One thing that I thought about while writing my most recent update on Hall of Fame voting was to revisit an older topic with new information. Two years ago, I looked at Scott Rolen’s Hall of Fame chances in the run-up to the 2023 announcement. That wound up being the year that he was elected, coming up just ahead of the needed 75%, but prior to that moment, things were genuinely up in the air. Projections had him at more or less coin-flip odds of making it.
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The biggest uncertainty at that point was “private voters”. For those who don’t follow Hall voting: whereas some voters will announce their ballot publicly before the election (and get picked up by Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker project), and another subset will reveal their ballot in someway after the official announcement, a chunk of voters never do; a rough current breakdown of these three groups right now is something like 55%/25%/20%, respectively. The last group had traditionally been the big damper on Rolen’s chances, but in 2023, they went from voting for him at a 34% clip to over 57% of the time. That was still his worst segment overall, but that big swing was enough to get him over the line.
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I theorized that Rolen hitting 60% of the vote the year before was the indication that he would see a big leap in private voter support. That call may seem odd, but it’s actually pretty normal: a big part of Hall voting really is momentum, and seeing other voters come around on a player does in fact move another chunk of voters, like a domino effect. That ended up being more or less correct, but I was also going off of a pretty small set of examples, around ten or so players who had hung around the ballot since the Tracker started and who had definitive moments of crossing over the 50% and 60% lines.
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In just the two years since then, we’ve had a few more players join their ranks, so I wanted to update my findings and see how we might be able to apply them to the 2025 Ballot. Is there a type of player more likely to see this effect? Are there cases who might not see this boost?
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