Don't get too excited: it's Roberto Alomar, who as we noted last week, played a career total of 38 games for Arizona, during the wretched 2004 season. But, hey, he'll be the first man who appeared for us at all, to go into Cooperstown, even if it won't be in our cap,. Be interesting to see whose cap he does wear: he didn't spend more than five years with any team (Toronto), and his best seasons were probably in Cleveland, but he had only three with the Indians.
When the results from the 2011 Baseball Hall of Fame voting were released this morning, Alomar cruised in to Cooperstown, notching an exemplary 90% on his second ballot, to qualify easily after scoring 74% last season. The BBWAA also, finally, elected Bert Blyleven as the first Netherlands-born inductee. Last week, we also had our SnakePit ballot, and 138 people took the time to pore over the 33 nominees and give us their selections - thanks to them for that. After the jump, we'll review our results, and see how they match up with the "official" ones
Here are the percentage of "yes" votes for each candidate on both the SnakePit and BBWAA ballots, and the difference between the two numbers. "Elected" voters are in bold, and those who failed to achieve 5% in the SnakePit voting, and so will not be on our 2012 ballot, are in italics. Note that figures are rounded to the nearest percent, while rankings are in absolute numbers of votes, e.g. Blyleven got one more vote than Alomar in our balloting, so is listed first, even though both he and Alomar's number rounds to 80%.
| Name | AZSP % | BBWAA % | Diff. +/- |
| Bert Blyleven | 80% | 80% | 0% |
| Roberto Alomar | 80% | 90% | -10% |
| Barry Larkin | 56% | 62% | -6% |
| Larry Walker | 38% | 20% | +18% |
|
Edgar Martinez Jeff Bagwell |
36% | 33% 42% |
+3% -6% |
| Mark McGwire | 36% | 20% | +16% |
| Don Mattingly | 34% | 14% | -20% |
| Tim Raines | 31% | 38% | -7% |
| Alan Trammell | 30% | 24% | +6% |
| Lee Smith | 28% | 45% | -17% |
| Rafael Palmeiro | 25% | 11% | +14% |
| Fred McGriff | 20% | 18% | +2% |
| Jack Morris | 20% | 54% | -34% |
| Dale Murphy | 17% | 13% | +4% |
| Dave Parker Kevin Brown |
12% | 15% 2% |
-3% +10% |
| Tino Martinez | 12% | 1% | +11% |
| Juan Gonzalez | 10% | 5% | +5% |
| Harold Baines | 9% | 5% | +4% |
| John Franco | 9% | 5% | +4% |
| John Olerud | 7% | 1% | +6% |
| Marquia Grissom | 6% | 1% | +5% |
| Brett Boone | 5% | 0% | +5% |
| Al Leiter | 4% | 1% | +3% |
| Lenny Harris | 4% | 0% | +4% |
| Benito Santiago | 3% | 0% | +3% |
| BJ Surhoff | 2% | 0% | +2% |
| Carlos Baerga | 2% | 0% | +2% |
| Charles Johnson Raul Mondesi |
1% | 0% | +1% |
| Bobby Higginson Kirk Rueter |
0% | 0% | 0 |
The same two inductees qualified on our voting, with the same percentage voting for Blyleven, though Alomar fell short of the number obtained from the BBWAA. Most of the SnakePit numbers were generally in line with the BBWAA ones, within 10% difference or less, though our electorate do seem rather more forgiving of steroid transgressions, with both McGwire (+16%) and Palmeiro (+14%) being among the leaders in SLOHOF [that's SnakePit Love Over Hall of Fame]. However, the champion there was Larry Walker at +18%: the BBWAA clearly discounted his Denver numbers more than those polled here.
Three players reached more than -10% SLOHOF: Lee Smith (-17%), Don Mattingly (-20%), and the SnakePit collective really does not like Jack Morris, who rated a whopping 54% from the BBWAA, but only picked up a 20% approval rating from us. I'm wondering if the widespread comparisons between Morris and Blyleven had more impact on our constituency. Most appeared to point out how mediocre a pitcher Jack was over the course of his career; his best full season resulted in Morris having an ERA+ of 127, slightly worse than 2010 Gio Gonzalez. I'd be keener to hear explanation from those who voted for him than the counter-argument.
If you want more information on who in the BBWAA voted for what, this handy spreadsheet lists all the ballots which have been made public: it's more than 20%, a surprisingly high number of people prepared to go 'on the record'. That's expecially the case when there are a couple of ballots that are... well, let's just go with "interesting" - the phrase Mrs. SnakePit uses to refer to movies she's too polite to damn, probably because I picked them.
It wasn't pretty for the other three former Diamondbacks on this year's ballot, none of whom will be troubling the electorate in 2012. Lenny Harris, Raul Mondesi and Carlos Baerga all received exactly zero votes from the BBWAA, and didn't enjoy home-cooking either, with a total of nine votes between them, none of the trio reaching the 5% threshold. We'll see what happens in the 2012 class, which includes a bunch more ex-Diamondbacks: Tony Womack, Jeff Fassero (one of the least significant D-backs of all time), Tim Worrell, Terry Mulholland, Rick Helling and Felix Rodriguez. We'll see if they have any more luck. I'm not optimistic though...