Your Oscar Precedents Are Worthless—or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

I said this last year, but it's even more true now: This is the most unpredictable Oscar season in memory. After Richard Linklater's 12-year epic Boyhood swept critics' awards at the beginning of the season, it looked safely on its way to Oscar gold. But Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman suddenly scored back-to-back-to-back wins with three critical guilds—the same industry professionals who cast ballots for the Oscars. As a result, Best Picture is now a two-horse race without a favorite.

The fascinating thing about the race is that, no matter which film wins, it will break Oscar precedent in a big way. If Birdman wins, it will become the first Best Picture since Ordinary People at the 1981 ceremony not to receive a nomination for Best Film Editing; the correlation between these two categories has been one of the most ironclad pieces of Oscar wisdom in the 30 years since. If Boyhood holds on, though, it will be the first time a Best Picture winner lost all three of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award, the Producers Guild of America (PGA) Award, and the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award since Braveheart at the 1996 ceremony—and that was back when the award season was much longer and put over a month of distance between the guild awards and the Oscars.

My predictions/wild guesses for this year's awards will be coming soon, but for now I just want to warn anyone who thinks that their knowledge of Oscar precedent or precursors can save them in this volatile year. Comparing the 2015 Oscar season to the 1995, 2005, or even 2013 Oscar season is like comparing apples to oranges. This is because the Academy is continually reassessing how it votes. Voting for categories like Best Foreign Language Film and Best Documentary Feature have been opened up to the entire Academy where they had previously been restricted to the few who attended select screenings. The number of Best Picture nominees has changed, from five to 10 to a flexible number (this year there are eight). Most importantly, the Academy changed the method of Best Picture balloting in 2009 to instant-runoff voting, rather than the first-past-the-post system that allowed films to win without majority support.

If the underlying rules have changed, can we even consider it the same election as pre-2009? We can't expect precedent to hold up if the Academy doesn't even count votes the same way it has in the past. It explains why, so quickly, the old rules of Oscarology have broken down—Argo winning Best Picture of 2012 without a Best Director nomination, for instance. And when you introduce precursor awards into the equation, the opportunity for error doubles: the Oscars have changed their rules, and the precursors have too. Before 2012, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) only allowed practitioners of a specific craft to vote on that craft's award. The PGA switched to a preferential ballot for its version of Best Picture when the Oscars did, but they have stuck with 10 nominees rather than the Academy's flexible total. The SAG merged with another union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, in 2012, adding thousands of non-film voters to its electorate. The DGA's five nominees and standard vote-counting procedure once matched the Oscars exactly but now feel obsolete. Clearly, a guild or other group that may once have been a great barometer for the Academy may now reflect totally different realities, and it's all because of the rules of the election.

Rather than relying on historical accuracy, then, it may be most helpful to simply look at each precursor award side by side with the Oscars and see how much they have in common, here and now in 2015. The two main questions to ask are (1) how similar are the voting processes and (2) how much do the electorates overlap? In theory, if two elections poll the same electorates in the same way, the results will line up exactly. Our luck will never be anywhere near that good, but here's how the major precursors stack up:

SAG

% of Academy in the SAG: 20.0% (~1,200 out of ~6,000)
% of SAG in the Academy: 1.1% (~1,200 out of ~110,000)
Voting Process: Traditional, first-past-the-post winner chosen from five nominees. The award is not for best film, but rather Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture—often referred to as "best ensemble."
Commentary: The SAG's top award has historically disagreed with Best Picture more often than they've agreed, and that's not surprising looking at the election specs. Although a lot of Academy members are actors, Oscar voters make up only a tiny share of the SAG, limiting the body's predictive power. The non-preferential ballot and, especially, non–Best Picture nature of the award make the election a totally different animal anyway. I wouldn't recommend even considering the SAG Award when trying to read the Oscar tea leaves; even a broken clock is right twice a day.

DGA

% of Academy in the DGA: 6.7% (~400 out of ~6,000)
% of DGA in the Academy: 2.7% (~400 out of ~15,000)
Voting Process: The DGA uses traditional, first-past-the-post vote-counting to choose among five nominees. The DGA's top award is technically for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film, not best film overall.
Commentary: The DGA's election laws used to fit the Academy's exactly, before the last decade's reforms, but now they're pretty well out of sync. So even though the DGAs have the best 25-year predict rate of Best Picture (76%), its modern relevance may be limited. What it does have going for it is that the Oscar for Best Director still plays by the DGA rules, and a healthy 6.7% of the Academy are directors.

