There’s still a year to go before MLB will announce the 2017 Baseball Hall of Fame class, but it wouldn’t be the worst idea for Tim Raines, Jeff Bagwell, Trevor Hoffman and Vladimir Guerrero to start looking into travel arrangements in upstate New York.
After we dug through the numbers—both advanced and otherwise—and examined the recent voting trends, those are the four former big leaguers who have the best odds of making it to the Hall in 2017.
The field also includes the likes of Barry Bonds and Manny Ramirez, both of whom have the numbers to cruise into Cooperstown but have been clouded by links to performance-enhancing drugs.
While the odds are still against those sluggers, the results from the 2016 vote suggest that the landscape could soon change in a big way.