David Ortiz elected to Baseball Hall of Fame

Throughout the ballot reveals that colored the Baseball Hall of Fame voting, one of the biggest questions was whether or not anyone would get into the Hall this year. The guy with the best chance, designated hitter David Ortiz, had some question marks regarding whether or not voters would punish him for being a DH and/or some amount of PED controversy. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens (among others) were in their last year on the ballot and while their numbers rank among the best all time, their support plateaued as a healthy minority of the voters were convinced that both they used performance enhancing drugs AND they should be kept out as a result.

There were other worthy candidates including Curt Schilling, Scott Rolen, Andruw Jones, etc....but all of those appeared to be longshot bids from the start. Well, the votes have been counted and one player did, in fact, gain entrance to Cooperstown.

Despite some headwinds to his candidacy, David Ortiz is now a Hall of Famer. The career .286/.380/.552 hitter with 541 homers and some of the bigger moments in Red Sox history received 11 more votes than was required to get in. As Jeff Passan notes below, Bonds, Clemens, Schilling, and others now fall off the ballot and will head to the Today’s Era Committee for consideration this fall.

Clemens and Bonds (as well as Schilling for that matter) will be a very interesting test case for the Today’s Era committee as players with both their stature and their level of controversy haven’t been on their ballots yet. It will be very interesting to see if they end up putting any players in this fall.