My Hypothetical 2012 MLB Hall of Fame ballot

At approximately 2:00 p.m. tomorrow (Monday, January 9), the 2012 National Baseball Hall of Fame voting results will be announced. Check here for a look at who was on the ballot this past year.

Over the last three years, I’ve posted on this blog indication of those players for whom I would vote if I had a ballot. So, without further ado, if I had an MLB Hall of Fame ballot this year, I would vote for the following ten players (in rough order of how strongly I feel they belong):

Mark McGwire
Rafael Palmeiro
Fred McGriff
Barry Larkin
Tim Raines
Jeff Bagwell
Jack Morris
Dale Murphy
Lee Smith
Alan Trammell

None of these players are new to this year’s ballot. The first nine fall right in line with what I wrote last year, so please read that for more commentary. With Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven from last year’s ballot having been elected, that made room for Murphy and Smith to move onto the ballot. Meanwhile, they jumped ahead of Harold Baines from last year, since Baines unfortunately failed last year to attain the five percent to maintain eligibility for the ballot.

Filling in Trammell in the tenth slot was the toughest call to make (and, though I don’t remember my thought process from a year ago, apparently, a year ago I would have put Larry Walker and Don Mattingly ahead of him). After looking over statistics from the careers of a group of players that included Trammell, Walker, and Mattingly as well as Juan Gonzalez, Edgar Martinez, and Bernie Williams, I decided that Trammell had the best case. That said, it was very tough to select one from among that group of six players, and so, like most years, if I could vote for more than 10 players, I would. In fact, I would vote for 16. That includes all of the ten on the mock ballot above as well as the five players who vied with Trammell for the tenth slot on my list.

Of course, that only adds up to 15, and so the final player who would make it is Ruben Sierra. I actually looked at Sierra’s numbers along with the six players mentioned above whom I examined for my tenth slot. I easily separated the other six from Sierra, though, which left him out of that hunt. However, when I reconsidered him to discuss what I would do with an unlimited ballot, I decided to include him. Statistically, he matches up with some players for whom I would have voted in the past. (See last year’s blog post as well as the posts from 2010 and 2009.) I hesitated, though, and I think that hesitation came from my perception of Sierra as not living up to expectation. When Sierra came up in 1986/1987, he was touted very highly, and for a while in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was my favorite baseball player. I even considered trying to find and purchase the album of music he released in 1994. But then Sierra’s career fell apart, and in the end he didn’t quite live up to the hype. Still, he ended up having a very nice career—one that, in the end, I think was just good enough to warrant Hall of Fame inclusion. Just barely, though.

After Sierra, the remaining candidates on the ballot (all of whom are new to the ballot this year) failed to stack up enough for serious consideration. The only one who seemed to warrant a second look was Vinny Castilla, but his statistics did not stack up enough to merit inclusion, especially when the 1990s Colorado effect seems to need to be taken into account for him. So, in addition to Castilla, Jeromy Burnitz, Brian Jordan, Javy Lopez, Bill Mueller, Terry Mulholland, Phil Nevin, Brad Radke, Tim Salmon, Tony Womack, and Eric Young would not make my ballot.