PGA

% of Academy in the PGA: 8.3% (~500 out of ~6,000)
% of PGA in the Academy: 7.7% (~500 out of ~6,500)
Voting Process: Instant-runoff voting determines the winner from 10 nominees. The award is technically the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures but is understood to be the equivalent of best film.
Commentary: The PGA is best aligned with the Academy Awards; it's the only guild to use the preferential ballot, and each electorate constitutes a healthy sample size of the other. The PGA hasn't missed a Best Picture winner since the 2009 switch in both elections to instant-runoff voting.

BAFTA

% of Academy in the BAFTA: 8.3% (~500 out of ~6,000)
% of BAFTA in the Academy: 7.7% (~500 out of ~6,500)
Voting Process: The BAFTAs use traditional, first-past-the-post vote-counting to choose among five nominees for Best Film.
Commentary: The BAFTAs have the same solid overlap with the Academy as the PGA, and it's the only industry precursor to be explicitly for the best movie of the year, so it's automatically a better bet than some of the other award shows listed here. But those election rules (so 1990s!) make them a worse precursor overall than the PGA.

Writers Guild of America (WGA)

% of Academy in the WGA: 6.7% (~400 out of ~6,000)
% of WGA in the Academy: 5.0% (~400 out of ~8,000)
Voting Process: Traditional, first-past-the-post voting system. Five nominees for Original Screenplay, five nominees for Adapted Screenplay—there is no "best film" award.
Commentary: The WGA has decent overlap with the Academy's electorate, but not as strong as the PGA or BAFTA. More importantly, though, its Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay awards are rubbish for predicting Best Picture. They're not even great at predicting their counterpart categories at the Oscars, as the WGA's strict eligibility rules often disqualify major Oscar contenders, such as 12 Years a Slave last year. Like the SAG, it's best not to let these awards influence your Oscar picks.

American Cinema Editors (ACE)

% of Academy in the ACE: 4.0% (~240 out of ~6,000)
% of ACE in the Academy: 34.3% (~240 out of ~700)
Voting Process: Traditional, first-past-the-post voting system. Five nominees for Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic) and five nominees for Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy or Musical).
Commentary: The ACE seems like an odd guild out in this list, but just like the Best Film Editing and Best Picture Oscars, the "Eddie" for Best Edited Film is seen as a Best Picture portent. It probably shouldn't be, though, given the SAG-esque misalignment between the contests. The Eddie winner is probably a good indicator of how Academy editors think, given the large share of ACE members who are also Oscar voters. But editors are a relatively small slice of the Academy, and even if they weren't, it would serve more to influence the Best Film Editing Oscar. "Best Picture" is not what the ACE votes on, and that category at the Oscars does not use the same vote-counting process the ACE does.

Of all the industry awards, the PGA is easily the best predictor. BAFTA and the DGA aren't great but can be acceptably used with a grain of salt. The WGA, SAG, and ACE shouldn't enter your calculus. This may not square with each guild's previous correlation with Oscar, but it's what makes sense among new voting realities. This is because it's not that the Academy ever looked to these groups—and, say, the DGA more than the PGA—for cues on how to vote. As In Contention's Kris Tapley quite astutely put it, the guild awards don't affect Oscar voting; they merely reveal sentiments and opinions that are already there. These guilds are the closest thing we get to polls of the Oscars, which unfortunately—and inexplicably—don't exist. A poll's past record of accuracy is worthless without the correct methodology, and so it is with Hollywood's awards.

Derek Jeter, Political Spin Doctor

During his playing career, Derek Jeter was a favorite of the sports media. He was easy to build a narrative around; he was always good for a quote. In return, they did nothing but shower him with praise, especially last season as he made his farewell tour around the league. So it's not very sporting of Jeter to make his first move post-playing-career to try to destroy them.

These days, Jeter runs The Players' Tribune, which is really hard to see as anything but an attempt to replace sports media. The Tribune is "a new media platform that will present the unfiltered voices of professional athletes"—no pesky middleman required! In the Tribune, athletes (or, more likely, their representatives) will be able to write their own stories, eliminating the possibility of their words getting twisted or any negative publicity getting presented whatsoever. Well, now, maybe that's not fair. Surely there's a place for first-person diaries from players that doesn't replace traditional sports reporting, right? Well, in Jeter's own words: "My goal is for the site to ultimately transform how athletes and newsmakers share information, bringing fans closer than ever to the games they love." This is an attempt to control the message, pure and simple.

This is a fairly revolutionary idea in the sports world... So why does it seem so familiar? Actually, attempting to harness the media to control one's one message is an age-old trick by those who are a little more crafty, a little more devious: politicians. The first campaign ad appeared in 1952—it's only taken athletes 62 years to see their brilliance. Paid media allows politicians to communicate directly to the public with virtually no filter. They can say what they want to say and only what they want to say. For millions of Americans every election year, TV ads are the main way of learning about the candidates.

