2016 Hall of Fame Vote: How Good Were My Predictions?
The voting results for the 2017 Hall-of-Fame election were announced Wednesday evening. Back in November November, when the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) first released the 2017 ballot for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, I predicted the final results. So, how did I do?
The next table shows my predictions, actual votes, and the difference (actual minus predicted, so a positive number means the player did better than I expected).
So, how accurate was I? Short answer: Not very.
As a simple prediction of who would be elected, I predicted that three players would be elected and, in fact, three players were elected to the Hall of Fame. Of course, I correctly identified only two of the three who were elected: Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines. I predicted that Trevor Hoffman would be elected, while he missed election by five votes (about 20 fewer votes than I predicted). And I missed badly on the third actual electee, Ivan Rodriguez.
Let's look in more detail at what I got wrong and why.
Total Names per Ballot
In 2016, the average ballot included 7.95 names. Between players inducted (Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mike Piazza) and players whose time on the ballot ran out (Mark McGwire and Alan Trammell), the average 2016 ballot included 1.74 names of players who were not on the 2017 ballot. In my prediction, I guessed that new players on the 2017 ballot would get fewer than 1.74 votes per voter and that some of the freed-up ballot slots would simply go unfilled, leading to fewer average names per ballot in 2017 than in 2016.
In fact, the average number of names per ballot did not decline, but actually increased somewhat, from 7.94 to 8.13 names per ballot. Overall, the average ballot included 1.77 new candidates, a very slight increase over the 1.74 ballot slots opening up. I predicted that returning candidates would take up approximately 6.1 slots per ballot. In fact, returning candidates took up an average of 6.4 slots per ballot.
Hence, in general, players received more votes than I predicted. That is basically the story of my misses on Bagwell, Raines, Mussina, Guerrero, and Walker.
Voter Attitudes Toward PEDs
I missed by more than 8% on five players: Ivan Rodriguez, Edgar Martinez, Roger Clemens Barry Bonds, and Manny Ramirez. A common theme for four of the five is that they all have a PED taint to one degree or another.
It appears that voters were more willing to vote for tainted players this year than in years' past, with Bonds and Clemens each seeing their vote totals increase by nearly 10% this year and by 17% over the past two years. I am not the first person to make this observation and I have seen several writers and/or commenters suggest various reasons for this: the election of Bud Selig, who was commissioner during the "Steroid Era"; a view by some that at least one PED user (always unnamed) was already in the Hall of Fame; I even read one writer who says he had always planned to wait until their 5th ballot (which the 2017 ballot was) to vote for Bonds and Clemens. Whatever the reason, I missed it in making my forecast.
What does this mean going forward? It's not easy to say. Again, I saw several writers and commenters who viewed this as indicating that it's inevitable that Bonds and Clemens will eventually be elected. And they both did pass what I think is a somewhat significant hypothetical barrier: 50%. For the first time in their five years on the ballots, a majority of voters picked Bonds and Clemens. On the other hand, however, a vote against Bonds and/or Clemens is a vote that PED use is (essentially, if not literally) an absolute disqualifier for the Hall of Fame. All it takes is for 25.1% of voters to maintain that attitude for the next five years and Bonds and Clemens will not be elected.
I suspect the former is more likely: that this signals the eventual election of Bonds and Clemens to the Hall of Fame, probably in 3-4 years, if I had to guess.
Individual Players
Ivan Rodriguez
As noted above, Rodriguez falls into the PED category, having been directly accused by Jose Canseco. That said, I was off by 9% on Bonds and Clemens but by 30.5% on Rodriguez. When making my prediction for Rodriguez, I said that "I wouldn't be terribly surprised by a number 20% higher or lower than" my prediction of 45.5%. Rodriguez's actual vote total didn't even fall within that range. I whiffed very badly on this one.
I based my prediction for Rodriguez on how recent catchers did in their debut. I then made two errors in this regard. First, I included Mike Piazza as one of the three catchers on whom I based my estimate (Piazza debuted at 57.8%). I then deducted "10% for possible anti-steroid votes". Which effectively double-counted the "strong anti-PED" vote as that was one of the things which also hindered Mike Piazza in his first year on the ballot.
Second, I missed the extent to which Ivan Rodriguez was viewed by the voters as simply being a better catcher than recent candidates. Rodriguez won 13 Gold Gloves and an MVP award. Gary Carter won 3 Gold Glove awards, Carlton Fisk won 1 Gold Glove, and Mike Piazza won none. And none of the three of them ever won an MVP award. The only catcher of the past 50 years with a similar resume to Rodriguez was Johnny Bench, who won 10 Gold Gloves and 2 MVP awards and was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility with 96.4% of the vote.
