NEWSLETTER
Although public ballot collection never gets you a PERFECT picture of what the ultimate voting will be, we usually have a pretty good sense of what’s going to happen with the Hall of Fame year to year thanks to the tireless tabulations of Ryan Thibodaux.
This year, no one is polling over the necessary 75% of the vote needed for election. Without obvious Hall of Famers jumping onto the ballot as first timers, and with still so much reluctance by some to support anyone attached to the Steroid Era (so-called because, well, USAGE WAS RAMPANT AND BASICALLY TOLERATED BY MLB … but I digress), it’s possible there won’t be any players admitted to Cooperstown this summer.
The one guy who is closest is former starting pitcher Curt Schilling, who is currently tracking at 74.5% in the publicly-available ballots, but whose private ballots took his number down quite a bit last year. The pundits think it’s unlikely he’ll get there when all the ballots are revealed.
But if that’s not the case, some writers reportedly want to do their part to make sure he doesn’t get there after recent events:
Source: Numerous National Baseball HOF voters have reached out to the Hall hoping to amend their ballots, removing their votes for Curt Schilling after he supported the seditious acts in Washington D.C. 2 weeks ago. HOF officials are concerned about the precedent this could set.
— M@ (@MattSpiegel670) January 21, 2021
I think it’s a little weird to see Schilling’s recent support for what happened at the Capitol as a final straw given that it was pretty much par for the course for him, but I guess some writers felt it was too much for the “integrity” and “character” portions of the vote.
To me, there can be no argument that, based purely on performance, Schilling’s was a Hall-of-Fame-caliber career. But voters for the Hall of Fame are permitted to consider a number of other factors in their vote, and when a player is as vile as Schilling has been (seriously: it’s not just a matter of politics with him), I don’t really have a beef with voters who don’t want him enshrined.
Do I think voters should be able to un-do votes they already sent in on the basis of the events from earlier this month? I don’t know, because I do at least understand HOF concerns about precedent. I do know that if Schilling were the only former player elected this year, it would make for quite an awkward induction event. Not that that’s a reason to un-do a vote, of course. Supporting the overthrow of a democratically-elected government might be, though. Clearly, that’s the position of at least some writers anyway.
