2019 Hall of Fame Projected Vote

For those of us who are enthusiasts about the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, today is Christmas. At 6:00p ET, on MLB Network, Hall of Fame President Jeff Idelson will reveal the latest members of the Hall. Either three or four players will join last month’s Eras Committee inductees Lee Smith and Harold Baines to form the Hall’s Class of 2019.

The New York Yankees longtime relief ace Mariano Rivera will headline the Class of 2019. The only suspense about Rivera’s Hall of Fame outcome will be whether he will be the first player to be inducted unanimously by the 400+ members of the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America).

Based on the early publicly disclosed votes (recorded on Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame vote tracker), it is a near certainty that Edgar Martinez, the brilliant hitting savant from the Seattle Mariners, will join Rivera on stage in Cooperstown this summer. It’s also a virtual lock that the late Roy Halladay, ace starter for the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies, will be inducted posthumously.

What remains the big mystery is whether Mike Mussina, starting pitcher for 18 years for the Yankees and Baltimore Orioles, will also join the party. Mussina, according to standard methodology applied to Thibodaux’s early reported votes, has about a 50-50 chance of crossing the 75% voting threshold required for a Hall of Fame plaque.

In this piece, I’m going to offer official “Cooperstown Cred” predictions about the final vote totals for all of the 35 candidates. First, however, a look at the “early” vote as recorded by Thibodaux’s tracker.

Before looking at these numbers, you should know that the early vote almost always over-estimates a player’s final vote total. Although this is a generalization, voters who keep their ballots private before the official announcement tend to be a bit stingier. Every BBWAA voter may check up to ten names on their ballot but are not required to do so. A healthy minority of writers vote for less than 10 players.

Current Projected Hall of Fame Vote (Ryan Thibodaux Tracker)

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There are an additional 12 first-time players on the ballot who have not received any votes on the currently reported ballots: Placido Polanco, Kevin Youkilis, Derek Lowe, Freddy Garcia, Vernon Wells, Ted Lilly, Travis Hafner, Jason Bay, Jon Garland, Darren Oliver, Juan Pierre and Rick Ankiel. There is one exception to the previous sentence. Bill Madden of the New York Daily News, has not submitted his full ballot publicly but did indicate in a column that he was going to throw a bone to Polanco as a “vote for defense,” since Polanco has the distinction of having the best all-time fielding percentage at both second base and third base.

So, that leaves 23 players who have had votes publicly tallied by Thibodaux and his team of interns. Four of that group (Michael Young, Roy Oswalt, Lance Berkman and Miguel Tejada) have received either two or three total votes, which amounts to less than 2% each. Since a minimum of 5% of the vote is required to remain on future ballots, we can assume that those four will not be on the 2020 ballot. Ultimately, at least 18 of the 35 members of the 2019 Hall of Fame ballot will not be around for 2020. That number includes Martinez and first baseman Fred McGriff, who are both on the ballot for the 10th year and thus have exhausted their eligibility for BBWAA votes.

Anyway, with the preamble complete, let’s move on to the predictions.

Cooperstown Cred 2019 Hall of Fame Projections

First, allow me to briefly share the methodology used to arrive at these numbers. You’ll notice that in most (but not all) cases, the projections are for a lower vote percentage than the numbers reported by Thibodaux’s tracker. As mentioned earlier, this is because voters who choose to remain anonymous are (as a whole) a little bit more frugal with their votes than those who reveal their choices.

The other generalization about “private” vs “public” voters is that the voters who keep their ballots to themselves tend to vote in more of an “old school” fashion. These voters tend to favor simpler statistics and award hardware. The “analytics” voters, who study metrics such as WAR, OPS+ or ERA+, are more likely to be transparent in their votes than the old school voters.

How did I arrive at these totals? For returning players, it’s pretty simple. It’s a matter of counting how many voters a player has “flipped” from “no” to “yes” between 2018 and 2019. The “flip percentage” on the votes reported in the tracker can then be used to predict how that player will do among the private or yet-to-be-reported public votes.

For first-time players, it’s more difficult to project because there are no “flips” to analyze. I’ll discuss the first-timers individually but the projections involve a bit more guess-work, trying to “profile” the anonymous voters en masse to determine if the first-time player is the “type” of player they vote for.

Anyway, here we go!!

