Hall of Fame season is underway, and I’ve already reviewed six of the eight Contemporary Baseball Era Committtee candidates and gotten a start on the annual BBWAA ballot. With the latter, it’s time to launch what’s become a yearly tradition at FanGraphs. In the spirit of our annual free agent contract crowdsourcing, we’re inviting registered users to fill out their own virtual Hall of Fame ballots using a cool gizmo that our developer, Sean Dolinar, built a few years ago. I’m also going to use this page to lay out a tentative schedule for the remainder of the series, as well as links to the profiles that have been published.
To participate in the crowdsourcing, you must be signed in, and you may only vote once. While you don’t have to be a FanGraphs Member to do so, this is a perfect time to mention that buying a Membership does help to fund the development of cool tools like this — and it makes a great holiday gift! To replicate the actual voting process, you may vote for anywhere from zero to 10 players; ballots with more than 10 won’t be counted. You may change your ballot until the deadline, which is December 31, 2022, the same as that of the actual BBWAA voters, who have to schlep their paper ballot to the mailbox.
The ballot is here and contains all 26 candidates (and no, you still can’t write in Pete Rose or Barry Bonds). We’ve got tables of career stats for the ballot’s position players and pitchers, if that helps, as well as a checkbox that allows you to see the stats of those already enshrined. As with last year, I’ll write up the crowdsourcing results sometime before the announcement of the official results on January 23.
As for the schedule, I’m still piecing it together, so what is sketched out below is incomplete and should be regarded as tentative. I do anticipate several first-year candidates with no shot at election — the one-and-dones — running sometime in early January, which allows me to focus on the stronger cases before the ballot deadline while continuing to pitch in with our coverage of free agent deals and other offseason news. This also lets me go a bit longer with the profiles of those one-and-done candidates, for whom just appearing on the ballot after an impressive career is its own reward. In order to free up space for contemporary coverage, I plan to group together brief summaries and updates of a few down-ballot candidates, such as those of pitchers Mark Buehrle and Andy Pettitte, or PED-linked sluggers Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, as relatively little has changed in their cases since last year.
Rest assured that I’ll be covering every candidate at length or in brief, in keeping with what I’ve done since the start of my JAWS-flavored coverage in 2004 (I’ll be celebrating the 20th anniversary at some point in January). I’m not about to miss any now. New profiles below are denoted with asterisks.
Nov. 20: Intro
Nov. 21: Todd Helton
Nov. 27: Billy Wagner
Nov. 28: Gary Sheffield
Nov. 30: Andruw Jones
Dec. 1: Joe Mauer*
Dec. 4: Carlos Beltrán
