. He does seem like a prime candidate for serious consideration by a small committee somewhere down the road, though.

Billy Wagner (37-of-226, 16.4%)

The time has come for Wagner to make some headway on the ballot. He has flipped 12 voters from a “no” vote to a “yes” vote and has received a checkmark on 16.4% of ballots. Closers typically see a slight boost in the final results, so it is possible that Wagner could wind up at around 20% of the final vote. With the ballot logjam easing, Wagner is a prime candidate to make up a ton of ground in the next few years. He should benefit from a ballot that won’t feature Rivera, Hoffman, or Smith for the first time since Wagner’s 2016 ballot debut.

In theory, Rivera’s tremendous support could draw more attention to the career Wagner authored. Among pitchers to debut in the live-ball era and throw at least 500 innings, Wagner ranks at or near the very top of the leaderboard in virtually every rate stat there is. It stands to reason that Wagner could benefit reasonably well from an internet push, much like Tim Raines was likely aided by Jonah Keri spearheading an artfully-crafted campaign in his honor.

Former Hoffman and Smith voters may well begin to offer some newfound support to Wagner once he is the primary reliever in the spotlight next year.

Gary Sheffield (31-of-226, 13.7%)

As many others have already written, Gary Sheffield has been a victim of the deep pool of candidates throughout his tenure on the ballot. In his first four years of eligibility, Sheffield reeled in 11.7%, 11.6%, 13.3%, and 11.1% shares. Despite 509 home runs and 62.1 WAR, he’s yet to gain much traction with the voters.

Sheffield does have a small link to steroids, but it is unclear how much that suppresses his reputation with the voters. A few other factors may very well be equally (or more) responsible for his lack of support. Like Walker, Sheffield was oft-injured, particularly earlier in his career.

He wore eight different uniforms – none for more than parts of six seasons – and played his most games for the Marlins, a franchise that has lacked the attention paid to to larger-market clubs. The lack of association with one single franchise has likely inhibited his votes to an extent.

Sheffield also comes with a less-than-stellar defensive reputation, one not offset by despite being one of baseball’s most feared hitters – by pitchers and third-base coaches – of his era.

Sheffield probably won’t gain much ground this year, but perhaps when the ballot opens up we will have more knowledge of what exactly has kept his support depressed to this extent. His 18.1% showing on 10-player ballots is up from the 13.3% he sported last year, and going forward that number should continue to trend upward, in all likelihood.

Sammy Sosa (25-of-226, 11.1%)

Sosa was one of four players – along with Kent, Sheffield, and Wagner – who lost support in 2018 from returning voters who had also publicly revealed their ballot the previous year. He did, however, post a decent 4-for-13 showing among public first-time voters and is 3-for-8 so far this year. He has also rebounded slightly from last year, earning back two votes he lost in 2018. He is assured of remaining on the ballot yet again, and he is likely to finish somewhere between 8-10%.

There doesn’t appear to much to look forward to here for Sosa, but perhaps he can eventually surpass the 12.5% high-water mark that he received way back in 2013, his first year of eligibility on the BBWAA ballot. If nothing else, he’s the last candidate guaranteed to return to the 2020 ballot and should stay on for all 10 years before his candidacy moves on to a committee.

Andruw Jones (19-of-226, 8.4%)

One of the biggest questions leading up to the 2018 announcement was whether Andruw Jones would receive the requisite number of votes to remain on the ballot for a second year. He ended up seeing a boost on the ballots which did not reveal prior to the announcement and finished with 7.3%. So far, he has been checked on 19 ballots, with just 12 of his 2018 voters revealing. Nine of those voters voted for him again, and he has also received votes from six voters who did not vote for him in 2018 and four voters who are new to the voting bloc.

He could see modest gains when the results are announced this evening, but if nothing else, he should once again remain above the 5% cutoff for another year.

Andy Pettitte (15-of-226, 6.6%)

Every year, there seems to be one candidate who is in serious danger of being removed from the ballot for further consideration. In 2016, Jim Edmonds fell off the ballot despite 393 home runs and eight Gold Gloves, while in 2017, five World Series rings couldn’t keep Jorge Posada’s candidacy afloat. Last year, the aforementioned Jones skated by with 31 votes, nine above the minimum. With 15 votes on the 226 publicly revealed ballots, Andy Pettitte would appear to be safe at first glance. His vote share has been steadily declining, however; he was on eight of the first 48 ballots and has been on just seven of the last 178. That latter vote share of under 4% has corresponded with more voters from chapters other than New York revealing their ballots, which doesn’t help Pettitte’s chances of clearing the 5% threshold. He only needs six more voters to reach 5%, however, so it is not a reach.

