Yahoo! SportsTalk Live: Jeff Passan previews Wednesday’s Hall of Fame vote

Wednesday is the big day for the 2014 inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame. No one made the cut last year, but there are locks this time around (read: Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas), not to mention candidates from last year who could sneak in this time around (Mike Piazza).

We’ve seen Bill Deane’s projection of Greg Maddux and no one else. We’ve been watching Repoz’s Gizmo tracking the public ballots. Now comes The Hardball Times’ Chris Jaffe, who each year projects the exact percentage of the vote each candidate gets. He’s pretty good at it. He’s made 96 individual candidate predictions since he started doing this and he has been within five percentage points 79 times. His margin for error is 3.5 percent.

This year he thinks four guys are getting above 75 percent — Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Frank Thomas and Craig Biggio. Biggio is only at 76% though, so he’s within Jaffe’s margin of error.

More than just the predictions, however, I think Jaffe’s column is interesting for the conversation of the factors which go into vote totals, ranging from the overall strength of the ballot to dynamics connected with how long each guy has been on the ballot and late-eligibility surges and whatnot. Good stuff.

- NBC Sports, HardballTalk