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Next, some brief comments on some of the player projections:

Three More Members of the Class of 2019

Mariano Rivera (projected vote – 99.5%)

I would love to be wrong about this and to see Rivera become the first ever player to be inducted with 100% of the vote by the BBWAA. The closest anybody ever got was Ken Griffey Jr., who got all but three votes in 2016. The identity of the three “no” votes for Junior remain unknown to this day.

If you think about the history of the Hall of Fame, it’s silly that nobody has ever been inducted unanimously. Who were the nine people who didn’t think that Hank Aaron was a Hall of Famer? How about the 23 voters who didn’t check Willie Mays’ name? 43 writers didn’t vote for Mickey Mantle.

So, it’s likely that there will be a couple of writers who think that nobody should be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. There may be others who think that a relief pitcher shouldn’t be the first player to have that unique honor.

I couldn’t disagree more. In the history of baseball during the LCS era (since 1969), there is no player who had more significance to the winning of championships than Rivera. His statistics, for both the regular and postseasons, are vastly superior to any other relief pitcher who ever lived. Add in the fact that you could see Rivera’s picture next to the word “class” on a Google search and you have a player distinctly worthy of the unique honor.

Roy Halladay (90.1%)

The late Roy Halladay is likely doing so well among the early voters for the Hall of Fame because his case has a blend of old school and analytics. On the old school side are the two Cy Young Awards, his perfect game, his postseason no-hitter, and his seven years in which he led the league in complete games. On the analytics side, he was the most dominant starting pitcher in the game for 10 years (2002-2011) as ranked by WAR.

I predicted a bit of a dip, however, from his publicly reported vote to his final vote total because he only won 203 games in his career. Some old school writers will not like that. Regardless, Halladay will be comfortably over the 75% bar. His family will be able to enjoy his induction this summer in what surely will be an emotional moment.

Edgar Martinez (83.8%)

In this, his 10th and final year on the ballot, Martinez will be well over the 75% line but will not do as well as the current tracking is showing. There is still a large group of writers who do not believe in voting for designated hitters. A year ago, Edgar got just 52.4% of the private vote, compared to 76.3% of the public vote. Still, because it’s his final year of eligibility, Edgar is getting a nice bump among all voters. I’d be very surprised if he didn’t clear 80% and he might get as high as 85%.

The Next Seven

Mike Mussina (73.7%)

It’s with the soft-spoken Mussina that the greatest drama exists prior to the vote announcement. I have projected him to fall a little bit shy of the 75% needed for induction. Other projection models have Moose just over the threshold.

Mussina got just 46.7% among the private voters 12 months ago. That does give him a lot of “flip” opportunities but there will need to be a higher percentage of private voter changed minds than there has been so far among those who have revealed their choices.

If Mussina does fall short of the Hall of Fame in 2019, he’s a lock to make it in 2020.

Curt Schilling (59.6%)

If it had not been for a poorly-received Tweet he sent two and half years ago, Schilling might be getting into the Hall of Fame this year. In 2016, Schilling got 52.3% of the vote, compared to 43.0% for Mussina. If both pitchers had followed a normal upward vote trajectory, Schilling would be ahead of Mussina on a year-to-year basis.

That’s not what happened. Schilling’s Tweet (a picture in which he said a picture with the words “rope, tree, journalist” was “awesome”) caused him to drop back to 45% of the vote in 2017. He’s being slowly forgiven; this will be his third straight season of upward momentum. If Schilling finishes a few points higher than I’ve projected, he will have an outside shot of induction in 2020.

Barry Bonds (59.8% and Roger Clemens (61.0%)

For obvious reasons, these two PED-stained legends have mirrored each other’s votes nearly identically for seven years. Among the votes revealed so far on Thibodaux’s tracker, Bonds and Clemens have each gained just 3 new supporters. That’s not enough to move them into “scoring position” for Cooperstown enshrinement in the upcoming years.

Bonds and Clemens are slowly creeping up towards 75% but there is a significant voter bloc that is strongly opposed to rewarding them with a Hall of Fame plaque. I’d say it’s more likely than not that Bonds and Clemens will not make it to Cooperstown before their eligibility runs out in 2022.

Larry Walker (53.8%)

In this, his 9th year of eligibility, Larry Walker has flipped more votes than any player on the ballot. Most projection models I’ve seen have Walker getting substantially more than what I’ve shared. The jump that I’ve predicted is still significant but it’s likely to be insufficient to give him a chance to surge to all the way above 75% in 2020.

