2011 Baseball Hall Of Fame Voting: Results From The Public Ballots

We’re about an hour away from finding out the results of the 2011 Baseball Hall of Fame voting. It’s expected that the 539 voting members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America will elect both Roberto Alomar and Bert Blyleven while failing to do so for others like Barry Larkin and Jeff Bagwell, but until 2pm ET rolls around, we can’t know for sure.

But we can get an idea, based on the voting ballots that have been made public by some of the writers. Several members of the BBWAA have written about the guys they’re voting for and the guys they’re not in print, online, or on Twitter, and this handy spreadsheet keeps track of just about all of them.

According to the spreadsheet, 111 ballots - 21% of the total - have been made public. This is a fairly strong sample size, and so it is with interest that we may peruse the results.

The first thing we notice is that, indeed, Alomar and Blyleven have done well, with Alomar skyrocketing to better than 90% approval. Based simply on the numbers in the spreadsheet, each of these guys should get elected.

In third place, we see Barry Larkin, who has collected 75 public votes, or 68%. He came in at 52% a year ago, so early indications are that he’ll take a step forward in 2011. After Larkin come Jack Morris, Tim Raines, Lee Smith, and Jeff Bagwell, all of whom have scored between 40-50% public support. That’s less encouraging for Morris and Smith, and more encouraging for Bagwell and Raines.

The spreadsheet can’t be considered an accurate predictor of the results, since one figures that public ballots are more likely to come from younger writers, who may not be representative of the whole BBWAA. But there’s definitely going to be a strong correlation between what we see now and what we see at 2pm ET, so give this sheet a look.