Electoral prognostication

Update: Gossage is in. Rice fell 16 votes short. Andre Dawson saw a significant increase in support but still fell well short of induction. Chuck Knoblach and David Justice received one vote each. Mark McGwire's vote total stayed pretty much the same. Both Lee Smith and Bert Blyleven gained votes. As of 1:30pm Eastern Time I called New Hampshire for Obama.

Well, tomorrow is the big day. That's right, the results of the Baseball Hall of Fame voting will be announced. It's almost a no-brainer, but I predict that Goose Gossage will secure election. Other thoughts:

• Mark McGwire will almost certainly lose votes. I think it's even possible that he'll fall below 5% and be dropped from the ballot. Not likely, mind you, but possible.
  
• You would think that there Andre Dawson and Jim Rice would have a shot at securing election by sweeping the anti-steroid protest vote. But you'd also think that if that were going to happen then some of the writers would have said something about it by now. In point of fact, the silence of the Andre Dawson Hall of Fame campaign is hard to miss. The Jim Rice supporters are slightly less silent, but that isn't saying much. My guess is that neither will secure election, but that Jim Rice will come close.
  
• Neither Chuck Knoblach nor David Justice will receive enough votes to remain on the ballot.
  
• Lee Smith will continue to lose votes.
  
• Bert Blyleven will reverse last year's trend and increase his vote totals.

In other electoral news, Obama will win in New Hampshire with Clinton and Edwards in a virtual tie for second. On the Republican side, Romney will do better than expected.

HOF horserace blogging

Another consequence of the Mitchell report is that any chance Mark McGwire had to increase his vote totals this year is as lost as the innocence of the East German women's swim team. Between that and the fact that Tim Raines is the best player coming on to the ballot, this is looking like a good year for the players who've been hanging around just below the 75% thresh hold for awhile.

I made a chart.

As you can see if you've got really good glasses or a high quality display, all the trends point to Goose Gossage going into the Hall. Jim Rice also looks pretty strong, but you have to wonder why he lost support last year.

For historical context, here's another chart.

And here's a piece of trivia: The last time that no player received enough support to be elected to the Hall of Fame was 1996.

Dept of corrections

From last December:

Speaking of exclusion from the Hall of Fame, Steve Garvey is down to two years of ballot eligibility. He was named on only a quarter of ballots last year, and has never been named on more than 43%, so it's looking like he won't make it into the Hall of Fame. It's a shame. |link|

It turns out, though, that last year was Garvey's last on the ballot. Oops.

And it is a shame. Especially when you look at the list of players coming on to the ballot over the next two years. Ricky Henderson is a first ballot lock in 2009, but nobody else looks likely to make the Hall, let alone on the first ballot. Tim Raines is probably the next strongest candidate, and he doesn't meet barely even meets my lax standards. With that kind of competition, there might have been room for Garvey.

By the by, while tooling around baseball-reference.com I noticed a stat I hadn't seen before -- HOF Monitor. Here's the description:

This is another Jamesian creation. It attempts to assess how likely (not how deserving) an active player is to make the Hall of Fame. It's rough scale is 100 means a good possibility and 130 is a virtual cinch. It isn't hard and fast, but it does a pretty good job.

Follow the link to see the rules for assigning points. Steve Garvey scored 130.5 points.

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