The "True" Season 74 HOF Ballot

Those of you on Discord, especially anyone who has seen the #hall-of-fame-voting channel, may know that in a couple of my other worlds I've recently published blog posts about what the "true" HOF ballot will be for the upcoming season based on several objective criteria: those who got elected and those who would have failed to make the cut to continue on the ballot in the subsequent season using the MLB thresholds. The players left in the middle are the ones that would still be on the ballot next year.

In the other worlds that I've done this exercise, the list of players left in the middle has been pretty short, which will hopefully help narrow the focus for voting this season. The two big changes that have been requested/suggested on the HOF Discord are to implement the cut line mentioned above and change the requirement for election from 17 votes (over 50% of 32 owners) to 50%+ of people who cast ballots that year. Given the spirited discussion that we just had last year, I figured that in lieu of a S74 HOF Committee post, I'd conduct that thought experiment here and give us a short list to work with (should you choose to accept.) 

The first step in this process is to figure out how many people cast ballots last season. To do that, we need to reference last season's results:

 

In total, there are 109 votes represented above...which works out to 21.8 five-vote ballots, meaning 22 people participated and one person only used four of their votes. But Romero got 24 votes, so that means at least 24 people voted, and that's the denominator we will work with going forward for this thought experiment. That means that anyone getting 12+ votes this year would have been elected this season. In practical terms: Ashby and Almadova would also be Hall of Famers right now. 

Now we need to consider the other side of the coin: MLB's threshold is that a player needs to appear on 5% of ballots. In our case, we had 24 voters so 24 voters * 5% = 1.2 votes (rounded up to 2) are necessary to stay on the ballot next season. 

What does that mean for the "true ballot", then? With Romero, Garza, Ashby and Almadova all enshrined and the seven one-vote-getters off the ballot the holdovers are the following players: 

1. JJ Jensen
2. Miguel Fernandez
3. David Oropesa
4. Willie Espinosa
5. Dellin Santana
6. Kelly Speizio

Given all that information, here's how it influences my votes for Season 74: My first move was to vote for both Ashby and Almadova since they cleared the hurdle mentioned above and really should be Stickball HOF'ers already. Sadly, Almadova is not even on the ballot this season so that means that I am only able to vote for Ashby before moving to the next step...which is to evaluate the HOF case of those six players on the "True Ballot" above: 

1. JJ Jensen: 158 HOF Monitor Score = "Should Be Inner Circle HOF" --> Vote #2
2. Miguel Fernandez: 87.5 HOF Monitor Score = "Hall of Very Good" 
3. David Oropesa: 110 HOF Monitor Score = "HOF Quality for sure" --> Vote #3
4. Willie Espinosa: 109 HOF Monitor Score = "HOF Quality for sure" --> Vote #4
5. Dellin Santana: 114 HOF Monitor Score = "HOF Quality for sure" --> Vote #5
6. Kelly Speizio: 101 HOF Monitor Score = "HOF Quality for sure" ... will need to wait for next year, but deserves to be in