The HOF's post-results ballot release happened today, and
the tracker has them. 84% of total ballots are now known (and the Jeter-dropper is not among them, FYI).
Of interest to me are the final numbers for "Votes per public ballot" (both pre- and post-results) over the tracked years:
2013: 6.57 (38% of ballots known)
2014: 8.72 (53%)
2015: 8.73 (60%)
2016: 8.23 (71%)
2017: 8.43 (71%)
2018: 8.74 (75%)
2019: 8.25 (84%)
2020:
6.80 (84%)
That's a
huge dropoff, albeit not unprecedented (see 2013). That right there is the data telling you "the logjam is cleared". It's also telling you that there's great and rising obstinacy over the standards, and that voters are raising those standards.
I wonder somewhat if the Hall will start to try and shift things around the edges to ensure they have a few inductees each year, because rising standards help nobody - not the Hall itself, not the game and its publicity, just the old-timers who want to pull up the ladder after them and feel superior. That shifting could look like:
- Tighter eligibility standards on how recently or thoroughly you covered the game, calculated to push off the voter rolls a disproportionate number of remaining old cranks
- More-liberal eligibility standards on what orgs get accredited to have their writers become voters, particularly top bloggers and the like, who are more likely to be younger and more engaged in the process
- Clarification of election standards, particularly to suggest that (e.g.) performance on the field and representation of the game off of it during playing days are the main criteria, and/or that PED use in the PED era is not a mortal sin when it comes to telling baseball's story, just like other forms of cheating were not in prior eras. There's a bright line for the Commissioner's Ineligible List and
that's it.
- Even considering lifting the 10-vote limit, although that does not appear to have really prevented anyone in particular from getting in (e.g., Schilling only would have picked up 1-2 more votes this year without it), though some might have gotten in earlier