Baseball Hall of Fame: 2015 Class Predictions

The 2015 class of Hall of Fame inductees will be announced tomorrow, and as they do each year, the folks at the Baseball Think Factory are collecting and tabulating those Hall of Fame ballots that have been published by voters.

As of this morning, below are the percentages of the ballots on which each player appears (75.0% is needed for induction). At this writing these represented 25.9% of the total expected ballots:

99.3 - R. Johnson
98.0 - P. Martinez
87.1 - Smoltz
82.4 - Biggio
77.0 - Piazza
————————————
66.2 - Bagwell
66.2 - Raines
54.1 - Schilling
43.2 - Bonds
43.2 - Clemens
38.5 - Mussina
29.0 - E. Martinez
23.0 - Trammell
18.9 - Lee Smith
15.5 - McGriff
14.2 - Kent
8.8 - L. Walker
8.8 - Sheffield
6.8 - McGwire
————————————-
4.7 - Sosa
4.7 - Mattingly
1.4 - Pete Rose (Write-In)
0.7 - Garciaparra
0.7 - Delgado

Starting at the bottom are those who are projected to get less than 5% of the vote and are projected to drop off the list ballot going forward. This obviously doesn't include all of those who have not gotten any votes so far on those published ballots -- more on these "less-than-5 percenters" here. Sammy Sosa with his multiple 60-HR seasons is projected to drop off the ballot, but it's going to be close. Long time Yankee Don Mattingly is in his 15th and final year of eligibility, so he will drop off in the future either way.

Further up the list, Mark McGwire, Gary Sheffield, and Larry Walker are dangerously close to that 5% threshold.

Alan Trammell, who deserves induction, and someone who Jimmy Rollins' slim Hall chances will one day rely on already being inducted, is stuck in the 20-25% range after peaking at 36.8% in 2012. He has one more year of eligibility on the ballot, and after that will depend on the Veterans Committee.

And finally the 5 currently projected to be inducted:

• Randy Johnson, with as unanimous as the vote ever gets.
• Pedro Martinez, who will dramatically reduce the time since a Hall of Famer wore a Phillies uniform. As Corinne Landry writes today, no Hall of Famer has worn a Phillies uniform since Mike Schmidt on 5/28/89.
• John Smoltz, who we know all too well.
• Craig Biggio appears to have a good shot after falling just shy last year, when he was named on 74.8% of the ballots.
• Mike Piazza, who is hanging on by a thread at 77.0%.

How accurate a predictor of the final results are the published ballots? Close enough to give a rough idea of their overall support, but with enough occurrences of 5-10 point swings to make us wary of counting chickens at this point. Below are the 2014 results, and how they compared to the final tally of known ballots, which represented 36.7% of the total.

It may be useful to note that most players got less of the vote (sometimes substantially so) on the ballots that were not published, and so their final vote total fell short of what was predicted by the known ballots: