My Final Baseball Hall of Fame Prediction

With the BBWAA voting results of the Baseball Hall of Fame Class of 2015 set to be announced this afternoon on the MLB Network, I offer my final thoughts on who I think will be elected.

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As of press time, the 2015 HOF Ballot Collecting Gizmo had shown five players getting inducted into the Hall of Fame.

With 188 ballots (32.9% of the vote based on last year) reporting, the expected inductees are going to be:
98.9 – R. Johnson
97.9 – P. Martinez
87.2 – Smoltz
84.6 – Biggio
76.1 – Piazza

With that being said, Piazza is way too close to the 75% threshold needed for induction. I feel as if he fall just short of induction this time around and that’s simply just not right. The writers are doing themselves no favor by inducting no less than four or even five players this time around. Will it be hard for 75% of the voting body to agree on more than three players, let alone four? Oh, sure. There’s always going to be a few writers that vote for somebody just to say that they voted for them?

St. Louis Post-Dispatch beat writer Derrick Goold proposed his own idea on voting for candidates. Goold proposes a binary ballot.

"The Hall and the writers should embrace the bedrock question and its two simple answers on the ballot by doing away the 10-player limit and just putting two boxes beneath every name on the ballot. Yes. No. This forces the voter to weigh each player individually, not as a group, not when weighted as one of the 10 most-deserving on the ballot. It’s simpler. It’s streamlined. And it fits the theme every voter must confront, the ghost of PEDs past or not."

I like Goold’s idea. The only downside of the binary ballot is that a Hall of Fame class could be as many as six to eight players and that doesn’t even take into account those who are inducted by the Veterans Committee.

Just before the end of the the year, I posted my IBWAA ballot and said that I would say who I would vote for if I had to choose only ten as the BBWAA does. It was a tough decision but I would have voted for: Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Mike Mussina, Mike Piazza, Tim Raines, Curt Schilling, John Smoltz, and Alan Trammell.

This is where I would have preferred the twelve slots that many BBWAA voters have been hoping for with the thought that it would lease the logjam of inductees.

Jeff Kent leads all second baseman in home runs while neither Fred McGriff or Trammell are getting a fair look by the voters. Trammell’s crime is the same as Raines. They played at the same time as Cal Ripken and Rickey Henderson. That’s not fair. It’s the same crime that led to Ted Simmons being dropped off the ballot for playing around the same time as Johnny Bench.