Others

Lance Berkman, Roy Oswalt, Miguel Tejada, and Michael Young each have two or three votes among published ballots, but none is even at 1.5%. The only candidate in Tracker history to clear the 5% minimum to remain on the ballot with less than 4% at announcement time is Nomar Garciaparra in 2015. He received 5.5% of the vote despite being on only 2.0% of pre-announcement ballots. He gives these four a small amount of hope.

FanGraphs readers want their Hall of Famers, and they want ’em now! That’s the take-home message from the results of our inaugural Hall of Fame Crowdsource Ballot, for which we invited registered users of our site to partake in our version of the real thing. To an even greater degree than the Baseball Writers Association of America — which over the past five years has elected 16 candidates, more than any other five-year stretch in the institution’s history, while using more slots per ballot than at any time since 1966 — our voters went deep, and they weren’t shy about honoring the ballot’s best.

A total of 1,213 users (including some of our staff) cast their electronic ballots (something the Hall of Fame currently does not yet have); they could vote for up to 10 candidates while adhering to the same December 31, 2018 deadline as the voters. Remarkably, more than three-quarters of our voters — 77.6% — used all 10 slots, well above the rate in the @NotMrTibbs Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker (55.8% of the 217 ballots as of midnight ET on Monday), and well beyond the modern BBWAA record of 51%, set in 2015. Our voters averaged a generous 9.41 votes per ballot, again ahead of both the current Tracker (8.61) and the modern BBWAA record (8.46), set last year.

Oh, you want to know who we elected? No fewer than seven of the 35 candidates received at least 75% of the vote from our crowd. Keep in mind, that’s two more than in any actual Hall of Fame class, and three more than in any class besides the 1936 inaugural one (Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, and Honus Wagner). Not only did our users anoint the three candidates who appear to be locks this year (Roy Halladay, Edgar Martinez, and Mariano Rivera) and the man on the bubble (Mike Mussina), they waved in the slate’s two most controversial candidates, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, and still had ample room to include Larry Walker as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: As we approach the January 22 Hall of Fame announcement, we’ll be featuring a few pieces from Anthony Calamis and Adam Dore, members of Ryan Thibodaux’s excellent team that tracks public Hall of Fame ballot. This is the second such piece. Be sure to check out the ballot tracker, which is an indispensable tool for any Hall of Fame enthusiast.

To get the obvious point out of the way, the Cooperstown stage is going to be crowded at this year’s Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony on July 21. All signs point to the trio of Mariano Rivera, Roy Halladay, and Edgar Martinez earning induction and joining Lee Smith and Harold Baines — both of whom were elected to the Hall of Fame by the Today’s Game Committee this past December — in the 2019 Hall of Fame class. It is also possible that Mike Mussina will join them as well.

This year’s class will, in all likelihood, have the unique distinction of being the first class ever comprised of two or more first-ballot selections (Rivera and Halladay) to go along with one candidate (Martinez) who received at least 75% of the vote in his final year of eligibility. On two previous occasions, the BBWAA selected one first-timer and one other inductee whose eligibility window was set to expire: the 2017 induction class featured Ivan Rodriguez (first year on ballot, 76.0%) and Tim Raines (10th year, 86.0%), while the Class of 2009 consisted of Rickey Henderson (first year, 94.8%) and Jim Rice (15th year, 76.4%).

As of Tuesday morning, we have published 177 ballots in our Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker, and it is clear that Fred McGriff and Larry Walker have gained the most ground of any of the returning candidates since the last voting cycle. McGriff has picked up 34 votes so far from writers who did not include him on their ballots last year – against just two drops – while Walker has seen a net gain of 37 new votes as of this writing. McGriff is in his 10th and final year of BBWAA eligibility and will not get the call from Cooperstown next week. Walker, in his penultimate year on the ballot, had a case that appeared dead in the water, garnering just 21.9% of the vote in 2017, his seventh year on the ballot. Heck, his candidacy was probably written off by almost everyone, even with a 12.1% jump in 2018.

Just how far can Walker’s surge take him? Well, his current showing of 66.7% through 177 public and anonymous ballots is sure to falter, as ballots revealed early have historically been more favorable toward the vast majority of candidates than those revealed later or kept private. In order to determine the likelihood of the Canadian former slugger finishing with a portion of the vote high enough to set him up for a real possibility of 2020 enshrinement, I investigated how Walker fared on ballots of varying sizes last year.

Since 2017, I have kept a public spreadsheet detailing the trends in Hall of Fame ballots of varying vote quantities, and how each candidate fares when ballots are broken into five different size groups. The 10-player and 9-player ballots are categorized individually, while 7-8 vote and 5-6 vote ballots make up two separate groups; the remaining ballots, which consist of four or fewer votes, make up the fifth and final category. This sheet, made possible by Ryan Thibodaux’s work, breaks down each of the five size classifications into two additional groups: ballots including both Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, and ballots that exclude one or both members of that duo.

For the sake of reducing space below, I’ve lumped ballot sizes into two basic groups: 10-player ballots and ballots which have fewer than the maximum 10 names checked.

On ballots with all 10 slots filled:

And ballots on which fewer than 10 names are checked:

Four candidates have experienced an increase of at least 10% on 10-player ballots revealed prior to the announcement, with Omar Vizquel just off the pace. Walker is securely out in front of the pack, with a whopping 30% increase on such ballots from last year. Bear in mind that half of the 422 ballots cast in 2018 had awarded votes to 10 players. That Walker has appeared on over 80% of full ballots after receiving votes on just over half of them in 2018 is astounding. Having four names cleared from the ballot certainly opened up more opportunities for electors to cast a vote for Walker, as they may have done last year had the BBWAA allowed unlimited votes.

The even more jaw-dropping statistic is this: Walker’s vote share on sub-10 ballots has more than doubled since last cycle, up to 45.1%. Yes, that’s right. He appeared on just 19.4% of ballots that left at least one open spot last year, but has since seen that number skyrocket faster than the number of likes on a funny cat video gone viral. Walker has also gone 6-for-29 thus far on “Small Hall” ballots of six names or fewer. That might not sound like much, but that 20.7% is nearly identical to the 20.8% of all public sub-10 ballots that included his name. (For what it’s worth, Walker appeared on only two of the 44 publicized ballots that consisted of fewer than seven names last election cycle.)

What does all this mean for this year’s results? Consider the following: through the first 177 publicly revealed 2018 ballots, 53.8% of the 104 writers who checked 10 names cast a vote for Walker. That figure dropped down to 51.4% among all 317 public or anonymous ballots – including 173 full ballots – accounting for a rate decrease of 4.5% from the original vote share (I’m referring to the rate of change, which is different than simply the 2.4% decrease in percentage). Conversely, Walker only appeared on 16.9% of the 71 ballots that consisted of fewer than 10 names at the 177-vote mark, but that mark rose to 20.8% once all public ballots – 144 of which had fewer than the maximum number of slots filled – were uncovered. The rate of increase here was about +23%.

Let us make a few conservative assumptions:

1) The total number of ballots revealed in 2019 will be somewhere in the neighborhood of the 317 made public last year. Let’s say +/- 10 from that mark.
2) The previous year’s four-man induction class will lower the average number of candidates strongly considered by the voters, resulting in 10% fewer ballots with votes for 10 players. This would give a 45:55 ratio of full ballots against those selecting nine or fewer candidates.
3) Walker’s strong showing on full ballots thus far is inflated by early-exit-poll bias, and he will finish with a vote share that is just 90% of what it is currently on such ballots. Such a rate of decrease will get him 74.2% of the vote on public 2019 10-player ballots, just shy of election.
4) The 45.1% share Walker currently holds on smaller ballots will drop slightly by a net -2.0% (for an overall 43.1% vote share) despite increasing by 20% from this point last year and an overall change of +3.6%.
5) Points 2-4 factor in estimates for the portion of the voting body who chooses to keep their votes private.

Factoring in all of these assumptions, Walker would reel in a vote total of approximately 57.1%, which would represent a colossal increase of +23.0% in a single election cycle.

Last week, FanGraphs’ own Jay Jaffe explored the largest single-year gains in BBWAA voting history. In the event Walker does finish at exactly the aforementioned 57.1% figure, he would require an 18.0% increase in his final year of eligibility. Sounds steep, right? Perhaps, but gaining 18% in one year is far from unprecedented, and it would rank as just the 15th largest increase ever — tied with Ralph Kiner’s jump from 24.5% to 42.5% in 1967. It should be noted that a much more recent candidate, Vladimir Guerrero, jumped 21.2 percentage points, from 71.7% to 92.9%, in 2018.

Remember, I’m calling 57.1% of the vote for Walker a rather conservative estimate. There is certainly a chance he could come much closer or even exceed a three-fifths majority of the vote. In fact, the most recent model of Jason Sardell pegged 57% as the median estimate.

It certainly appears that we will have some drama on our hands in 10 months’ time when Walker hits the BBWAA ballot for the final time. A weaker ballot and the recent surges in vote totals for players late in their eligibility is sure to provide some additional excitement to the ballot tracking process next year. I would expect that every Walker fan will have run out of fingernails to bite come announcement day in 2020.

Even if Walker doesn’t get elected next year, he and fellow 2019 ballot-mate Fred McGriff might ultimately have a rather smooth road ahead of them. In the last two Eras Committee elections, we have seen three candidates who had gathered solid support during their tenure on the BBWAA ballot sail into Cooperstown upon their first introduction to one of these committees.

