Bluebird Banter Hall of Fame poll results

On another slow news day in the baseball world, here are the results from the Hall of Fame polls Tom ran about a month ago.

We ran 24 polls, and using the 75% threshold for election, if Bluebird Banter readers were the voters there would be six Hall of Famers in the Class of 2017. Of course, all but the two first timers would have already been inducted, and the real voters are limited to voting for 10 whereas there’s no such limitation here (indeed, totals translate to an average of over 12 votes per ballot).

Each player's poll page linked to his name on the table below

In reality, there will likely be two, maybe three inductees. Jeff Bagwell and Tim Raines are well on track to be inducted this year, and barring any shocking changes should both land at about 80% plus or minus a couple points. Ivan Rodriguez is well above the line now, but should drop as the early returns are always high. I think it will be a very close call, my point projection would be 76%.

Vladdy is just above the line now, but will likely fall short. But it positions him very, very well for future induction. The other player with a shot is Trevor Hoffman, who is just below right now after 67% last year. I think he too will fall a short in the low-70s. He's actually flipping enough voters from no to yes, but he's also lost about 10% of the voters who voted for him last year.

Three of the top four in the BBB vote are former Expos...definitely no bias in our electorate! And Fred McGriff falls just short at 74%. Compared to the early returns from the actual voters, our voters were much higher on Larry Walker (by 66 points!), McGriff, Gary Sheffield, Manny Ramirez, Billy Wagner, Jeff Kent and Jorge Posada. On average, BBB voters were more inclined to induct players, but otherwise the correlation was pretty strong:

One final observation: our electorate is unsurprisingly tough on Roger Clemens, giving him just 57% support. That's actually probably about where he'll end up, but it's 14% behind Barry Bonds' 71%. The relevance of that among the writers, the correlation between votes for the two is about 98-99%: all but a handful of writers vote for neither or both.