Jaffe: JAWS and the 2019 Hall of Fame ballot: one-and-dones
From SABR member Jay Jaffe at FanGraphs on January 2, 2019:
For better or worse, I’m a completist. In 15 years of analyzing Hall of Fame ballots using my JAWS system, I’ve never let a candidate pass without comment, no matter how remote his chance of election. From the brothers Alomar to the youngest Alou and the elder Young, I’ve covered them all. It should come as no surprise, then, that I’m tackling the minor candidates on the 2019 Baseball Writers’ Association of America ballot in addition to the major ones — of which there were 21 this year. That leaves 14 to go.
To be eligible for election, a player must appear in games in at least 10 major league seasons, with a career that ended at least five calendar years ago, and then be nominated by at least two members of a six-member screening committee — a step that can produce some arbitrary results, as I noted last month. Given the backlog of strong candidates, this is no tragedy in the grand scheme of things, since most newcomers have no shot at gaining the 75% of the votes necessary for election. Indeed, the 14 players in question have received a total of four votes among the 140 ballots published thus far; nobody here will come close to the minimum 5% needed to remain on the ballot. Just the same, these one-and-done candidates were accomplished players who deserve their valedictory, so I’ll spend the remainder of this series running through the ones about whom we might say, “They also served.”
Read the full article here: https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/jaws-and-the-2019-hall-of-fame-ballot-one-and-dones-part-1/
Originally published: January 3, 2019. Last Updated: January 3, 2019.