by TUN

Hi everybody, it’s your favorite person, me, TUN. I’d like to talk about something called strategic voting.

You see, in the real world, the Baseball Hall of Fame is decided by something called the Baseball Writer’s Association of America, or BBWAA for short. It’s essentially a collection of journalists who, one way or another, have obtained the right to vote on who does and doesn’t make the hall of fame. These writers have what you might call a “spotty” track record when it comes to making the right decisions, and often vote in very strange ways. There’s a rather famous example of a writer saying that they would vote for Derek Jeter if he were on the ballot, only to then realize that Jeter had in fact already been inducted, and they had not voted for him.

However, one thing that I think the BBWAA sometimes does right is Voting strategically. That is, rather than simply voting for your 10 favorite players on the ballot, voting with a goal in mind.

Time for some brutal honesty: so far, we haven’t been very good at getting players inducted. In two ballots, we’ve voted in just 3 players. Two of them, Pitching Machine and Jaylen Hotdogfingers, are among the most well known players in Blaseball history. One of them, Jaxon Buckley, is arguably the greatest hitter in the history of the game, and he only barely made it in with 66% of the vote. It would be one thing if there weren’t a lot of other deserving players on the ballot yet, but there are several no-doubters. You shouldn’t have to be the best hitter ever or the most famous player ever in order to make the hall. This problem will only be exacerbated as the hall starts to churn through players at a faster rate.

Suffice it to say, if we keep voting like this, we aren’t going to get many players inducted. Intrinsically speaking, that’s not the end of the world, there are valid reasons to want a Small Hall. But personally, I think a Big Hall is way more fun, and if you’ll hear me out, I think I can convince you too.

• Big hall means more hall of famers: To me, the whole point of this project is to honor our beloved players. Doesn’t it make sense, then, to want to honor as many of them as possible?
• Big hall is more fun: This hall of fame project has over 400 players to go through, meaning that we’ll be at this for months. Which is more fun: inducting 20 players, or inducting 100? A big hall ensures that we have a lot more things to get excited over while we do this.
• Big hall is better for small teams: A hall of fame decided by popular vote is always going to favor teams with more fans. However, if the hall is bigger, small teams will have an easier time getting their legends in. We avoid a situation where we only induct players from a few teams, and get a hall of fame that more appropriately honors players from all our teams.
• Big hall means more turnover: I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to be voting for the same players week in and week out. I want lots of new names to talk about. Inducting more players means that we get more new players in to replace them on the ballot.

Maybe you agree with me, maybe you don’t. If you don’t, I encourage you to disregard what I say and vote as you please. However, if you’re with me on this, then you really should consider voting strategically to get players into the hall.

If you’re like me, and you want to see players get in, here’s what you should do:

1. Use all 10 of your votes. There’s no reason not to, especially right now when there are definitely at least 10 deserving players. While a majority of ballots are 10 vote ballots, we’re leaving a lot of votes on the table. Last week we had 526 ballots, meaning that there was a maximum of 5260 possible votes (10 per ballot). Of those possible votes, 4229 were cast, about 80% of the maximum. In other words, 1031 votes, over 100 people’s worth, were left unused. Because players are inducted based off a % of ballots, rather than a % of votes, large quantities of unused votes make it very hard for any player to get in. It’s impossible to avoid having at least some unused votes, but if we want a big hall, we need to get those numbers up. Use all 10.
2. Don’t overlook a “sure thing”. Following on that last point, there’s no such thing as a “sure thing”. The Blaseball community is a group of people with diverse interests and very different experiences with the game itself, and it’s hard to get a group like that to agree on anything. No matter how much of a no-doubter you think a player is, they’re still going to struggle to get in. Don’t avoid voting for a player just because you think they’ll get in anyway. They need your vote more than anyone.
3. Don’t vote just to keep a player on the ballot. If a player is in danger of falling off the ballot in week 1 or 2, odds are that they aren’t going to make it into the hall, even if they survive the week. There is no difference between being eliminated in week 1 and being eliminated in week 5. While it may feel good to see your fave make it to the next week, it’s more impactful to vote for a player with a better shot of making it in.
4. Vote for players with >40% of the previous week’s vote. This is the real meat of the strategy. If a player is already receiving more than 40% of the vote, that means that they have a real shot of getting in. If you want players to get in, you should consolidate your votes to the players with the best chance of making it, those being the players who already have some level of widespread support. Odds are that if a player is receiving this level of support, they’re a worthy candidate. Last week we had 5 players who got at least 40% of the vote and didn’t make it in: Jolene Willowtree, Knight Triumphant, Goodwin Morin, Paula Turnip, and Brock Forbes. All 5 are, by virtue of their statistics and their stories as players, obvious hall of famers (although you should vote for Summers Preston too).

I want to be clear, I’m not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t vote for your fave. Nor am I saying that you shouldn’t campaign for a player with a low vote total. Part of the fun of this project is that people get to learn about players they’d never heard of before. All ballots are valid, there’s no such thing as a “wasted” vote, and we shouldn’t get into the business of policing people’s ballots.

However, if you want the hall to be big, like I do, your primary goal should be to figure out which players have the best chance of making it in, and vote for them first and foremost. When you submit a ballot, you aren’t just voting for certain players, you’re voting for a certain kind of hall. If you want the hall to be a certain way, then you need to vote in a certain way.

Going forward, I’ll be taking things like this into account when writing my voting guides. I should have Week 3’s up in a few days. Merci beaucoup!