2018: Jack Morris, 14 of 16 votes, Modern Baseball
2018: Alan Trammell, 13 of 16 votes, Modern Baseball
2019: Lee Smith, 16 of 16 votes, Today’s Game

Each of these three former players received at least 40% of the BBWAA vote in at least one appearance on the ballot. Historically, many players who have received a relatively high vote share eventually made it to Cooperstown through some ideation of the committee structure. There are only 13 players – excluding those currently on the ballot – in Hall of Fame history who have accrued at least 30% of the overall Hall of Fame vote from the BBWAA who have not since been inducted to the Hall.

(Disclaimer: Yr on Ballot refers to how many appearances on the ballot the candidate had made at the time his highest vote percentage was received. The BBWAA voting process has evolved greatly from a time when elections were biennial and the 5% minimum threshold did not exist. Some players appeared on the ballot more than 15 times while others were cast off prior to reaching 15 appearances. The * denotes players who appeared on the ballot before several more recent rule changes were instituted. For more on the evolution of Hall of Fame voting, see Jay Jaffe’s The Cooperstown Casebook.)

Note that only six of these players have ever even reached 40.0% of the vote, and just 4 of the 13 exited the ballot with a vote share above 35%. With McGriff currently tracking at 36.2% through 177 ballots, is it likely that he joins this group, considering that he has been favored by private voters more so than public voters each year since the massive purge of the voting body prior to the 2016 election. It is conceivable that the Crime Dog crosses 40.0% of the vote this year, and probable that he – like Morris, Trammell, and Smith – is easily elected by the next Today’s Game Committee, which will meet in December of 2021 to determine which candidates should receive a bronze plaque the following July.

I will touch only briefly on Mussina here, as fellow member of the Tracker team Anthony Calamis thoroughly explored Mussina’s chances for FanGraphs recently. Mussina ranks fourth – behind the three near surefire inductees – in votes on full ballots, missing only seven out of 102 tallied thus far. Along with the three most likely inductees and Curt Schilling, Moose has also gotten the nod on more than 75% of 9-player ballots as well as the 7-or-8-vote group. He is the only candidate besides Rivera – who remains unanimous – to appear on all 19 of the 9-player ballots to date.

At first glance, it would appear as though Mussina’s luck runs out once we get to the true “Small Hall” ballots, which I will label as those containing six votes or fewer – he is just 9-for-30 on those. If we eliminate the “Tiny Hall” 0-4 player ballot category — votes on these ballots are most likely to be awarded to the candidates with the highest vote shares (there is only one public ballot that has named exactly four players) — on which ballots Mussina has been shut out, his vote total share is 39.1% (9 of 23) on remaining Small Hall ballots.

As Calamis mentioned, the average number of votes per ballot is sure to drop precipitously among private voters, who notoriously are far less likely to cast a vote for Bonds and Clemens. In my estimation, a large number of private ballots will fit into the Small Hall demographic. I also believe that the current breakdown of 5-or-6-player ballots – 11 including both Bonds and Clemens (on which Mussina has failed to earn a vote), 12 excluding them – will begin to shift greatly towards the latter as more votes are made public; my guess is that trend will also hold true among private voters. If this is true, Mussina has a chance to remain close to the 75% mark (9 of 12) he holds on such ballots because, as Calamis indicates, he was the second-ranked ballot holdover behind Martinez in terms of 2018 vote percentage. It remains to be seen whether the man known as Moose will have enough gas in the tank to cross the proverbial finish line this year, or if he will have to wait it out until 2020.

Several other players will be covered in greater detail in a subsequent piece next week, but for now I will leave you with a brief overview of some other interesting trends gathered from my Ballots by Quantity sheet.

Scott Rolen, who ranks 12th on the Tracker in overall vote percentage, has gathered votes on 33 of the first 102 full ballots – not a bad showing for a second-year candidate who barely eclipsed 10% of the overall vote when all was said and done last year. However, Rolen has the rather puzzling distinction of being a paltry 4-for-75 on any other ballots, a mark which only bests Andruw Jones’ among candidates likely to remain on the ballot in 2020. Similarly, Rolen was polling at just 3.9% on less-than-10 ballots on all 2018 pre-announcement ballots.

I was rather stunned to see the remarkable consistency of first-timer Todd Helton’s vote distribution. Excluding the stingiest group of Tiny Hall ballots from the mix, Helton’s vote percentage has ranged from a lower bound of 17.4% to an upper bound of 23.1% in each of the remaining four size categories through the first 177 revealed ballots. Naturally, he has benefited substantially more from ballots of the anti-Bonds and Clemens variety.

