After weeks of speculation and ballot reveals, this Tuesday finally marks the culmination of Hall of Fame season: at 5 PM Central Time (in a presentation broadcasted on MLB.com and the MLB Network), we will learn who will be added to the hallowed halls of Cooperstown at this summer’s induction ceremony.
Or, rather, who else will be added; we already know that longtime manager Jim Leyland will be there, after he was elected by the Veterans Committee back in December (not to mention broadcaster Joe Castiglione and writer Gerry Fraley, for the Ford C. Frick and BBWAA Career Excellence Awards, respectively). However, it’s looking like the BBWAA will be sending several players along as well. So, with under 24 hours to go, how are things shaping up?
Well, for anyone who hasn’t been keeping up with Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker: just last night, we learned of our 200th ballot, meaning we already know how likely just over half of the electorate has voted (there were 389 votes for the 2023 election, but that total fluctuates year-to-year). Those are the numbers that I’ll be working with for this piece; however, please note depending on what time you’re reading this, these numbers may already be outdated compared to what’s in the Tracker, since so many writers wait to release their votes until the morning of. I’m largely going to be speaking about trends in the voting anyway, so it won’t matter too much for the analysis.
Right off the bat, there are two things about this evening’s announcement that I feel like I can say for certain. One is that multiple people will be getting the call this year, and the second is that ballot newcomer Adrian Beltre will be leading the pack. The 3000-hit third baseman sits at 99% right now, well above the 75% of the vote that a player needs to hit to secure a plaque.
I’m really not sure how anyone could object to his case, and I suppose I could look up the two “No” votes and interrogate their reasoning, but quite frankly, I only have so many hours in a day and they won’t make all that much of a difference. Here’s the all-time leaderboard in highest voting percentage if you’d like to follow along at home; we know Beltre isn’t going to be the second unanimous choice in Hall history (after Mariano Rivera back in 2019), but 99% would put him at fourth-best ever, if it holds.
A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Checking in on the Most Interesting Astros on the Hall of Fame Ballot
[This piece is also up over at The Crawfish Boxes]
We just passed the two-week mark until the 2024 Hall of Fame results are relieved; the evening of January 23rd will have the usual results show airing at 5 PM Central Time on MLB.com/the MLB Network.
Of course, for those who don’t want to go in blind, there are of course the yearly efforts of Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker team (available at tracker.fyi), where volunteers record and total writers’ ballots as they make them known. So far, they’ve amassed over 130, which works out to just over one-third of the expected total, and there are likely dozens more to come in our lead-up to the results.
I already released a longer, initial look last week at how those results were shaping up, but this week I wanted to do a more focused update looking at two prominent former Astros on this ballot, Billy Wagner and Carlos Beltrán. As it turns out, these two have some of the more interesting and nuanced cases, so if you want to know what to look for in the coming days, it might help to have more context.
Let’s start with where they both stood coming into this year. For those not in the know, the basics of the Hall election are: roughly 400 current and former members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) will vote in this year’s election. If 75% of them vote for a player, they’re in. If a player gets 5% of the vote, they get to stick around for the election next year; otherwise, they’re off the 2025 ballot. Voters are capped at voting for ten players in a year, and players are capped at ten attempts on the BBWAA ballot before they get dropped (at which point the Veterans Committee can take a look at them, but that’s a whole other can of worms).
Both Wagner and Beltrán are returning candidates from the 2023 ballots. Wagner, in his eighth election, reached a personal high mark with 68.1% of the vote, or just 27 votes shy of induction. He’ll have this year and (should he fall short) one more chance after that to pick those up. Beltrán, meanwhile, was in his first year on the ballot, and reached a respectable 46.5% of the vote.
Also I’ll mostly be covering their Hall of Fame votes and chances of election here rather than their cases, but I just want to note that I think both are deserving picks. I laid out the case for Wagner several years ago. I haven’t done anything that straightforward with Beltrán, but I also think his resume is much more overwhelming: a Gold Glove centerfielder with 435 homers, 565 doubles, 2725 hits, 312 steals (against only 49 time caught stealing!), a .279/.350/.486 batting line, a 119 OPS+… there’s a reason Baseball-Reference’s Wins Above Replacement has him as a 70-WAR player (a line that usually marks an obvious Hall selection). His struggles so far are pretty obviously backlash to his role in the 2017 sign stealing scandal.
So, how are things shaping up for them in 2024? We’ll start with Wagner, since he’s polling ahead of Beltrán right now. Right now, he’s in fourth place on the ballot, behind newcomers Adrián Beltré and Joe Mauer, plus returning runner-up Todd Helton. Back at the end of December, he crossed the 75% in the Ballot Tracker for the first time since he became a candidate. He’s held strong in the 60ish ballots revealed since then, even crossing the 80% mark for a stretch of time. However, he has seen a little bit of backsliding recently, dropping down to 78.7% just last night.
Despite that bad news, he is still above where he was at this time last year, which is a promising sign. And what’s more, he’s actually won over votes: the tracker has documented seven 2023 voters who were “no”s on him last year but have changed their vote. On the whole, he’s at a net change of +5 in flips (he’s also lost two “yes”es), but on a crowded ballot like this year’s, that’s actually not bad; in fact, it’s third among players on the ballot (put a pin in that thought for now).
Monday, January 1, 2024
A First Look at the 2024 Hall of Fame Results: Who Will Stand Out on the Crowded Ballot?
We’ve finally reached 2024, meaning that the deadline for this year’s Hall of Fame voting has passed; voters’ ballots must be postmarked by December 31, 2023 to qualify for this year’s election. Of course, there’s nothing stopping writers from revealing their votes earlier, which is why we’ve been seeing results over at Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker trickle in since around Thanksgiving or so.