So far, political paid media hasn't destroyed the independent political press corps. However, there was a disturbing development on this point last week, when Indiana Governor Mike Pence unveiled plans for a state-run news outlet, Just IN. Exactly like The Players' Tribune, Pence's office sought to write their own stories, about themselves, for direct placement in front of Hoosier eyes. Just IN would also compete directly with the rest of the state house press corps, occasionally breaking its own stories—and presumably not giving scoops to traditional media members. Practically plagiarizing the mission statement of The Players' Tribune, Just IN said its content would "range from straightforward news to lighter features, including personality profiles."

There is obviously something more insidious about a politician controlling his own coverage than an athlete doing so. Under its wire-service-esque business model, Just IN news articles would be disguised as regular independent journalism in many smaller Indiana papers looking to fill pages cheaply; a world where this self-reporting pushed out real political journalism would be a chilling one indeed. Ultimately, that's what made Just IN dead on arrival. After just a few days of backlash and comparisons to totalitarian regimes, Pence pulled the plug on the program that many had taken to calling "Pravda on the Plains."

But Jeter's venture is as much a sign as Pence's of an evolving media landscape. The internet and social media have democratized communication, creating ways for nontraditional content producers (this blog not excepted) to reach an interested audience. But it also provides a direct pathway for people to get information from a primary source, rather than through a middleman (i.e., professional reporter) that has usually been necessary. That this trend is evident across fields is strong evidence that it could be the way all media are headed. In sports, you have Jeter's site, but you also have teams announcing signings and pitching assignments themselves via Twitter or MLB.com. In politics, you have Pence's agency, but you also have Voice of America and a White House that prefers to interact with the public through Reddit AMAs or hashtag #asktheWH on Twitter, cutting out the press corps more and more.

The motivations are certainly understandable; newsmakers rely on publicity to earn a vote or a buck, and there can be benign reasons for them wanting to keep a direct line open to the public. But as soon as the independent press is threatened, we are losing something valuable in the case of sports and essential in the case of politics. I cling to the perhaps naïve belief that there can be room for both a strong independent press and the option for important voices to reach people directly. But with how rapidly media is changing, hopefully we don't lose the former even as the latter seems inevitably on the rise.

A First Glance at February's Big Election

Every year around this time I take a brief respite from politics and baseball, where it's slow season, and dip my toe into the deep, deep pool of Oscar-watching. Keep checking this space and my Twitter feed for occasional commentary, including my final predictions right before the Academy Awards ceremony on February 22.

For now, though, just a few observations of interest on the initial state of play. Always of interest to me is which nominees are the most "due" for an award; last year, I wrote about some of the most long-suffering Oscar bridesmaids in history. This year, as I updated my comprehensive list of everyone in history with five or more Oscar nominations, I identified plenty of people who have been to the dance before—many times—but come away empty-handed. The following 2015 nominees are still looking for their first Oscar:

Person	Occupation	Nominations
Roger Deakins	Cinematographer	12
Alexandre Desplat	Composer	8
Diane Warren	Songwriter	7
Daniel Sudick	Visual Effects Artist	7
Frank Montaño	Sound Mixer	7
Paul Thomas Anderson	Director/Writer/Producer	6
Wes Anderson	Director/Writer/Producer	6

Unfortunately, as I found in my study last year, the idea that the Academy notices when you are "due" and throws you a sympathy Oscar is largely a myth. And lo and behold, none of the above people is favored to win this year; the reality is, except in the acting categories where nominees are truly brand names, voters go for the movie or the body of work, not the person.

Another angle that catches my attention more than you'd think is the politics of the Oscar race. Yes, even (especially?) Hollywood can't rid itself of politics completely. This year, two films have been appropriated by the left and the right and used as weapons in bringing their war to a new theater (no pun intended)—Selma and American Sniper. Selma, one of the best-reviewed films of the year, looked to be an Oscar frontrunner—but that made it an easy target for negative campaigning, as much a staple of Oscar season as of electoral politics. One of the oldest negative campaign tricks in the Oscar playbook is to make an issue of a film's historical accuracy. What had been done before, successfully, to Zero Dark Thirty (that film managed to win just one Oscar, a tie for Best Sound Editing), happened to Selma when various corners accused its director of making President Lyndon B. Johnson out to be a villain. "The movie should be ruled out this Christmas and during the ensuing awards season," Johnson loyalist Joseph A. Califano Jr. wrote in the Washington Post. Despite the movie's liberal alignment, this perceived criticism of a white Democratic president ("white Democrats" basically are Hollywood) stopped the movie's awards campaign in its tracks. When Oscar nominations were announced, Selma received just two: Best Picture and Best Original Song.