For a candidate who received just an 11.1% vote share in 2018, eight new supporters for Billy Wagner so far is a step in the right direction (he was also dropped from one ballot, but that ballot included 10 names and Wagner is almost certainly going to earn that vote back in the coming years). Closers historically have received a small boost among the un-published ballots, so the possibility exists that Billy The Kid’s final percentage can be a few ticks higher than where it stands currently. I have long believed that 2020 would be the year that things could really begin to take off for Wagner. He will finally be able to stand alone as the top relief pitcher on the ballot and out of the shadows of Smith, Trevor Hoffman, and Rivera. Wagner will also – at least in the opinion of this observer – have the distinction of being the greatest reliever outside of Cooperstown, period.

If Walker can total 15.5% in his sixth year of eligibility and we are – just three years later – discussing how he might actually have a chance at 75% in his final year, perhaps hope is on the horizon for Wagner, set to reach the 15.5% threshold two years earlier. Only time will tell.

Editor’s Note: As we approach the January 22 Hall of Fame announcement, we’ll be featuring a few pieces from Anthony Calamis and Adam Dore, members of Ryan Thibodaux’s excellent team that tracks public Hall of Fame ballot. This is the first such piece. Be sure to check out the ballot tracker, which is an indispensable tool for any Hall of Fame enthusiast.

In case you have somehow missed any of Jay Jaffe’s excellent coverage over the last month, December is the time of the year when Hall of Fame ballots get mailed out. More than 400 BBWAA members comprise the voting body tasked with electing players to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

I’m part of a four-person ballot-tracking team led by Ryan Thibodaux (@NotMrTibbs) that finds every public ballot, records the percentage of votes for each candidate, and tracks which players have been added to or dropped from a voter’s ballot from one year to the next, assuming they were public in both years. Right now, there are 172 ballots in the Tracker.

This year in particular, a few intriguing trends have emerged as ballots have been made public. I chose to explore Mike Mussina’s candidacy and what needs to happen over the next nine days for him to share the stage next July with likely inductees such as Mariano Rivera.

Before diving into the particulars, here is a table showing the current results in the Tracker:

Three of the candidates have had their boxes checked on over 90% of known ballots. All the others are below the required 75% for election, leaving Mussina as the most interesting bubble candidate this year. In the 2018 voting, Mussina received votes on 268 of the possible 422 ballots cast, good for 63.5%, 11.5% (or 49 votes) shy of election; Chipper Jones, Vladimir Guerrero, Jim Thome and Trevor Hoffman all surpassed 75%.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

It would be inaccurate to say that in the months from November through January, I spend hours a day simply refreshing and reloading the Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker. On the advice of my doctor, I’ve cut down to an hour a day, tops, and besides, I’ve got spreadsheets of my own that get jealous of how I spend my time. My voting results sheet, which has every candidate’s year-by-year progress since 1966, is a particular favorite. With my profiles of all 35 candidates on this year’s ballot complete, it’s time to think about what these two particular spreadsheets are telling us right now, particularly with regards to two candidates: Larry Walker and Mike Mussina. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Over the course of delivering a novel’s worth of words, sentences, and paragraphs about this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, including revisions to 15 candidate profiles previously published at SI.com, inevitably, I’ve let various tidbits — some more pertinent to their cases than others — slip through the cracks. Sometimes, I learned new information about the player in question after those profiles’ publication, remembered something that slipped my mind, or decided that a tangent would lengthen an already-long piece. Other times, a reader or fellow writer called my attention to a detail that I’d missed.

In the interest of Getting It Right, I’ve been keeping notes on those things, and figured I’d share them in one catch-all post, which will serve the additional purpose of prompting me to include some of these items in the candidates’ respective profiles next time around.

Working alphabetically…

Barry Bonds

As anyone who follows Hall of Fame voting knows, ever since Bonds and Roger Clemens became eligible in 2013, both players have received far less support than their accomplishments would otherwise merit due to allegations connecting them to performance-enhancing drugs. While voters have treated the pair similarly, Clemens has received more votes than Bonds on every ballot thus far, by a margin ranging from one vote (2017) to eight (2013); last year, it was four. I’ve read and heard myriad explanations for that gap, ranging from race to longstanding sportswriter grudges to the perception that the drugs had a greater effect on the slugger’s career (insofar as they aided him in breaking the single-season and all-time home run records) to Bonds’ roundabout admission under oath that he used the drugs, pitted against Clemens’ vehement denials.

A recent Twitter conversation between colleague Dan Szymborski and ESPN’s T.J. Quinn offered an additional explanation that touches upon an issue I had failed to include in my writeup. In 2007, Quinn (then at the New York Daily News) broke the story that Bonds had failed an MLB-administered test for amphetamines during the 2006 season; Bonds initially blamed it on a substance taken from the locker of teammate Mark Sweeney. While amphetamines and other banned stimulants such as Adderall are considered PEDs under MLB’s drug policy — some of them are allowed for legitimate medical reasons, so long as a player gets a therapeutic use exemption (a possibility Bonds later explored) — a player is not publicly identified and suspended for stimulant use until a second offense (à la Miguel Tejada). A player testing positive for the first time is instead referred for treatment and counseling, and is subject to additional testing. Quinn reported that Bonds subsequently passed six tests in six months.

