FanSided MLB’s 2012 Hall of Fame Vote: Jeff Bagwell Elected to Cooperstown

Over the last two weeks, FanSided’s MLB team held a mock vote for the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s 2012 class. The votes have been tallied, and the result is: first baseman Jeff Bagwell is the sole candidate who would join Ron Santo’s widow for induction this year in our Cooperstown.

Forty-four writers representing 26 sites participated in our vote. Each writer was allowed to cast votes for up to 10 of the 27 candidates on this year’s ballot. As with the real BBWAA voting, candidates needed 75 percent (33 votes) to gain entrance into Cooperstown. Players receiving less than five percent (two or fewer votes) would be dropped from next year’s ballot.

Here are the results:

With the support of 77.3 percent of FanSided MLB writers (34 votes), Bagwell gets through to the Hall of Fame in his second year on the ballot. He received 41.7 percent of the vote from the BBWAA in his debut last year; every player not still on the ballot who debuted that well has ended up being elected.

Barry Larkin just misses the cut for induction, finishing only one vote shy of the 75 percent threshold in his third year on the ballot. Tim Raines is the only other player to receive more than 50 percent of the vote. Larkin and Raines received 62.1 and 37.5 percent of the vote from the BBWAA in 2011, respectively.

Edgar Martinez, Lee Smith, Don Mattingly, Alan Trammell, Jack Morris, and Dale Murphy all received significant support, with each being named on more than a third of all submitted ballots. All but Morris received more support in our vote than they did from the BBWAA last year.

Mark McGwire and Larry Walker came in at just under 30 percent, while exactly one quarter of FanSided writers named Fred McGriff on their ballots. Rafael Palmeiro, Bernie Williams (the only first-year candidate to receive more than five percent of the vote) and Juan Gonzalez round out the bottom tier of surviving candidates.

With just two votes apiece, first-year candidates Bill Mueller and Tim Salmon would be eliminated from next year’s voting, as would Terry Mulholland, Phil Nevin, and Brad Radke, who were named on just one ballot each. Jeromy Burnitz, Vinny Castilla, Brian Jordan, Javy Lopez, Ruben Sierra, Tony Womack, and Eric Young did not receive any votes.

Our writers averaged 5.93 names per ballot, and 20 percent of participants used all 10 of their allocated votes. The BBWAA will almost certainly be stingier with their ballots: with an historically weak first-year candidate class and the general decline in the number of votes writers use, The Hardball Times’ Chris Jaffe predicted that this year’s election will include the lowest votes-to-ballots ratio in BBWAA history.

I used all 10 of my alloted votes to pick Bagwell, Larkin, Martinez, McGriff, McGwire, Palmeiro Raines, Smith, Trammell, and Walker. You can click here to see my reasons for supporting them, and my rationale for snubbing the other candidates can be found here.

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