The newest inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame – if any – will be announced Tuesday evening and The Post’s 10 voters have just one player – Scott Rolen — receiving more than 75 percent of the needed vote (eight or more votes out of 10). Andruw Jones came the next closest with six votes. Ex-Met and Yankee Carlos Beltran received just four and Alex Rodriguez, who won a World Series in The Bronx, manage just two.
Here’s how The Post’s writers voted:
Rolen could become just the 18th third baseman elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame, the fewest of any position.
“It stems from an original prejudice that third base is not important defensively,” John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, told the AP on Monday. “I think Brooks Robinson changed that perception. So that just as relief pitchers for the longest time were regarded as failed starters rather than as a new position in the changing game, third basemen were regarded as washouts.”
A seven-time All-Star who retired after the 2012 season, Rolen is among the top contenders on the 28-player ballot considered by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in a vote announced Tuesday night. He received just 10.2% in his first ballot appearance in 2018 and climbed to 52.9% in 2021 and 63.2% last year, when he fell 47 votes shy of the needed 75%.
The leading vote-getters are first baseman Todd Helton at 79.8%, Rolen at 79.2% and reliever Billy Wagner at 73.2%, according to Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker, which included 183 public plus anonymous ballots as of Monday afternoon among an estimated total of 396.
When David Ortiz was elected last year, his final figure of 79.8% was down from 83.1% of public ballots ahead of the announcement. Barry Bonds declined from 76.8% of public ballots before the announcement to 66% and Roger Clemens from 75.4% to 65.2%, so it is possible no one will be elected by the BBWAA for the second time in three years. This could become the first three-year span with only one player voted in by the writers since annual voting started in 1966.
Even if no players get voted in Tuesday, there will be player representation in Cooperstown this summer, as Fred McGriff was voted in by the Contemporary Era committee last month.
— With AP