In fact, we just hit 100 ballots (a little over a quarter of the total expected votes) before the calendar turned over, so why don’t we take a quick peek at where things stand.* Although the votes technically won’t be changing from here on, the results still won’t be revealed until January 23, which gives us just over three weeks for more ballots to come out and give us a fuller picture of where things stand (for reference, last year we ended at 198 pre-announcement ballots, so we’re about halfway there right now).
*And, depending on when this gets published/you’re reading it, here are the full results through 100 ballots, so you can see what I was pulling from. At least one more ballot came out between the end of writing and publishing, but I’ll leave the numbers as is for now and make notes where it’s warranted.
The first thing to note, for anyone who hasn’t looked at the ballot yet, is that we’re dealing with a more crowded ballot than last year. Scott Rolen was inducted in 2023 and future Veterans Committee selection Jeff Kent aged off the ballot following his tenth attempt, freeing up two spaces; however, this year’s freshman class includes standouts Adrián Beltré, Joe Mauer, and Chase Utley.
And it’s not just that there are three players replacing two on the ballot that will make votes tighter to come by. Beltré is polling about 20% higher than Rolen, which means he will soak up about 100 more votes than Rolen did last year. And even ignoring Utley (who’s matching Kent pretty well so far) and Mauer (who’s polling very competitively on top of them, but more on that in a minute), we’ve also got a few other names down-ballot who are picking up some nominal support (David Wright looks like he might cross 5%, plus Bartolo Colón and Matt Holliday have already gotten votes so far, and I wouldn’t be shocked if José Bautista, Adrián González, or José Reyes get a vote or two).
Of course, the Hall ballot is also pretty momentum-based, and every returning candidate who passed the 40% mark last year has also seen their vote percentages increase so far (more on the breakdown there shortly). We had a little bit of slack to work with, as the average players-per-ballot count in 2023 was on the lower end of our recent ballots. However, we are still working with a 10 player per ballot cap that’s going to aggressively limit how big that number can get, so in the short term, you might see some names at the bottom start to get squeezed out to make room for those other names.
We’ll work our way there eventually. For now, though, let’s take it from the top (non-2024 ballot stats will mostly be from Baseball-Reference). For a little bit there, it looked like Adrián Beltré might be threatening to become the Hall’s second unanimous selection (after Mariano Rivera’s 2019 election); however, that mark remains pretty difficult to match, and he’s now sitting at 98%. Not that it really matters much. With 3166 hits, 477 homers, and a bevy of field awards, Beltré is poised to easily sail past the 75% needed, and we’re basically looking at which specific hyper-elite group he lands in: the nineteen-name ring of 95% or higher, the fifteen players who topped 96%, the baker’s dozen of 97%+, the octet of 98%+, or the trio of 99%+. I don’t expect him to drop much below that, but I guess we also can’t rule it out.
In fact, we just hit 100 ballots (a little over a quarter of the total expected votes) before the calendar turned over, so why don’t we take a quick peek at where things stand.* Although the votes technically won’t be changing from here on, the results still won’t be revealed until January 23, which gives us just over three weeks for more ballots to come out and give us a fuller picture of where things stand (for reference, last year we ended at 198 pre-announcement ballots, so we’re about halfway there right now).
*And, depending on when this gets published/you’re reading it, here are the full results through 100 ballots, so you can see what I was pulling from. At least one more ballot came out between the end of writing and publishing, but I’ll leave the numbers as is for now and make notes where it’s warranted.
The first thing to note, for anyone who hasn’t looked at the ballot yet, is that we’re dealing with a more crowded ballot than last year. Scott Rolen was inducted in 2023 and future Veterans Committee selection Jeff Kent aged off the ballot following his tenth attempt, freeing up two spaces; however, this year’s freshman class includes standouts Adrián Beltré, Joe Mauer, and Chase Utley.
And it’s not just that there are three players replacing two on the ballot that will make votes tighter to come by. Beltré is polling about 20% higher than Rolen, which means he will soak up about 100 more votes than Rolen did last year. And even ignoring Utley (who’s matching Kent pretty well so far) and Mauer (who’s polling very competitively on top of them, but more on that in a minute), we’ve also got a few other names down-ballot who are picking up some nominal support (David Wright looks like he might cross 5%, plus Bartolo Colón and Matt Holliday have already gotten votes so far, and I wouldn’t be shocked if José Bautista, Adrián González, or José Reyes get a vote or two).
Of course, the Hall ballot is also pretty momentum-based, and every returning candidate who passed the 40% mark last year has also seen their vote percentages increase so far (more on the breakdown there shortly). We had a little bit of slack to work with, as the average players-per-ballot count in 2023 was on the lower end of our recent ballots. However, we are still working with a 10 player per ballot cap that’s going to aggressively limit how big that number can get, so in the short term, you might see some names at the bottom start to get squeezed out to make room for those other names.
We’ll work our way there eventually. For now, though, let’s take it from the top (non-2024 ballot stats will mostly be from Baseball-Reference). For a little bit there, it looked like Adrián Beltré might be threatening to become the Hall’s second unanimous selection (after Mariano Rivera’s 2019 election); however, that mark remains pretty difficult to match, and he’s now sitting at 98%. Not that it really matters much. With 3166 hits, 477 homers, and a bevy of field awards, Beltré is poised to easily sail past the 75% needed, and we’re basically looking at which specific hyper-elite group he lands in: the nineteen-name ring of 95% or higher, the fifteen players who topped 96%, the baker’s dozen of 97%+, the octet of 98%+, or the trio of 99%+. I don’t expect him to drop much below that, but I guess we also can’t rule it out.
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