Thus, if Quinn’s reporting is correct — and there’s no reason to believe it is not, given his stellar track record — Bonds did actually fail an MLB-administered test, where Clemens (so far as we know) did not. For voters interested in splitting hairs, well, there’s one to split.

Todd Helton

At the recent Winter Meetings in Las Vegas, two writers who covered Helton during his career with the Rockies, MLB.com’s Thomas Harding and the Denver Post’s Patrick Saunders, offered a couple of notes regarding my profile, one concerning Helton’s brief college football career at the University of Tennessee — and specifically my assertion that he had won the starting job as a junior — and the other noting a potential trade later in his career that I had long forgotten about.

Entering the 1994 season, Helton’s junior year, Jerry Colquitt was Tennessee’s starting quarterback, succeeding the NFL-bound Heath Shuler. On the seventh play of the season-opening game at UCLA, Colquitt tore his left ACL. Helton, freshmen Peyton Manning, and Branndon Stewart all played QB during that game, as coach Phillip Fulmer tried to “get a competition started.” Helton rallied the Volunteers for 23 fourth-quarter points, but Tennessee lost, 25-23. He started Tennessee’s next three games (a win over Georgia, and losses to Florida and Mississippi State) but injured a knee in the last of those games and yielded to Manning, who took over the job and went on to fame and fortune. Helton likely would have stopped playing football after the season anyway to focus on baseball; he was chosen with the eighth overall pick by the Rockies the following spring.

As for that potential trade, in January 2007, the Rockies talked to the Red Sox about a possible deal that would have sent Helton — who had waived his no-trade clause and still had $90.1 million remaining on his $141.5 million contract — to Boston, with third baseman Mike Lowell, pitcher Julian Tavarez, and prospects heading to Colorado. The Red Sox did not want to include the two relief prospects the Rockies wanted in the deal, namely Craig Hansen and Manny Delcarmen, while Colorado didn’t want to include more than $36.1 million of Helton’s remaining salary. The talks broke down. Later that year, of course, the two teams met in the World Series.

Andruw Jones

It’s no secret that the foundation of Jones’ candidacy rests upon his defense. He won 10 consecutive Gold Gloves (1998-2007) and based on the combination of Total Zone and Defensive Runs Saved used at Baseball-Reference, his 235 fielding runs ranks first among all center fielders. Thanks to that glovework, he’s 11th in JAWS at the position.

Of course, there’s room to quibble when it comes to defensive metrics, particularly at the extremes. On the one hand, it’s worth noting that UZR values Jones’ defense more highly than DRS does; for the years 2003-2012, for which we have both metrics, his 111 UZR is well beyond his 66 DRS. One system, however, takes a very different view: RED (Runs Effectively Defended), a forerunner to other batted ball data-based metrics such as DRS and UZR that was created by Chris Dial. RED is not currently published anywhere (hopefully, that will change), but it is included among the alphabet soup of metrics in the SABR Defensive Index, which has accounted for 25% of the Gold Gloves voting since 2013.

“By every metric available in the late 1990s – Baseball Reference Total Zone, Michael Humphries’ DRA, and RED, which is based on STATS Zone Rating batted ball data — Andruw’s defense was outstanding,” wrote Dial in a data-heavy email to me (which he gave permission to share). In Dial’s assertion, Jones came back to the pack in the early 2000s, and fell below average defensively from 2003 onward, more or less. Here’s his table comparing the various metrics:

Where the weighted SDI supports’ Jones’ claim on 10 Gold Gloves, Dial’s RED-driven view suggests he should have won only three (1997-1999). According to Dial, the other metrics, both before the arrival of batted ball data and after, aren’t sensitive to the way Jones’ fielding numbers are propped up by discretionary plays, routine ones where more than one player could have caught the ball. “Jones just took all the discretionary plays from the left fielder and continued to do so after he had lost his range. That’s not talent, it’s Kelly Leak,” referring to the ball-hogging star of the Bad News Bears. UZR and DRS “weight plays made by percentage for a position – when Andruw takes a discretionary play, he gets too much extra credit in those systems. Everything else tells us Andruw lost a step or three. His zone ratings (percentage of balls caught), his extra weight, his speed scores, his range factors. How the other metrics miss this, I cannot say.” Dial wrote. Another table:

Dial has excluded the shortened 1994 and ’95 seasons as well as Jones’ cup-of-coffee 1996 season from the table. Note the big dip in left field chances for 1997-2003, which rebounds to a number on par with the right fielders’ total because, according to Dial, the older Jones could no longer get to as many balls, and also because the team upgraded from less capable left fielders such as Ryan Klesko (alongside Jones in 1997 and ’98) and Chipper Jones (2002 and ’03).

