Monday, January 12, 2009

Rice and Henderson In: Quick Reaction to 2009 HOF Voting


The Baseball Hall of Fame released the results of their 2009 balloting moments ago, and as I predicted, the writers have selected Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice for induction later this summer.

This was the first time that I've published predictions for the actual vote totals. A quick look at the results shows that most of those projections for the vote totals were pretty close. My forecast for 16 of 23 players was within 3 percentage points. Here's a quick peak at the results, with the actual results first and my projections second.

Actual Lahman Player
95 95 Rickey Henderson *
76 77 Jim Rice
67 62 Andre Dawson
63 60 Bert Blyleven
45 46 Lee Smith
44 41 Jack Morris
32 38 Tommy John
23 29 Tim Raines
22 27 Mark McGwire
17 19 Alan Trammell
12 15 Don Mattingly
15 14 Dave Parker
4 12 Mark Grace *
12 11 Dale Murphy
4 9 David Cone *
6 7 Harold Baines
1 5 Mo Vaughn *
1 4 Matt Williams *
0 3 Jesse Orosco *
0 3 Greg Vaughn *
0 2 Ron Gant *
0 2 Jay Bell *
0 1 Dan Plesac *
It's heartening to see that my projections were a little low for the guys like Dawson and Blyleven, and that (as I expected) my estimate for Mark Grace was way too high. After I've had a chance to digest the data, I'll make another post and talk about why I think some of my totals were off.