Announcement of the results of the Hall of Fame voting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America is scheduled for this Wednesday, January 8. About 20% of the votes that will likely be cast by the writers have already been publicly disclosed. A running tally via Google spreadsheet (much like the Circle of Greats spreadsheets that we use here at HHS) is available that is recording all those publicly available ballots as they come in: Hall of Fame Publicly Available Ballots Spreadsheet . The spreadsheet shows, among other things, that Maddux has appeared on every one of the publicly disclosed ballots so far. Somewhat to my surprise, Glavine is doing almost as well on these ballots as Maddux. Frank Thomas also looks like a sure thing, based on this group of ballots. In short, it looks like a bunch of Circle of Greats inductees are on their way to Cooperstown induction, which is nice thing for them, albeit a less prestigious honor than the Circle.
Keep in mind that the votes collected on the spreadsheet linked above do not represent a random sample of the total ballots that will be cast by the baseball writers as a whole. Most ballots will not be publicly disclosed before Wednesday’s announcement, and although the spreadsheet is capturing all the publicly available ones, it is beyond doubt that the sort of voters who publicly reveal their choices will have different characteristics on the whole than the sort who choose not to disclose their votes. So you can’t assume that the votes cast by non-disclosers will look completely like those cast by the disclosers. On the other hand, this same process has been used the last few years and the final results as announced by the Hall have not differed wildly from the publicly disclosed ballots, so the spreadsheet may be useful as a general guide (though subject to meaningful error) to how the voting is going.
