The 2020 MLB Hall of Fame voting is over and now we can officially say which players will be inducted into Cooperstown in just a couple of months. Getting inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame is the most difficult out of any sport because there is a 75% minimum needed and no minimum number of players that need to be inducted.
There have been multiple seasons where there were no players elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America, with the latest being in 2013 where only three members were inducted by the Veterans committee.
We knew this season would not be one of those since a newcomer on the ballot was a sure lock to make the hall in his first season—Derek Jeter—but the question that was brought up was whether or not any player would join Jeter in the class of 2020.
Well, that question was answered with an emphatic yes. After nine years of getting less than 75% of the vote, Larry Walker made a surge in his final season on the ballot to reach 76.6% of the vote and to help break the stigma of the Coors Field effect.
We all knew Jeter was a lock, but Jeter almost made history during these elections by becoming the first position player to ever get elected unanimously. Jeter’s teammate in New York, Mariano Rivera, became the first player ever to get elected unanimously in 2019 and Jeter almost equaled that feat but came up one vote short in the end. Jeter now holds the highest vote percentage for any position player elected to the Hall with 99.75%, .43% higher than Ken Griffey Jr. in 2016 at 99.32%.
At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter what percentage of the votes that the players elected got, what matters is that they got enough votes to get elected. 100% or 75%, these players will now forever be immortalized with the other greats of the game in Cooperstown, where they have been since the first election in 1936 when five all-time greats—Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson
Let’s take a quick look at how these two players got to the Hall of Fame. First let’s start with Jeter. Between 1995 and 2000 the Yankees won four championships and Jeter was the catalyst of all of them. With 3,465 hits—good for sixth all-time— and a .310 career average with a .377 on-base-percentage; 14 All-Star selections and almost a full season worth of games in the playoffs with 158, Jeter is one of the best offensive shortstops of all-time and earned his spot in Cooperstown.
Finishing with a career triple slash of .313/.400/.565 Walker had all the numbers, with 383 HR, 1,311 RBI, and 230 SB. His only downfall for offensive numbers was his total hits, where he only has 2,160. All of this also took into account that he played in Coors Field for a little bit which helped inflate his offensive number. Although Walker did play in Denver for a while, he was also a good defensive right fielder, a metric that seems to not matter as much to voters as offense. Walker finally helped break the Coors field stigma by breaking his way into Cooperstown in his final year of eligibility.
Although only these two players were inducted this season, there were also some other big storylines with some of the other players on the ballot and we will discuss them here.
There were four players who are currently in their eighth year of eligibility—Curt Schilling, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa—out of these players there is only one that has no shot of making the hall unless there is a drastic change in opinion, and that is Sammy Sosa who only had 13.9% of votes.
Curt Schilling has the highest percentage out of all of these players, and he jumped almost 10% from last year to this year and now sits at 70%. Since this was only his eighth year that means he still has two years of eligibility left and what history has shown us is that once a player reached 70%he is very likely to reach 75%, especially since he has two more years you can expect Schilling to be inducted, potentially next year on an especially weak ballot.
Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are still two cases that have to do with their decisions to partake with performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) that have led them to still not be inducted into Cooperstown. Bonds only reached 60.7% this year, a 1.6% jump from last year and Roger Clemens only reached 61% this year, a 1.5% jump from last year.
These two players will always have that stigma surrounding PEDs following them and it could be enough to keep them out of the hall for good. Like Schilling, they only have two years of eligibility left and they will need to make a large jump in order to make it. However, they have been around 50-60% for the past four years so it is unlikely to see an influx in voting for these two.
Scott Rolen was also an interesting case because when he started out on the ballot, he only had 10.2% of the vote, over the past two years he has jumped to 35.2%, if this trend can keep up then he should be on pace to be inducted eventually.
Now that Larry Walker is inducted, the Coors Field stigma may have been broken a little and it will be interesting to see what happens with Todd Helton. Helton is only on his second year and jumped from 16.5% to 29.2%. It will be interesting to see what happens with Helton over the next couple years with Walker now being in, but we can only wait.
Omar Vizquel is one of the best defensive players the game has ever seen, and he looks like he is well in the way to making it to Cooperstown. In his first ballot he had 37% of the vote, now in his third year he is at 52.6%, with a trend like this he should make it before he stops being eligible.
Catcher Ted Simmons and the former players’ union head Marvin Miller were also selected to be inducted as part of the committees.
The 2020 Hall of Fame voting was a good one and has placed to all-time greats into the hall of fame, rightfully so, now we have to wait until 2021 to see if any other players will be inducted in a particularly weak ballot.