A lot of Selma's late momentum instead went to another Christmas release: Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, which appeals to a very different (read: conservative) demographic. Despite mixed reviews, criticisms that it glorified war, and questions about its own historical accuracy, Sniper was nominated for six Oscars, including one that probably came at Selma's expense (Best Actor for Bradley Cooper). The combination of Selma's snubs and Sniper's success on nominations day inspired a new wave of frustration with the Academy's demographics: 94% white, 77% male, a median age of 62. None of the 20 nominees for acting were minorities, and none of the 15 nominees for directing and writing this year were women.

These stats, and the fact that American Sniper is clearly more liked among Academy voters than we previously thought, have caused many to see it as a serious threat to win Best Picture. Sasha Stone, the prominent Oscarologist behind the blog Awards Daily, is a noted preponderant of this theory. But in my opinion, Stone (a vocal critic of the Oscars' white- and male-centric tendencies) is letting her cynicism cloud her predictions. As we sit here on January 20, Sniper is at the peak of its power—coming off the high of six Oscar nominations and a box-office-busting $108.7 million opening weekend. Sniper benefited in the nominations stage from flying under the radar and thus not attracting a loud negative campaign, but now that it has asserted strength in the race it appears that the backlash is beginning. "A week is a long time in politics," the saying goes, and it's no different in an Oscar campaign. There are three of those weeks left until Oscar voters even start voting, and five weeks until the awards ceremony. I'll be surprised if Sniper still looks this strong after taking Selma-level criticism and, probably more importantly, seeing other films take their turns in the sun as films like Boyhood (my Best Picture pick) win important precursor awards like the Producer Guild Awards.

It's also mathematically very difficult for a film as polarizing as American Sniper to win Best Picture. For their top award, the Oscars use instant-runoff voting, which allows voters to rank their preferences; if a voter's top choice is eliminated, their vote gets redistributed down to their second or third choice. This rewards films that are broadly liked, which I doubt American Sniper is; as Grantland's Mark Harris pointed out, the film's association with conservative values (a narrative that has been everywhere this weekend) probably won't do it any favors. For every Jacksonian voter who ranks American Sniper first on their ballot, there is almost certainly a Democrat who will rank it last. At the end of the day, I predict Sniper will win the two awards usually won by war/action movies: Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. The result will be what everyone might have expected six months ago, and when we look back at this Oscar season, it will seem like an unremarkable achievement, hardly driven by a hidden conservative agenda.

However, that doesn't mean we should go on ignoring Hollywood's diversity issue. I'll bring it full circle here with a shared suggestion for both the Academy and the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA), the slow-to-evolve body that elects players to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Both the Academy and BBWAA are showing why lifetime membership and lifetime voting rights may not be the best idea anymore in a rapidly changing world. In the film industry (as in every industry), demographics are changing and bringing more women and minorities into prominent roles, yet the older generation of filmmakers are still voting strong in retirement. In the BBWAA, retired baseball writers still vote for the Hall of Fame without even considering new approaches, like sabermetrics, that have fundamentally changed how we assess baseball in the 21st century. Both organizations are also too slow to accept new members and give them a vote in their high-profile elections. If either organization would like to get with the times and avoid all this bad press—and they should—it's time to make their voting pool reflective of the new age we live in.

2015's Predictable But Elusive Hall of Fame Results

On Tuesday, the Hall of Fame did something unusual: it actually did us proud. It was the first time since 1955 that as many as four players had been elected to the Hall, and Randy Johnson, Pedro Martínez, John Smoltz, and Craig Biggio were all eminently worthy—that's something we should appreciate. Would I have liked to see even more make the grade? Of course. But we knew entering the 2pm announcement that this was likely the best we could hope for.

We knew that thanks to pre–Hall of Fame election "polling" done by Darren Viola and Ryan Thibs, who do a great public service by collecting and recording ballots made public before the announcement. Public ballots don't tell the whole story, though, since they're biased toward types of candidates, so for the past several years I've "unskewed" them to predict the final outcome. With some adjustments to my model this year—and, surely, more than a few strokes of luck—I'm humbled to say they did better than ever in 2015:

The exit polls, as taken from Viola's HOF Ballot Collecting Gizmo, ended 2015 with a larger-than-usual average error of 4.7 percentage points (the median error was four points). My projections carried a mean deviation of 2.6 points and a median of 2.5 points. According to tweep Ben Dilday, the root mean square of my projections was the second-lowest among Hall of Fame projection systems this year, behind only Dilday's himself (I'm self-taught at this stuff so I'll admit to a lot of his methodology going over my head, but his uncanny projections are here). One of the systems I beat out was father-of-sabermetrics Tom Tango's, which is kind of like beating Meryl Streep at the Oscars—a huge honor that I'll enjoy for the brief time it will last.

