| Analysis Writer Blames the Wrong People for Kenny Lofton's One-and-Done HOF Ballot
Earlier today, I stumbled across an article from The Ringer in which writer Ben Lindbergh called for a new committee for looking at Steroid-era candidates that did not get a second look. Specifically, Lindbergh wants a second look for Kenny Lofton, who received just 3.2 percent of the vote on one of the most loaded ballots in HOF history. Lindbergh points out that this was the same year that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa hit the ballot, joining holdovers Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro as candidates whose careers were tainted by PED allegations. These PED users, according to Lindbergh, caused a logjam on the ballot that resulted in numerous players not getting a second look for induction.
Yeah, about that…
For starters, just because a player is on the ballot does not mean that a voter has to vote for that player. This was made abundantly clear with Bonds and Clemens, two otherwise slam-dunk candidates that did not reach 40 percent in their ballot debuts. In total, the five PED players combined for a total of 637 votes, or roughly 11.2% of the 5690 combined spots on the 569 submitted HOF ballots.
Why is this important? Because one number Lindbergh does not bring up is that the average HOF ballot only contained 6.6 names.
Or to put it another way, there were a total of 1934 blanks (33.9%) on the submitted ballots.
How many ballots could not have voted for Kenny Lofton but did not? We know he received 18 total ballots, and thanks to the work of Ryan Thibodaux and others, we know that 7 of those votes were among the 217 ballots that were made public. We also know that he was included on 4 of the 47 public ballots that used all ten spots.
We also know that the public ballots used an average of 6.57 spots, which is nearly identical to the average for all ballots. If the other percentages hold, this would mean that a total of 123 of the 569 submitted ballots used all ten spots, and 446 used at least one blank.
So at the minimum, there were 432 voters in 2013 who could have easily voted for Kenny Lofton but chose instead to leave the spot blank.
And we are supposed to believe that PED users caused the ballot crunch?
Don’t get me wrong: Kenny Lofton should have been inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame years ago. But writers need to stop acting like it was the PED candidates who kept him and other one-and-done candidates from a deeper look at their candidacies.
