Former #SFGiants on 2014 BBWAA Hall of Fame Ballot

For some, this is an exciting time. For others, this is the AL MVP debate all over again. There are plenty of good people on social media fighting the battle against tired narratives and instead look to numbers to justify a player’s place in the Hall of Fame. We restart this conversation of HOF-ness since the ballot is going to be released at 11:00AM PST today.

This isn’t a post about pitchers that believe they pitched to the score, about players who maybe used steroids, or about is it necessary for HOF-inductees to have had a position on the diamond to be enshrined into Cooperstown, this is just about the Giants, or former Giants. We will be having eight former San Francisco Giants gracing the ballot for the first time and one guy you may have heard of on the ballot for the second time:

For those unfamiliar with the categories here’s a link to the page with all the numbers on it, and you can put your cursor over the category to see what everything means. Just in case you don’t want to click on the link, to sum up the columns, HOFm is a Bill James HOF monitor where above “100” is a likely HOF player. HOFs on the other hand, is measured on a 1-100 scale where “50” is the average HOF player. Yrs of course, is how many years the player played. WAR is the Baseball Reference wins above replacement a player accumulated in their playing career, while WAR7 is the WAR of a player’s “peak years” of performance, not necessarily being seven years in a row. JAWS is Jay Jaffe’s baby and is used to compare HOF to others at their respective positions. Jpos is the average JAWS rating for the already inducted HOF that are inducted that played that position. These are the numbers people like me will be looking at when we’re talking Hall of Fame-caliber players, and for me these will be relevant because there are plenty of players still eligible for the ballot that I don’t remember watching for a single game while I was growing up.

Apr 6, 2013; San Francisco, CA, USA; San Francisco Giants former player

speaks during the MVP ceremonies at AT

There are only two Giants that you could say stand a legitimate chance at being voted in, that being Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent, two humble, peaceful, certainly not spotlight-seeking players the Giants had on their rosters. I expect both players to get voted in by the BBWAA, it’s just a matter of when. The naive side of me says Bonds can’t be kept out unless he goes and does something truly awful (but if it’s a DUI it won’t count, so let’s be mindful of that), Barry will get his time to speak. Kent may not get in this year just because you have so many players you can put on your ballot. Should you need a refresher on the voting procedures, Baseball Ref has you covered:

"General Summary: Each voting cycle, qualified members of the BBWAA name no more than 10 eligible players whom they consider worthy of Hall of Fame honors. To be enshrined, a player must be named on at least 75% of the voters’ ballots. Currently, players are removed from the ballot if they are named on fewer than 5% of ballots or have been on the ballot 15 times without election."

Moises Alou may be an interesting case, but he’s going to need the bar lowered to really get the attention of the fans in later years. If he makes it to Year 11 on the ballot, I wonder if it’ll be due to there being an unlimited number of selections on the ballot. While I have fonder memories for guys like Ray Durham, Shawn Estes, Matt Morris, and especially the homie J.T. Snow, I know they’re not getting in, and they may all be one-and-done with Durham standing the best chance at lasting more than one year.

So there you have it, your San Francisco Giants on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot. Do you think any former Giant gets in this year? Disagree with my Bonds prediction? The thoughts on Moises “pee on your hands” Alou? Let me know if the comments section below!