In retrospect, a better prediction would have been Johnny Bench's vote total minus 10% because Bench won one more MVP award and minus 10% for the Canseco accusation. That would have produced a near-perfect prediction (76.4% vs. 76.0% actual). Alas, hindsight is always 20/20.
Edgar Martinez
By far my biggest non-PED whiff was Edgar Martinez, who has seen his vote total improve from 27.0% in 2015 to 43.4% in 2016 to 58.6% this year. I did predict Martinez to improve his vote total this year, from 43.4% to 48.0%. But I missed badly on the extent of Martinez's momentum. After gaining more than 16% in 2016 he nearly repeated that, gaining an additional 15.2% in 2017.
Martinez seems well-positioned to now be elected to the Hall of Fame, although he only has two more years on the ballot. Still, he had a higher percentage this year than Tim Raines had in his 8th year on the ballot (55.0%; Bagwell had 55.7% that same year). Martinez only needs another 16.4% in the next two years - exactly what he gained in one year fron 2015 to 2016. And, like Bonds and Clemens, he's passed the 50% mark, which I think, at a minimum, will prompt the electorate to consider his candidacy seriously in a way that they may not take the candidacies of, say, Jeff Kent or Fred McGriff.
Curt Schilling
As I noted above, I under-estimated the average number of names per ballot by voters. As a result, most players' actual vote totals exceeded my predictions. There were, however, a few exceptions, two of which are worth looking at more closely.
Curt Schilling received 45.0% of the vote, a dramatic decline from the 52.3% of the vote he received in 2016. This appears to have been due to offensive comments that Schilling made, primarily on Twitter shortly after the U.S. Presidential election (and, hence, just before Hall-of-Fame voting began). In my prediction, I acknowledged this as a possible issue, suggesting that "it could theoretically halt any momentum he gained last year and, perhaps, hold his votes constant this year." I predicted Schilling's vote total to remain constant with the negatives from his offensive tweeting perfectly offsetting natural gains that might have been expected. Clearly, I under-estimated the negative fallout of Schilling's tweet.
Fellow starting pitcher, Mike Mussina, continued to gain momentum, passing 50% for the first time (which I predicted) and, to my mild surprise, passing Curt Schilling for the highest vote total among non-PED associated starting pitchers.
Jorge Posada
Finally, I predicted that four players who debuted on the 2017 Hall-of-Fame ballot would receive the 5% of the vote necessary to stay on the ballot in 2018. I was wrong about one of these, Jorge Posada. I based my estimate of Posada's vote total on his long-time teammate, Bernie Williams, who received 9.6% of the vote in his first year on the ballot, 2012, before falling off the ballot with 3.3% of the vote in 2013.
I used Williams's first-year vote total as my guide. In retrospect, I clearly should have used Williams's second-year vote total as my guide. The 2012 ballot - from which probably only four players will end up being elected by the BBWAA (Barry Larkin, Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, and Edgar Martinez) - was simply much less crowded than the 2013 ballot from which Williams fell - which contained as many as 7-8 eventual BBWAA electees - and from the 2017 ballot from which Posada just fell, which could have as many as 10 players on it who will eventually be elected by the BBWAA (if Curt Schilling can manage to stay off Twitter for a few years). My mistake.
Early Look at the 2018 Hall-of-Fame Ballot
So, what does 2018 look like? The list of players debuting on the 2018 Hall-of-Fame ballot is an intriguing one. It contains two obvious Hall-of-Famers: Chipper Jones and Jim Thome, along with at least five players who seem like they could generate some attention: (in alphabetical order) 10-time Gold Glove winner Andruw Jones, 269-game winner Jamie Moyer, 8-time Gold Glove winner Scott Rolen, 2-time Cy Young winner Johan Santana, and 11-time Gold Glove winner Omar Vizquel. I think that I would be more surprised if any of those five were actually elected by the BBWAA than if all five of them dropped off the ballot after one year, but they all have interesting, even if not necessarily compelling, cases.
Among returning candidates, my early prediction would be that Trevor Hoffman and Vlad Guerrero seem well-positioned to join Jones and Thome in a four-person Hall-of-Fame class in 2018. I would also anticipate continued momentum for all of Martinez, Clemens, Bonds, Mussina, and, perhaps, Schilling. Finally, one down-ballot candidate worth watching could be Manny Ramirez. He debuted far stronger than I expected and if anti-PED sentiments among the electorate continue to wane, he could be a big beneficiary of that.
Let me close with congratulations to Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, and Ivan Rodriguez, three very deserving members of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
All articles are written so that they pull data directly from the most recent version of the Player won-lost database. Hence, any numbers cited within these articles should automatically incorporate the most recent update to Player won-lost records. In some cases, however, the accompanying text may have been written based on previous versions of Player won-lost records. I apologize if this results in non-sensical text in any cases.
Home
List of Articles