Good poll position
Hall of Fame voting trends in Jeff Bagwell’s favor.
Scott Miller has agonized over that tiny box next to Jeff Bagwell’s name. He even claims to have lost sleep in years past as yet-to-besubmitted Hall of Fame ballots waited on his desk.
The same goes for Mark Newman, who after mailing his 2016 ballot went so far as to ask the Baseball Writers’ Association of America if he could check just one more box. (He couldn’t. Changes aren’t permitted once a ballot has been postmarked.)
Miller, a national columnist for Bleacher Report, and Newman, an editor for MLB.com, also have this in common: Both belong to a particular subset of the BBWAA electorate. They are two of 16 known voters who flipped their stances on Bagwell, the 48-year-old Astros icon who on Wednesday, after six years of disappointment, is expected to receive that life-changing call from Cooperstown.
Bagwell finished 15 votes shy of the 75 percent support he needed to join Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza in the class of 2016. The volume of votes he is already known to have secured from writers who previously abstained from checking his box forecasts a comfortable margin for election in 2017.
As of Saturday, Bagwell was polling at 91 percent, second to likely Hall of Fame classmate Tim Raines (91.5 percent). Only 46 percent of the 435 ballots have been made public or compiled by unofficial ballot tracker Ryan Thibodaux, but a dropoff of more than 16 percent once all votes are tallied would be stunning.
Writers become eligible to vote after 10 consecutive active years as members of the BBWAA. Among those voting for the first time this year, Bagwell so far is a perfect 12-for-12. Those votes are pivotal for his candidacy but more important are the changed minds among returning voters, the area he has made the greatest strides the last two years. Steady climb
“I think this is more an evolution than a revolution,” said Sports Illustrated writer and Hall of Fame expert Jay Jaffe. Bagwell, as Jaffe points out, has trended steadily toward election for years now, having appeared on between 54.3 and 59.6 percent of ballots from 2012 to 2015 before jumping to 71.6 percent last year.
This year could be the tipping point for many reasons. The most popular refrain among new Bagwell voters contacted by the Chronicle regarded the yearly reevaluation undertaken based on the pool of candidates in a given year.
The “Rule of 10,” which since 1936 has allowed voters a maximum of 10 candidates per ballot, has contributed to the former first baseman’s wait. Bagwell has had to wait his turn as obvious first-ballot candidates Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, John Smoltz and Griffey earned induction over the past two years.
As long as he appears on at least 5 percent of ballots, a player remains eligible for election for as many as 10 years. Bagwell is in his seventh year on the ballot, Raines in his last.
Danny Knobler, who voted for Bagwell for the first time this year after having “considered him seriously each of the last few years,” noted that there’s a reason the rules allow a candidate to remain on the ballot for up to a decade.
“Everybody asks, ‘How can you change (your vote) because a guy’s numbers don’t change?’ and that’s absolutely true,” said Knobler, who covered the Detroit Tigers from 1990 to 2008 and now writes for Bleacher Report. “Bagwell hasn’t gotten any more hits since last year. His case really isn’t any different from last year. He’s not the one who changes. It’s the composition of the electorate, and also it’s the opinions of the voters that change over time.”
For example, Knobler last year had Bagwell as one of four candidates he considered for the 10th and final spot on his ballot. Torn among Bagwell, Mike Mussina, Edgar Martinez and Larry Walker, he ended up voting for only nine candidates. But this year, he included Bagwell, Mussina and Martinez.
“It doesn’t make you any less of a Hall of Famer if it takes you 15 looks (as the old rules allowed) instead of five looks or two looks or one look,” Knobler said. “Once you get in, you’re in.” Piazza’s election helps
Fairly or not, last year’s election of Piazza also helped Bagwell’s case. As home run hitters who played in the steroid era, each long faced similar obstacles to election. Both have been suspected by writers of using illegal performance-enhancing drugs despite never failing a drug test or showing up in the Mitchell Report. (Both also admitted using the testosterone-boosting androstenedione back when it was legal in MLB.)
For at least two new Bagwell voters, credentials were never the issue. Both Miller and the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Jeff Schultz abstained from voting for Bagwell in the first six years of his eligibility because of steroid suspicion.
