:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70341435/1345597221.0.jpg)
Good morning, baseball fans! And Happy New Year! I, for one, am glad 2021 is in the rear view mirror. Though the bastard didn’t have to take Betty White with him, dang it. But I digress.
It’s kind of hard to get too excited about a new year and thus a new baseball season when there is still a never-ending lockout threatening said season’s very existence. So let’s talk about some other uncertain things!
Like San Francisco Giants legend Barry Bonds’ chances at making it into the Hall of Fame on his tenth and final attempt. Ballots were due by December 31st, so we’re starting to get a better picture of what his chances are looking like.
According to Ryan Thibodaux’s vote tracker, early votes have favored Bonds, who currently has the second highest number of votes (behind David Ortiz) and is currently on 80.2% of the ballots received thus far. But only 30.9% of the ballots are known at this point.
As a reminder, players need 75% of the vote or more, which equals 294 total votes. Bonds currently has 97, and needs 197 more in order to reach that threshold. So he’ll need to average pretty much 72% of the remaining ballots.
In my perspective, that’s still unlikely, despite how high his vote percentage has been thus far. Per a post from Taylor Wirth of NBC Sports Bay Area, Bonds’ early favorability is likely due to the fact that younger voters tend to send their ballots in early and are more favorable towards Bonds in general.
There could still possibly be a bump due to it being his final year on the ballot, but it would need to be quite sizable over his 2021 numbers, in which his final vote percentage was only 61.8%. To me, that seems unlikely, but I’m going to stay optimistic anyway.
We’ll be keeping an eye on the numbers leading up to the final announcement on January 25th.
Old, random MCC article for you to read
Willie McCovey pardoned by President Obama (January 17th, 2017 - Grant Brisbee)
How many days has it been since the owners locked out the players?
It has been 34 extremely dull days since the owners started this unnecessary lockout.