In his first time on the Hall of Fame ballot, Vladimir Guerrero is (mostly) getting the love he deserves

Perhaps it’s my inner Angels fan talking, or maybe it’s my unrepentant love for all things Vladimir Guerrero, but whenever the discussion of Vlad’s Hall of Fame case has come up over the past few years, I’ve always imagined him to be a sure thing. Again, I may be biased, but Guerrero’s inclusion in Cooperstown, in my opinion, is as much of a no brainer as you can get.

But this is the Hall of Fame we’re talking about here, and it’s inductees are voted in by a diverse group of baseball writers that have never been immune from bad ballots and takes on the game that range from stodgy to weird to just plain old wrong. Now, there are also a lot of bright, even keeled and open-minded voters who do their darndest to cancel out their ill informed brethren. But the point remains the same: when it comes to HOF ballots and who gets in/who gets left out, anything can happen.

That’s why I’m pretty surprised that Vladimir Guerrero is doing so well at this point in the voting process; it seems that baseball writers, for the most part, are completely on board with the insanely talented and entertaining force of nature that Vlad represented.

Going off of Ryan Thibodaux’s invaluable BBHOF ballot tracker, which he tirelessly compiles every year for us baseball fans, it’s looking like Vlad is going to get into the Hall of Fame on his first try, and rightfully so. As of this writing, there are 174 ballots entered into the tracker, 169 public and five anonymous. Guerrero currently has 131 public+anonymous votes tallied, which means he’s showing up on a little over 75% of all the ballots we know about. That’s pretty good!

Of all the ballots in the tracker, Vlad’s 131 votes put him 4th highest, just behind Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines and Ivan Rodriguez. Now, there are still plenty of ballots out there that we don’t know about, so I don’t want to count my HOF chickens before they’ve hatched, but right now his chances are better than decent, and that’s all that you can really ask for.

He’s shown up on 75% of the ballots that have been entered into the tracker so far (at time of writing, there were 169 public and five anonymous), and if he shows up on 75% of the remaining ballots ( approximately 261) , then we’ve got ourselves a Hall of Famer Vlad Guerrero, and then all that’s left is bitterly fighting over which hat he’ll wear when inducted.

Here’s some extra bonus fun you can have with the ballot tracker: finding the writers who didn’t vote for Vladimir Guerrero, and shaming them. Okay, maybe I’m not going to go on a public tirade against any of these guys, but c’mon...it’s VLAD friggin’ GUERRERO!

You’ve got guys like Marcos Breton, Jaime Aron and Scott Bordow, who barely seem to cover baseball these days, and under some new BBWAA rules, they may be losing their vote soon. There are the AM radio dinosaurs like Pat Caputo and John Canzano. There’s John Fay, who should lose his voting privileges just for having such a crappy, pixelated Twitter profile pic.

But here are my favorite BBWAA voters who didn’t vote for Vlad Guerrero: Art Martone, Tony Massarotti, Bob Hohler, Nick Cafardo, Jimmy Golen and Michael Silverman. Why, you ask? These are all Boston guys. Go figure.