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| Should-Be Hall Of Famer Curt Schilling |
When Red Sox legend
Curt Schilling stated last year that his politics were impacting his Hall Of Fame chances, he was pilloried. He later back-tracked on the comments he made to WEEI. However,
a new analysis of public voting indicates that his Republican political views are almost certainly hurting his chances.
Ryan Thibodaux has been tracking the
publicly available votes for several years—and has been uncannily accurate in his predictions of who will actually end up in each year's induction class. Thibodaux has noticed an interesting trend. When you track the public votes of specific writers year-by-year, just one player loses significant votes: Schilling—
who lost seven between 2015 and 2016. By comparison,
Jeff Bagwell,
Tim Raines and
Mike Piazza lost
no tracked votes,
Roger Clemens lost one and
Mike Mussina lost two. Stated Thibodaux:
"Essentially, nobody is losing any significant number of voters. Except for him." While his overall percentage will probably go up from last year, he will likely fall short again of the 75% threshold. It might be an "inconvenient truth", but it's pretty clear that the 'wrong' politics can kill your quest for the Hall of Fame. What a shame.
