Baseball Hall of Fame Voting, 2011: My Predictions
I love the day the new baseball Hall of Famers are announced each January. In fact, outside of Christmas, Halloween, Easter, New Year’s Day, my birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day and Arbor Day, it is my favorite day of the year.
I also enjoy making predictions based on not-very-scientific methods, which is exactly what I did for this article. Without going into detail into how I came up with these numbers (like I said, it wasn’t very scientific, though it did involve math—I did not just arbitrarily assign numbers to the players on a whim), the following is how I predict the voting for the Hall of Fame will go this year. Listed are the players, the percentages I predict for them, and which category they will fall into. We will see how accurate I am come January 5.
Welcome to the Hall…
Bert Blyleven, 83.0%
Roberto Alomar, 81.9%
We’ll see you next year…
Barry Larkin, 57.5%
Jack Morris, 57.4%
Lee Smith, 49.8%
Fred McGriff, 40.9%
Edgar Martinez, 37.2%
Tim Raines, 33.5%
Jeff Bagwell, 30.1%
Alan Trammell, 25.4%
Mark McGwire, 23.8%
Rafael Palmeiro, 23.5%
Larry Walker, 19.5%
Don Mattingly, 18.2%
John Franco, 14.5%
John Olerud, 13.5%
Kevin Brown, 13.4%
Dale Murphy, 12.5%
Juan Gonzalez, 9.2 %
Harold Baines, 6.4%
Tino Martinez, 5.1%
To the Veteran’s Committee…
Dave Parker, 16.5%
One-and-done…
B.J. Surhoff, 2.9%
Al Leiter, 2.8%
Benito Santiago, 1.5%
Raul Mondesi, 1.0%
Bret Boone, 0.8%
Kirk Rueter, 0.5%
Bobby Higginson, 0.4%
Marquis Grissom, 0.4%
Carlos Baerga, 0.3%
Lenny Harris, 0.0%
Charles Johnson, 0.0%
Of the 33 players on the ballot, a whopping two of them, or 6.1%, will make the Hall of Fame. 19 of the players, or 57.6%, will be on the ballot again next year, including eight (42.1%) of the first-timers. 11 (57.9%) of the newcomers will not make it past this election—two of them will not garner even a single vote.