I’m not sure I buy that last part; if the discretionary plays disappeared, why are his 2004-2007 metrics via other systems still so strong? Nonetheless, Dial has provided a compelling alternative view that at the very least is in line with the voters’ general consensus regarding Jones, who has received just 8.0% from among the 162 ballots published thus far after getting 7.3% last year.

Edgar Martinez

Between Craig Biggio (74.8% in 2014), Jeff Bagwell (71.6% in 2016), Vladimir Guerrero (71.7% in 2017), Trevor Hoffman (74.0% in 2017) and Martinez (70.4% in 2018), we’ve had an unusually large number of near-misses in recent elections — players getting between 70 and 74.9% — and that’s not even counting Mike Piazza (69.9% in 2015) or Tim Raines (69.8% in 2016). Thus, I’ve often hauled out a bit of research that, as updated for Martinez’s 2019 profile, read like this: “Since 1966, 19 out of 20 candidates who received at least 70% of the vote and had eligibility remaining were elected the following year, with Jim Bunning the lone exception; he received 70.0% in 1987 (his 11th year), then 74.2% in 1988 before slipping to 63.3% in 1989. Ultimately, he was elected by the Veterans Committee…”

Left unexplained is exactly how Bunning missed out, and what caused him to fall further. To the first point, as it turns out, in 1988, nine voters — including Bill Madden and Phil Pepe of the New York Daily News, Moss Klein of the Newark Star-Ledger, and at least four other New York-area voters submitted blank ballots as a general protest against what they believed to be the erosion of Hall of Fame standards. “Maybe my standards are higher than most people,” Pepe said. “But I think the Hall of Fame is too crowded … I think to go in alongside Ruth, DiMaggio, Williams, Aaron, Cy Young, you have to be the cream of the cream.”

Had the blank ballots — which are counted in the total, and therefore each require three “yes” votes to offset for a candidate to maintain a 75% share — not come in, Bunning would have received 317 votes out of 418 (75.8%) instead of 317 out of 427 (74.2%). As for Bunning’s support plummeting the next year, to the point that he missed election by 53 votes, it probably owed something to the flood of strong first-time candidates. Both Johnny Bench (who received 96.4% of the vote) and Carl Yastrzemski (94.6%) were slam-dunk first-ballot guys, and some voters may have simply kept their ballots short, leaving off even 314-game winner Gaylord Perry, who had the next-highest share of the vote (68.0%). In head-to-head comparisons, Perry’s win and strikeout numbers dwarf Bunning’s, as do those of Ferguson Jenkins (52.3%); by the next year, the latter overtook Bunning in the voting as well.

Alas, I uncovered one tantalizing Bunning-related lead that turned out to be a dead end. In a 2011 Baseball Prospectus interview with current FanGraphs contributor David Laurila, BBWAA secretary-treasurer Jack O’Connell suggested that the Bunning-bumping blanks were in protest of the Veterans Committee election of catcher Rick Ferrell (the lowest-ranked Hall of Famer at the position according to JAWS). But since Ferrell’s oft-mocked election was in 1984, that theory appears farfetched.

Mike Mussina

Maybe it was because I’d already included a GIF from Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) showing Mussina’s knuckle curve in action that I chose to leave this one out, but more likely, I just plumb forgot.

Mike Mussina Telling Joe Torre "No, Stay There!" when Torre was starting out of the dugout to take him out of the game. ? pic.twitter.com/9K2Xqn9dCS

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) November 25, 2017

Gotta love Joe Torre’s reaction. Given the score bug atop the GIF, a bit of Play Index sleuthing reveals that this encounter was from the ninth inning of Mussina’s May 31, 2006 start against the Tigers. Up 6-0, he allowed a two-out RBI single to Magglio Ordonez, who brought home Placido Polanco, who had reached on an Alex Rodriguez throwing error. Mussina finished the job by striking out Carlos Guillen, capping the last of his 57 career complete games.

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

At last, we’ve reached the final installment of my round-up of the 14 players on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot who are certain to fall below the 5% threshold, with most of them being shut out entirely. It’s no tragedy that they’ll miss out on plaques in Cooperstown, but their triumphs and travails are worth remembering just the same.

Jon Garland

Known mainly for his durability, Garland was the perfect embodiment of a League Average Innings Muncher (LAIM), a term coined by blogger Travis Nelson in late 2003, generally describing dogged but unspectacular sorts such as Dave Burba, Jeff Suppan, and Steve Trachsel who rarely deviated from average run prevention by more than 10%. Over a nine-year span from 2002-2010, the heavy sinker-reliant Garland never made fewer than 32 starts or threw fewer than 191.2 innings, only once finishing with an ERA+ outside of the 91-to-111 range. In 2005, he put it all together, making his lone All-Star team and helping the White Sox to their first championship in 88 years.