Some of my more notable calls included not being fooled by the polls' over- and underrating, respectively, of Tim Raines and Lee Smith. However, in my mind, these calls aren't that impressive; Raines and Smith have become very very predictable over the years in how much they underperform and overperform their polls. Others I called within a percentage point included John Smoltz (that one I am proud of, considering he had no over- or underperformance history to go off), Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds (those two's middling showings have become as foreseeable as the sunrise), Jeff Kent, and Larry Walker.

While I am quite gratified, there are always things I could have called better. This year, my biggest misses were overestimating Curt Schilling by 7.8 points, overestimating Jeff Bagwell by 5.4 points, and underestimating Gary Sheffield by 5.2 points. Schilling is perhaps forgivable, as he suffered an almost unprecedented 19.2-point gap between his public- and private-ballot performance. Meanwhile, I'm still baffled by Sheffield—a surly steroid user who is actually more popular with the sport's crusty traditionalists?!

However, Sheffield shared his good fortune with most of the other players who made up the bottom of the ballot, including Nomar Garciaparra and Carlos Delgado, which I did not expect. However, I'm now wised up to it for next year. Nomar does seem to be a perfect intellectual heir to the newly departed (from the ballot) Don Mattingly, who always gained ground relative to his pre-election polling numbers. Like Mattingly, Garciaparra was an elite player with an awesome peak, but injuries cut short out both their careers. Narrative-driven voters may dwell more on their mythology-buoyed memories of Mattingly's and Garciaparra's primes—and it certainly doesn't hurt that they had those primes on the biggest stages, in New York and in Boston.

Finally, one small but important prediction that I slightly muffed was voter turnout, which I use to predict the proportion of public-to-private ballots. Instead of my predicted 570, turnout dropped slightly from past years to 549 voters. If I had nailed the turnout, could my projections have been even better? As it turns out, they would have been worse—a mean error of 2.8 points and a median error of 3.1. This is what I mean when I say I got lucky!

State of the State Schedule 2015

For fans of political oratory, it's a very happy new year indeed. We're coming off an election year when 36 governors were either elected or re-elected, and new legislatures will sit in most states. It's a clean slate for a lot of these pols, and they're gearing up to unveil their agendas in speeches to kick off the 2015 legislative sessions. From redistricting to labor issues to taxes to human rights, the policies that really affect you get made in your state capitol, not Congress—especially in this era of gridlock. Every year, I urge everyone to watch or read the State of the State address—and, this year, inaugural speech—for your state to bone up on what conservative or liberal dream policy is (or isn't) coming down the pike. Here's Baseballot's annual list of speeches to catch this winter (updated as new speeches are given or announced):

Alabama: January 19 at 9am CT (inaugural); March 3 at 6:30pm CT (State of the State)
Alaska: December 1 at 11:30am AKT (inaugural); January 21 at 7pm AKT (State of the State); January 22 at 7pm AKT (budget address)
Arizona: January 5 at noon MT (inaugural); January 12 at 2pm MT (State of the State)
Arkansas: January 13 at noon CT (inaugural); January 22 at 10am CT (health-care speech)
California: January 5 at 10am PT
Colorado: January 13 at 11am MT (inaugural); January 15 at 11am MT (State of the State)
Connecticut: January 7 at 1:30pm ET (inaugural); January 7 at 4pm ET (State of the State); February 18 at noon ET (budget address)
Delaware: January 22 at 2pm ET (State of the State); January 29 at 1pm ET (budget address)
Florida: January 6 at 11:20am ET (inaugural); March 3 at 11am ET (State of the State)
Georgia: January 12 at 2pm ET (inaugural); January 14 at 11am ET (State of the State)
Hawaii: December 1 at noon HAT (inaugural); January 26 at 10am HAT (State of the State)
Idaho: January 9 at noon MT (inaugural); January 12 at 1pm MT (State of the State)
Illinois: January 12 at 11am CT (inaugural); February 4 at noon CT (State of the State); February 18 at noon CT (budget address)
Indiana: January 13 at 7pm ET
Iowa: January 13 at 10am CT (Condition of the State); January 16 at 9am CT (inaugural)
Kansas: January 12 at 11am CT (inaugural); January 15 at 6:30pm CT (State of the State)
Kentucky: January 7 at 7pm ET
Louisiana: April 13 at 1pm CT
Maine: January 7 at 11:30am ET (inaugural); February 3 at 7pm ET (State of the State)
Maryland: January 21 at noon ET (inaugural); February 4 at noon ET (State of the State)
Massachusetts: January 8 at noon ET
Michigan: January 1 at 11:30am ET (inaugural); January 20 at 7pm ET (State of the State)
Minnesota: January 5 at noon CT (inaugural); April 9 at 7pm CT (State of the State)
Mississippi: January 21 at 5pm CT
Missouri: January 21 at 7pm CT
Montana: January 28 at 7pm MT
Nebraska: January 8 at 2pm CT (inaugural); January 22 at 10am CT (State of the State)
Nevada: January 5 at noon PT (inaugural); January 15 at 6pm PT (State of the State)
New Hampshire: January 8 at noon ET (inaugural); February 12 at 1pm ET (budget address)
New Jersey: January 13 at 2pm ET (State of the State); February 24 at 2pm ET (budget address)
New Mexico: January 1 at 9am MT (inaugural); January 20 at noon MT (State of the State)
New York: January 1 at noon ET (New York City inaugural); January 1 at 4:15pm ET (Buffalo inaugural); January 21 at 1:30pm ET (State of the State)
North Carolina: February 4 at 7pm ET
North Dakota: January 6 at 1pm CT
Ohio: January 12 at 11:30am ET (inaugural); February 24 at 7pm ET (State of the State)
Oklahoma: January 12 at noon CT (inaugural); February 2 at 12:30pm CT (State of the State)
Oregon: January 12 at 10:30am PT (Kitzhaber inaugural); February 18 at 10am PT (Brown inaugural); April 17 at noon PT (State of the State)
Pennsylvania: January 20 at noon ET (inaugural); March 3 at 11:30am ET (budget address)
Rhode Island: January 6 at noon ET (inaugural); March 12 at 7pm ET (budget address)
South Carolina: January 14 at 11am ET (inaugural); January 21 at 7pm ET (State of the State)
South Dakota: December 2 at 1pm CT (budget address); January 10 at noon CT (inaugural); January 13 at 1pm CT (State of the State)
Tennessee: January 17 at 11am CT (inaugural); February 9 at 6pm CT (State of the State)
Texas: January 20 at 11am CT (inaugural); February 17 at 11am CT (State of the State)
Utah: January 28 at 6:30pm MT
Vermont: January 8 at 1:30pm ET (inaugural); January 15 at 2pm ET (budget address)
Virginia: January 14 at 7pm ET
Washington: January 13 at noon PT
West Virginia: January 14 at 7pm ET
Wisconsin: January 5 at 11am CT (inaugural); January 13 at 7pm CT (State of the State); February 3 at 7pm CT (budget address)
Wyoming: January 5 at 10am MT (inaugural); January 14 at 10am MT (State of the State)

National: January 20 at 9pm ET

"Unskewing" Polls of the 2015 Baseball Hall of Fame

Want to know who'll win an election? Take a poll. That's what dedicated election watchers like Darren Viola and Ryan Thibs do, in effect, for the Baseball Hall of Fame every year around this time. Their methodology is simple: find and record every Hall of Fame ballot released by a BBWAA writer on Twitter or explained by them in a column. The end results are Viola's toplines (which, like a political poll, list each candidate's simple overall percentage) and Thibs's crosstabs (which break down how specific voters voted).

The results of this poll are a great starting point for predicting who will make the Hall every year—but they're not perfect. Like any poll, this one has a margin of error. In politics, you would never go around quoting raw polling data as final; the results must be weighted to account for sampling error, creating a final snapshot that's representative of the whole voting pool. It turns out the same adjustments are necessary for polls of the Hall of Fame.

For the past few years, I've calculated these adjustments and used them to project final Hall of Fame vote totals. As it turns out, ballot aggregators consistently over- and underestimate certain candidates (i.e., players) by predictable margins. This makes sense—the polling sample is self-selected, and the kinds of voters who value transparency and choose to release their ballots (thus opening themselves up to all sorts of vitriol on Twitter and in comments sections) are very different from those who clam up. Generally, writers who make their ballots public skew more progressive, overstating support for steroid-tainted candidates (e.g., Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens) as well as those with more subtle, sabermetrics-based cases for induction (e.g., Tim Raines and Mike Mussina). The casters of private ballots, on the other hand, are more likely to be conservative voters—less likely to be on Twitter (a major medium for sharing ballots) and less likely to even still be covering baseball (it's hard to explain your ballot when you no longer have column inches to devote to it). This explains why private ballots will give old-school candidates like Lee Smith and Don Mattingly a significant boost in the final results as compared to the polls.

We know this because we've seen this public/private divergence year in and year out, and we can calculate each player's exact deviation from the polls by looking at those historical results. The gory details can be found at the bottom of this post, but in short, all we have to do is calculate a player's historical public-versus-private disparity, add them to or subtract them from the player's current polling numbers, and combine the public ballots we know about with the private ballots we're expecting. Voilà—a more accurate forecast of the final vote totals that will be unveiled on January 6.

Below are my final Hall of Fame projections as of January 6, 2015. As of that date, 204 public ballots had been polled out of my projected final turnout of 570. Currently, I'm projecting Pedro Martínez, Randy Johnson, John Smoltz, and Craig Biggio to be elected to the Hall. Mike Piazza currently looks to fall just short despite a 76.0% showing in the polls, thanks to a negative adjustment factor, although he's so close that a small error in my calculations could easily put him in. Meanwhile, I expect Sammy Sosa, Nomar Garciaparra, and Carlos Delgado to all (unfortunately) fall off the ballot.

I'll update this page daily with new, up-to-the-minute projections as more public ballots become known, so check back often.

If you're still with me, here is my methodology for all of the above. To find each player's adjustment, I compared 2014, 2013, and 2012 Hall of Fame polls from Viola and Twitter user @leokitty to the final results released by the BBWAA in order to figure out how private ballots voted. (For these numbers year by year, see this Google spreadsheet.) I took a simple average of each player's difference between public and private ballots in those three years. (Last year, multiple people suggested to me that I should weight more recent data more heavily in calculating my adjustments; this was a good idea, but when I went back and calculated it in a post mortem of my projections, a straight average was actually more accurate.) Then I added or subtracted that average deviation to/from players' polling numbers this year and extrapolated a projection for the final vote. I assumed that final turnout will be 570 BBWAAers (it has been very consistent at 571, 569, and 573 the past three years) and weighted public and private ballots proportionally—so, as more and more public ballots are released, they will assume a greater and greater share of the final projection, and private ballots will matter less and less. This will also reduce the error in my forecasts; obviously, as public ballots approach 100% of the total ballots, the effect of private ballots will shrink to approach zero. (In other words, in some magical land where every BBWAA voter announces his or her ballot in advance, there would be no polling error because every vote has been pre-counted.)

For some players, 2015 is their first year on the Hall of Fame ballot, so there was no historical deviation to calculate. After two fancy attempts to guess first-timers' adjustment factors fell flat in 2013 and 2014, I decided to keep it simple this year. The one overriding pattern for first-timers is that public ballots tend to overstate them by a few points—specifically, they did an average of 5.1 points worse on private ballots than on public ballots the last two years. Therefore, this year, I docked each rookie candidate 5.1 points from the polls.

Don't Vote for Pedro: A Strategic-Voting Guide to the Hall of Fame

This year, I was excited and honored to be accepted into the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America (IBWAA), an alternative to the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA) for bloggers and other web-based baseball writers. I'm a big fan so far; the IBWAA is open and accepting, it's full of knowledgeable baseball scribes I look up to, and it allows members to participate in BBWAA-style elections of their own—including for the Hall of Fame. As a result, on December 15, I submitted my first Hall of Fame ballot of any kind. My ballot was thoroughly researched, cross-referenced, and revised, and I'm now confident it represents my ideal vision on who should enter the Hall.

It's also completely different from how I'd want actual Hall of Fame voters to vote.

Wait, what?

Unfortunately, due to complicated and outdated Hall of Fame election rules, the list of players most deserving of the Hall of Fame and the ideal Hall of Fame ballot are two different things. This is especially true if, like me, you believe a lot more people deserve to be enshrined in the Hall than the 10 that the BBWAA allows its members to vote for. On the "big Hall vs. small Hall" spectrum, I'm pretty far to one extreme; there are 24 players on the BBWAA and IBWAA ballots that I believe should be Hall of Famers. In order of most slam-dunk to most borderline case, they are:

1. Barry Bonds
2. Roger Clemens
3. Randy Johnson
4. Pedro Martínez
5. Jeff Bagwell
6. Mike Piazza*
7. Curt Schilling
8. Mike Mussina
9. Tim Raines
10. Alan Trammell
(11. Barry Larkin)*
12. Craig Biggio*
13. Mark McGwire
14. Edgar Martínez
15. Larry Walker
16. John Smoltz
17. Sammy Sosa
18. Gary Sheffield
19. Jeff Kent
20. Fred McGriff
21. Brian Giles
22. Lee Smith
23. Nomar Garciaparra
24. Carlos Delgado

* Piazza and Biggio aren't on the IBWAA ballot, since the IBWAA "elected" them in previous years. However, Barry Larkin is on the IBWAA ballot, since he's never reached 75% among that organization as he did in 2012 with the BBWAA.

For the IBWAA ballot, which has no direct consequences for actually deciding players' fate, voting solely on the baseball merits will do just fine—hence the ballot I submitted of Bonds, Clemens, Johnson, Pedro, Bagwell, Schilling, Mussina, Raines, Trammell, Larkin, McGwire, Edgar, Walker, Smoltz, and Sosa. (The IBWAA imposes a cap of 15 votes per ballot, not the 10 limited by the BBWAA.) But if I had an actual Hall of Fame vote, my ballot would look much, much different.

That's because baseball merits aren't the only consideration. As politically minded readers know, it's equally important to maximize the impact of your vote. A vote is much more likely to make the difference in a close election than in a landslide. For Hall of Fame voters who, like me, can't fit all their preferred candidates onto one ballot, it's important to vote strategically.

Due to the unique setup of the Hall of Fame election, there are exactly two important numbers: 75% (the percentage required for induction) and 5% (the minimum percentage a player must receive to not be dropped from the ballot next year). As a result, the election is only suspenseful for—and your vote will only matter for—players who flirt with these marks. Thus, any BBWAA voter agonizing over which deserving players to prioritize on his or her ballot should start with those expected to fall inside two important ranges: between about 70% and 80% of the vote and below 10%.

Based on last year’s results as well as early "exit polls" of this year’s ballots, there are only three players sitting on the cusp of 75%, whose Hall of Fame fate is in real suspense: Smoltz, Biggio, and Piazza. This trio should be the starting point for any strategic ballot. Much lengthier is the list of candidates who are at risk of missing the 5% cutoff. Last winter, Kent, McGriff, McGwire, Walker, Don Mattingly, and Sosa all received less than 16% of the vote; on a ballot growing more and more crowded by the year, their support will only shrink in 2015. Of newcomers, Sheffield, Giles, Garciaparra, and Delgado are the four best-qualified candidates most likely to garner less than 5% support. That’s 10 endangered species right there, whereas our imaginary ballot has just seven slots left. Not everyone thinks all 10 of these men are Hall of Famers, so reasonable people can disagree on how best to allot the valuable seven remaining slots. For me, Mattingly is not a Hall of Famer, and Garciaparra and Delgado are iffy cases. I could live with myself if they didn’t survive the election.

Therefore, my ideal BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot would read Smoltz, Biggio, Piazza, Kent, McGriff, McGwire, Walker, Sosa, Sheffield, and Giles. Without a doubt, this would be one of the screwiest ballots ever submitted. It excludes players who everyone, myself included, agrees are better than the players actually on it. This year, everyone agrees that Johnson and Pedro are first-ballot Hall of Famers. But that means they are also locks to get upward of 80% or 90% of the vote—making them the biggest no-brainers for a smart voter to leave off his or her ballot. Of course, this isn't always the easiest call to make on a gut level. Many writers are just uncomfortable with not voting for who they believe to be the most qualified individuals on the ballot; it seems perverse. Well, it is, but these are the contortions that the overcrowded ballot and the limiting 10-vote cap force voters into. Some would also argue that achieving a unanimous election is important for the most elite players, but this too is silly; the Hall has never given extra credit for being elected unanimously, and being a Hall of Famer is a binary state—either you are one or you're not.

Likewise, the ballot leaves off the two people I believe are most qualified for the honor—without whose inclusion the idea of a Hall of Fame seems silly and pointless. But thanks to their history with performance-enhancing drugs, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are again destined for baseball purgatory with about 35% of the vote. Bagwell, Schilling, Mussina, Raines, Trammell, and Edgar Martínez are other examples of worthier players than most of the men I champion; nevertheless, supporting them on a BBWAA ballot would be like throwing that vote away, as it is a virtual certainty that they will once again register somewhere in the no-man’s land between 10% and 70%.

Regardless of this reality, most, if not all, BBWAA members will vote with their hearts, not their heads. That’s no surprise; after all, remember the myth of the rational voter. One of the great foibles of political science is that voting is fundamentally irrational; the likelihood that your individual vote will matter is so remote. Yet millions of people still do it. In baseball, even though many voters recognize that the system is broken, they’ll keep casting irrational votes.

If I’m honored enough to have any BBWAA voters reading this, I urge you to break the mold and reconsider. I urge you to vote only for Smoltz, Biggio, Piazza, and whomever you wish to protect from elimination. Your ballot may not end up containing the most deserving players—not by a long shot. But it will contain the most needing ones.