“With the suspicion but never the proof, I kind of had him and Mike Piazza in their own category,” Miller said. “When they went onto the ballot, for lack of a better term, personally, I put them in a holding bin.
“What I wanted to do was let some years elapse and see if any other information emerged, be it a book, further investigation by somebody, maybe one of them admitting they did some things. Because guys are on the ballot for 10 years, I just don’t see a need to rush to vote for a guy, especially if I’m just on the fence about him.”
Miller said that in each of the previous six years, he submitted his ballot “having just thought and thought and thought about Bagwell.” He “became more and more uncomfortable withhold- ing a vote from him just based on suspicion without any smokinggun evidence or circumstantial evidence.”
Schultz, too, felt like enough time had passed when filling out his 2017 ballot. (Frustrated with the process, namely what he described in a column as “the lack of direction from the Hall on how voters should view past PED users,” he has stated this year’s vote will be his last.)
“I can’t say I’m 100 percent convinced he didn’t use, but it wouldn’t be fair to keep him out of the Hall of Fame based on that,” Schultz wrote in an email.
Perhaps the aspect that has most abetted Bagwell’s candidacy in recent years is the increasing percentage of voters accepting advanced metrics.
Though Bagwell’s 2,314 hits and 449 home runs left him short of a couple major statistical benchmarks, the popular Wins Above Replacement metric and JAWS — the Jaffe-created system to determine Hall of Fame worthiness — better contextualize the former slugger’s contributions on the basepaths and in the field.
“I did change my mind, which I rarely do with Hall candidates,” Steve Wine of the Associated Press wrote in an email. “I always considered it a close call with Bagwell, but I never really thought of him as a Hall of Famer when he was playing.
“He was an All-Star only four times, which stopped me, and I considered his career hits and home run numbers borderline for the Hall.”
But Wine said when he revisited Bagwell’s career last month, he for the first time studied his WAR and JAWS rankings compared with other first basemen. He said he also “realized I hadn’t given him enough credit for hitting in the Astrodome.”
Jaffe says Bagwell is definitely among “a wave of guys” whose candidacy has been helped by advanced metrics. Raines also falls into that category.
“If I say (Bert) Blyleven is probably No. 1, Bagwell and Raines might be No. 2 and No. 3 in terms of guys whose cases were really specifically boosted by the advanced stats in front of the writers,” Jaffe said. WAR hero
During his 15-year career, Bagwell accumulated 89.6 WAR, the sixth-highest total all-time among first basemen and second to only Albert Pujols (101.1) at the position since World War II. The other four ahead of Bagwell — Lou Gehrig (112.4), Jimmie Foxx (96.4), Cap Anson (93.9) and Roger Connor (84.1) are all enshrined in Cooperstown, as are 16 first basemen with a lower WARtotal than Bagwell.
Bagwell’s 63.9 score in JAWS is well above the 54.2 baseline for the average Hall of Fame first baseman. The National League MVP of the strike-shortened 1994 season accounts for the only two 30-30 seasons by a first baseman in history, accomplishing the feat in 1997 and 1999, years he placed third and second in MVP voting, respectively.
Kevin Kernan of the New York Post wrote in an email he voted for Bagwell for the first time this year because he has voted for Fred McGriff and “and even though McGriff has more home runs, by a bit, they both had eight-plus 100-plus RBI seasons, and Bagwell has that .948 OPS.”
Mike Puma, also of the New York Post, re-evaluated his methodology, expanding his ballot from the four to six candidates he limited himself to in recent years to use all 10 spots. In making his decision, he said he compared Bagwell’s résumé to that of Frank Thomas, who was inducted in 2014.
Newman overhauled his voting process for 2017 after the internal strife he felt over his 2016 vote. He wrote in an email he “studied JAWS and WAR and listened to as much discourse as possible in the industry and social media.”
In a column explaining his ballot, he cited both aforementioned metrics as well as Bagwell’s 149 career OPS-plus, a metric that indicates his on-base plus slugging percentage was 49 percent better than the league average throughout his career. OPS-plus adjusts for ballpark effects — Bagwell played nine of his 15 seasons in the cavernous Astrodome.
“I slept well after mailing my ballot back this time,” Newman said.