The reason for my pessimism is this: Walker got just 24% of the private vote a year ago. While, again, that provides a large amount of potential voters to change their minds, he’s going to need a much larger percentage to flip than have done so already in order to get his total into the high 50’s.

If you’re a Walker fan, you can root for me to be wrong. From the other Hall of Fame projection experts…

• Scott Lindholm (62.8%)
• Nathaniel Rakich from fivethirtyeight.com (60.8%)
• Jason Sardell (56.0%)
• Ross Carey (54.5%)

Omar Vizquel (46.1%)

On the flip side, my projection model is more favorable to Vizquel than the others except for Carey. When I look at it, to be quite frank, the number looks a little bit high but I’ll stick with the methodology. A year ago, Vizquel received 45.7% of the private vote compared to 33.6% of the public votes that had been revealed prior to the results announcement.

Fred McGriff (42.2%)

I have The Crime Dog getting a farewell bump of nearly 20% in this, his final year on the BBWAA ballot. It’s been written many times before (by me and others) that McGriff (and his case for the Hall of Fame) is one of the most significant casualties of the PED era. By coming close to doubling his voting percentage in his final year, many writers have acknowledged the same.

I’ve read several columns in which writers bemoaned having to squeeze McGriff off their previous ballots due to the limit of 10 selections. With four Hall of Famers inducted in 2018 and only two new first-ballot candidates for 2019, there was a littler breathing room for writers to give a tip of the cap to a great career.

McGriff is widely considered a huge favorite to be inducted by the Today’s Game Committee in 2022.

Methodology of the First-Ballot Players Outside the Top 10

As you can see above, there’s a big gap between the 10th place vote-getter (by my projections) and the cluster of 9 players between 5% and 23%.

Given the less-clogged ballot, every returning player is seeing an increase in their vote share for 2019. These gains are not earth-shattering but they are significant. Remember, among the players who will be in the top 10 of votes received, three or four will be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Additionally, McGriff will be aged off the ballot next year, with Walker’s final year of eligibility occurring in 2020.

The point is that there will be an opportunity for these small gains to triple or quadruple in the next two voting cycles.

To wrap up, let me state for the record that my projections for Todd Helton (15.5%) and Andy Pettitte (6.6%) are essentially guesses. I projected Helton to be slightly lower than his current polling because of the Coors Field effect that has always depressed the “private” vote numbers of Walker, Helton’s longtime teammate in Colorado.

As for Pettitte, his career doesn’t fit into any predictable box. His level of voting support is clearly being held down by being an admitted user of Human Growth Hormone. But he has 256 career wins and has more postseason wins (19) than any other pitcher in baseball history. The point to my boring story is I have no idea how the private vote will look upon Pettitte so I’m projecting his vote to be exactly the same as the current projection on Thibodaux’s tracker.

Links to profiles of the players on the 2019 ballot

Finally, here are links to the Cooperstown Cred profiles of most of the players on the 2019 ballot. Thanks to all of you for reading. If you aren’t already, please follow Cooperstown Cred on Twitter @cooperstowncred for Hall of Fame tidbits, trivia, articles about current players on a Hall of Fame track, and tributes to some of the legends already enshrined in Cooperstown.

Mariano Rivera: Inner Circle Hall of Famer

Why Roy Halladay Should be a First Ballot Hall of Famer

Edgar Martinez: On the Doorstep of the Hall of Fame

Mike Mussina: on the 2019 Hall of Fame Bubble

Forget Twitter: Curt Schilling is a Hall of Famer

Hall of Fame Conundrum: Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens

Larry Walker’s Hall of Fame Case and the Impact of Coors Field

The Polarizing Hall of Fame Case of Omar Vizquel

True Crime: Fred McGriff’s Last Year on the Hall of Fame Ballot

Why Does Jeff Kent Get Overlooked in the Hall of Fame Debate

Scott Rolen’s Hall of Fame Case: a Matter of WAR

Hall of Fame Doors Remain Closed to Billy Wagner

Why Gary Sheffield Remains Far Outside the Hall of Fame

Andruw Jones: Best Defensive Center Fielder Ever?

Todd Helton: Another Coors Field Hall of Fame Debate

Andy Pettitte’s Complicated Hall of Fame Case

Lance Berkman: Underrated Star Falling Shy of Cooperstown

Thanks for reading.