Baseball's 2017 Hall of Fame class will be announced Jan. 18 during a live MLB Network broadcast. There are 34 players on the ballot this year, including 15 holdovers from a year ago.
Among those 15 holdovers are slugger Jeff Bagwell and leadoff hitter extraordinaire Tim Raines. Both players fell just short of induction last year:
Bagwell: 71.6 percent (15 votes shy of 75 percent)
Raines: 69.8 percent (23 votes shy of 75 percent)
So, so close. Both of them. Bagwell is on the ballot for the sixth time and still has four years remaining to get over the 75 percent threshold needed for induction. Raines? This is his 10th and final year on the ballot. It's now or never for him.
The good news is both Bagwell and Raines have gained a significant number of votes from returning voters this year, per Ryan Thibodaux's public ballot tracker. These are votes received from BBWAA writers this year who did not vote for these players last year:
Bagwell: 14 votes gained
Raines: 23 votes gained
The size of the BBWAA voting body changes slightly each year as members gain and lose Hall of Fame voting privileges, and based on the estimated size of this year's voting pool, Bagwell only needed to gain 12 votes to reach 75 percent. Raines needed to gain 20 votes. Both have accomplished that.
Of course, fewer than 40 percent of all Hall of Fame ballots are public as of this writing, so more than 60 percent of all votes are unknown. It's entirely possible Bagwell and/or Raines lost votes from some returning voters and we just don't know it.
But given the large increase in support for both players on the publicly available ballots, it looks like Bagwell and Raines are well on their way to Cooperstown.