Born September 27, 1979 in Valencia, California, Garland grew to 6-foot-5 1/2 and 200 pounds by the time he was a senior in high school (1997), able to throw 90 mph when that was a big deal. That year, he made a variety of pre- and postseason All-America teams, and planned to go to the University of Southern California, but when he was chosen with the 10th pick of the amateur draft by the Cubs, he signed for a $1.325 million bonus and was on his way. Less than 14 months later, he was traded to the White Sox straight up for reliever Matt Karchner in a rare crosstown deal; the Cubs got all of 60.2 innings of 0.1 WAR relief work in exchange for their top pick from the previous season.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Yet another installment of our quick look at the 14 players on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot who are certain to fall below the 5% threshold — with most of them being shut out entirely — but are worth remembering just the same.

Kevin Youkilis

At the major league level, Youkilis’ reputation — “Euclis: the Greek god of walks,” as nicknamed by Michael Lewis in the 2003 bestseller, Moneyball — preceded his arrival by over a year. First a source of friction between the A’s analytically-minded front office and their scouts ahead of the 2001 draft, and later a player they coveted as a potential acquisition, Youkilis was Billy Beane’s white whale, forever eluding Oakland’s general manager. Though he lasted just 10 years in the majors, he hit .281/.382/.478 (123 OPS+) while making three All-Star teams, and winning a Gold Glove and two championship rings, one as the Red Sox’s starting first baseman.

Born in Cincinnati on March 15, 1979, Youkilis did not have any actual Greek ancestry. Via Sports Illustrated’s Mark Bechtel in 2007:

Youk’s family history reads like a Michael Chabon novel: Back in the 19th century in Romania, males were conscripted at the age of 16. The Cossacks in the region weren’t known for their tolerance, so many Jews tried to avoid enlisting in the army. Youk’s great-great-great-grandfather—no one is sure what his first name was, but the family name was Weiner (it’s actually pronounced WINE-er)—moved to Greece, where the family had friends. After a year or two he got homesick and returned to Romania, but he assumed a Greek name so he could avoid the army and jail. And with that, the Youkilis family was born.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

We continue our quick look at the 14 players on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot who are certain to fall below the 5% threshold — with most of them being shut out entirely — but are worth remembering just the same.

Placido Polanco

A valuable player who started for five playoff teams, Polanco didn’t pack much punch with his contact-oriented approach at the plate, but he was quite a glove whiz, rangy and sure-handed, at home at both second base and third. In fact, he was just the second player to win Gold Gloves at multiple positions (after Darin Erstad), and his 136 career fielding runs ranks 31st among all infielders.

Born on October 10, 1975 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Polanco came to the U.S. on a student visa, attending Miami Dade Community College. Drafted by the Cardinals in the 19th round in 1994, he began his minor league career as a shortstop, and though he spent all of 1996 and ’97 as a second baseman, played more short than second during his 45-game callup in 1998. He spent most of his five-season tenure in St. Louis as a utilityman, earning an increasing amount of playing time as his offense improved. In 2000, he hit .316/.347/.418 in 350 PA, while in 2001 he upped his playing time to 610 PA while batting .307/.342/.383; he was a combined 23 runs above average at third base (his primary position), second and short, boosting his WAR to 4.5. The Cardinals made the playoffs in both of those seasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

For better or worse, I’m a completist. In 15 years of analyzing Hall of Fame ballots using my JAWS system, I’ve never let a candidate pass without comment, no matter how remote his chance of election. From the brothers Alomar to the youngest Alou and the elder Young, I’ve covered them all. It should come as no surprise, then, that I’m tackling the minor candidates on the 2019 Baseball Writers’ Association of America ballot in addition to the major ones — of which there were 21 this year. That leaves 14 to go.

To be eligible for election, a player must appear in games in at least 10 major league seasons, with a career that ended at least five calendar years ago, and then be nominated by at least two members of a six-member screening committee — a step that can produce some arbitrary results, as I noted last month. Given the backlog of strong candidates, this is no tragedy in the grand scheme of things, since most newcomers have no shot at gaining the 75% of the votes necessary for election. Indeed, the 14 players in question have received a total of four votes among the 140 ballots published thus far; nobody here will come close to the minimum 5% needed to remain on the ballot. Just the same, these one-and-done candidates were accomplished players who deserve their valedictory, so I’ll spend the remainder of this series running through the ones about whom we might say, “They also served.”

Rick Ankiel

Ankiel’s path through the majors — from pitching phenom through a debilitating bout of the yips and then Tommy John surgery to a second career as an outfielder — was unlike any other. As I wrote last month, his mere appearance on this Hall of Fame ballot is a triumph unto itself, even if his numbers offer no reasonable basis for election.

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