Jaffe vs. the BBWAA

Our own Chris Jaffe did a fine job of predicting the Hall of Fame results, correctly forecasting that Rickey Henderson and Jim Rice would make it, and Andre Dawson and Bert Blyleven would fall short. I’m sure he’ll brag about this himself, but here’s a close look at his predictions vs. the actual voting:

Player         Actual  Jaffe   Diff
Rickey!          95%    99%    -4%
Jim Rice         76%    85%    -9%
Andre Dawson     67%    71%    -4%
Bert Blyleven    63%    69%    -6%
Lee Smith        45%    47%    -3%
Jack Morris      44%    45%    -1%
Tommy John       32%    33%    -1%
Tim Raines       23%    19%     4%
Mark McGwire     22%    23%    -1%
Alan Trammell    17%    21%    -4%
Dave Parker      15%    16%    -1%
Don Mattingley   12%    17%    -5%
Dale Murphy      12%    15%    -4%
Harold Baines     6%     5%     1%
Mark Grace        4%     4%     0%

As you can see, the BBWAA writers were more choosy than Chris thought they would be. In particular, Rice barely made it past the 75% qualifying hurdle. One other interesting point: Tim Raines didn’t decline as much as Chris thought he would.

That’s really nitpicking, though. Kudos to Chris for his predictions. Let’s just skip the actual voting next time.