The National Baseball Hall of Fame's Class of 2024 will be announced Tuesday at 5 p.m. CT, and Mark Buehrle's quest to stay on the ballot is on the right side of 5 percent.
With nearly half of the known ballots logged in Ryan Thibodaux's tracker, Buehrle is running at 7.9 percent. That's a drop from the 10.8 percent he received last year, but with more vote-worthy players (Adrian Beltre, Joe Mauer, Chase Utley) joining the ballot than departing it, this always looked like tough sledding for Buehrle.
By Thibodaux's calculations, Buehrle only needs about 5 votes from the 180 still out there to stay above 5 percent, and while those votes could be harder to come by due to the aforementioned unfavorable math, he's fared better in the private vote than the pre-announcement public vote every single year.
| Year | Public | Final |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 8.3 | 11.0 |
| 2022 | 4.9 | 5.9 |
| 2023 | 10.2 | 10.9 |
| 2024 | 7.9 | ??? |
Staying on the ballot is a worthy goal for Buehrle and his fans, partially because the ballot is a temporary sort of Hall in and of itself, where returning for another round puts his career back in the public light for at least one more winter. Buehrle told Scott Merkin that getting any votes at all is good enough:
“No, I think there’s zero chance I’ll make it, and I don’t think I’m worthy and I [didn't do] enough in the game to be in the Hall of Fame,” Buehrle told me during our extended conversation this past Friday. “It would be awesome to get 20 votes or whatever it is I need to stay on [the ballot].
“That would be cool. But if this is the year I get 10 votes and I’m off, hell, I was on for four years, and you can’t ask for anything better.”
It's also worth staying on the ballot just in case some of the electorate changes course as starting pitchers garner less and less support.
Sam Miller is one of those voters. He didn't check Buehrle's box last year, which was the first time he submitted a ballot, but he chose to back Buehrle this time around due to the position's murky present and future.
I left Mark Buehrle off last year. I put him on this year. I don’t feel strongly that he should be in the Hall of Fame—he’s got Andy Pettitte’s career but without Pettitte’s huge postseason resume, which is a big part of the Pettitte case. I do feel strongly that the Hall of Fame ballot should have more than four starting pitchers on it, for goodness sakes, which is what we had this year thanks to the lost generation of pitchers who were born in the 1970s. Two of those four—Bartolo Colón and James Shields—will likely fall off the ballot after one try, and best as I can tell only two of the 15 most likely additions to next year’s ballot will be pitchers. This will also be the fifth year in a row without a starting pitcher being elected. That’s all wild, to me. Buehrle is my ninth selection, if only to keep him on the ballot.
As I've said before, there are going to be a bunch of Billy Wagners down the line, but there aren't going to be many Buehrles. That doesn't mean that Buehrle should be in the Hall of Fame, but it's an argument for prolonging his eligibility in the event that it'd receive a much different look on an updated scale.
Regarding the rest of the class, here are the percentages of the candidates who have received votes:
- Adrian Beltré - 99.0%
- Joe Mauer - 83.2%
- Todd Helton - 82.2%
- Billy Wagner - 78.5%
- Gary Sheffield - 74.3%
- Andruw Jones - 70.7%
- Carlos Beltrán - 66.5%
- Chase Utley - 41.4%
- Alex Rodríguez - 39.3%
- Manny Ramírez - 35.1%
- Bobby Abreu - 19.4%
- Andy Pettitte - 15.2%
- Jimmy Rollins - 15.2%
- Omar Vizquel - 10.5%
- Mark Buehrle - 7.9%
- Francisco Rodríguez - 6.8%
- David Wright - 6.8%
- Torii Hunter - 4.7%
- Jose Bautista - 1.6%
- Victor Martinez - 1.0%
- Bartolo Colón - 0.5%
- Matt Holliday - 0.5%
Everybody's support feels more or less in line with where they should be except Mauer. I figured it would take a few cycles to hash out whether he caught long enough to make up for the fact that he was a first baseman who topped out at 11 homers afterward. We'll have to see what his private ballot support looks like, since this is his first year on the ballot.
Wagner is the other one to watch, because he's typically run way higher in public ballots than private ballots, so he could be in for another near-miss. The elections (or lack thereof) for Mauer and Wagner will have an impact on what kind of wiggle room Buehrle has next year, assuming Buehrle makes it there himself.
