Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.

—Marilyn "Pete" Monroe

Yesterday, Major League Baseball released the 2005 Hall of Fame baseball writers' ballot. The obvious choice on this year's ballot is first timer Wade Boggs, a certain first-ballot inductee. With just 27 players on the ballot, 12 first-timers, this is one of the smallest pools ever presented to the writers. Perhaps it will simplify the vote to such a degree that one or two more inductees will be culled from the bubble candidates—can I get a Ryne Sandberg, brothers and sisters?

I would like to take a look at the writers' ballot as I did last year and with a little help from a study on the Hall elections that I did last offseason. First, here is the ballot with some pertinent data for each player:

They did a decent job of selecting the best candidates from this year's newly eligible players. Of the first-timers with at least 122 career Win Shares Jeff Blauser (154) and
Brian McRae (132) were the only ones overlooked.

Now, let's run the candidates through their paces. Here is a comparison using Bill James's Hall of Fame criteria. Also, I threw in Blauser, McRae, and the other overlooked newly eligibles with at least 100 Win Shares:

Next, let's compare the players to their similar players from Baseball-Reference.com. How many of the similar players who were eligible for the Hall are actually in? We'll also throw in career Win Shares. Using the data from my Hall study last season, we know that 337 Win Shares is the Hall average. Finally, from the six criteria in both tables, we'll rate the candidates based on the percentage of those tests that each candidate passed:

Boggs and Blyleven got the highest marks passing five of six tests. Dawson, Morris, Murphy, and Rice all passed at least half of them. Besides Boggs, Strawberry is the only new candidate who passes at least one test.

All of this leads me to my final assessment. As a point of reference, I have included the voting percentage for each candidate over the last three years and the all-time high for each:

There's one more thing that bodes well for this year's class. As I mentioned previously, this is one of the smallest ballots of all time. Let's take a look at how the smaller pools have faired in the past. Here are the ten smallest:

That's an average of 6.81% inducted in these classes as compared to 2.85% as an overall average, or about three times the average. Of the ten years in which the writers failed to select a single player, none had fewer than 35 men on the ballot and just one had fewer than 47. Also, of the 14 seasons in which the writers selected at least 6% of the available candidates, eight were from ballots of 33 or fewer.

So maybe this is the year that the writers start to whittle down the list of those in baseball's purgatory, the players who never amass enough votes to gain election but earn enough to remain on the ballot year after year. I'm hoping that writers feel Sandberg has completed his penance for not playing the bulk of his career during the offensive surge of the last eleven or so seasons. Maybe they will take Sandberg and spot him a buddy, perhaps Bruce Sutter. Dare I dream that Blyleven even has a shot? No, I daren't.

Anyway, of the new candidates, I doubt that more than one or two will remain on the ballot next year. I don't think that a small class will help the likes of Steinbach and Montgomery.

Just a few more Hall-related items: Let's take a look at last year's candidate pool and review my predictions for each. First the pertinent criteria as in the lists above:

Now, the predictions and the actual results:

I did get Eckersley and Molitor right and still may be right about Sandberg. The one thing that surprises me is that I predicted a few more of the new candidates in 2004 would at least stick around on the ballot, but none did. Maybe that's why I'm being so hard on this year's new guys.

Finally, here are the career Win Shares leaders for those players not already in the Hall of Fame, including active and not-yet-Hall-eligible players. I have included all players with at least 250 career Win Shares plus those active players with at least 200. It's a long list, but you can suffer through it: