Baseball's Hall of Fame class could be the biggest in more than a decade

Mike Oz
Chipper Jones, Jim Thome and Vladimir Guerrero are among the names who should be heading to Cooperstown this year. (AP)
Chipper Jones, Jim Thome and Vladimir Guerrero are among the names who should be heading to Cooperstown this year. (AP)

We’re closing in on one of the most contentious days on the baseball calendar — Hall of Fame results day. It’s coming Jan. 24 and, based on the polling data, we could be in for one of the biggest classes in more than a decade.

The current class in front of the Baseball Writers Association of America has a few sure things in first-timers Chipper Jones and Jim Thome, plus Vladimir Guerrero, who came close last year and should have no problem getting voted in this time. A Hall of Fame veterans committee elected two players in December — Jack Morris and Alan Trammell. That’s five players already.

When you add to that the data from ballots that have already been made public, we could see a Hall of Fame class that’s as big as seven players. The last time that many players were inducted into Cooperstown at once was 2006 and that’s because 17 players from the Negro League were immortalized. Before that, 1999 was the last time we saw seven players. We saw classes of six in 2014 and 2008.

Twitter and the Internet’s information age has opened up an entire lane for Hall of Fame data trackers and predictors, and they’ve been busy in recent weeks as many voters have made their ballots public.

The Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker by Ryan Thibodaux, Anthony Calamis, Adam Dore and Jon Becker is an invaluable resource this time of year. It tracks every ballot made public by BBWAA voters. The numbers inevitably go down once the final announcement is made, as many of the voters who don’t go public are often stingier. But as of Tuesday, with about 44 percent of ballots in, this tracker has five players above the magic 75-percent threshold, with Edgar Martinez and Trevor Hoffman added to the sure things:

Since these numbers will go down, it’s not completely certain that Martinez and Hoffman will beat the 75 percent mark, which is where the Hall of Fame projectors come into play. Nathaniel Rakich and Scott Lindholm each have their own method of projecting the results at 100 percent of the ballots.

Their most recent projections, both released Monday, have a one player difference: Hoffman.

If the Baseball Writers Association of America were to elect five players this year — Chipper, Thome, Vlad, Edgar and Hoffman — that would almost be unprecedented. Four players were elected by the BBWAA in 2015, 1955 and 1947. But the only other time five players were voted in by the writers was 1936, which is the very first Hall of Fame class that featured Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson.

If five are elected — with seven players total entering Cooperstown when you add Morris and Trammell — this could be a truly historic Hall of Fame class.

More MLB coverage from Yahoo Sports:

– – – – – –

Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!